Books I Read In December

Well, this year I managed to read 53 books which averages out at just over one per week. However, the pattern across the year has been imbalanced due to the varying length of what I read. This month I read, at 704 pages, the second longest book I read this year so did not get through much else.

Fiction

'Fleshmarket Close' by Ian Rankin

This was the last of the Rebus books I had been given. It is the 15th in the series and 9 others follow it. However, I am unlikely to rush out and buy those. As has been clear in terms of the Rebus books I have reviewed this year, they are not bad, but they are far from gripping. You do feel rather as if you are slipping into an episode of the 'The Bill' (broadcast 1983-2010). Rebus goes about his business as does Siobhan Clarke who by this stage was overdue for equal billing with John Rebus. The book has three components which reflect issues of the time (2005) and indeed now. One is the murder of an immigrant living on a sink estate; there is also human trafficking and modern slavery involved. The attitudes towards immigrants seems unchanged even 18 years on and indeed much of this book, bar some aspects of technology, could be set right now. The other is the disappearance of a young woman depressed at the death of her sister who may be mixed up in prostitution and the other is the finding of skeletons in a pub basement. Rebus and Clarke go through the motions to solve what soon proves to be a tangling of these elements and Rebus might be starting a relationship with another middle aged liberal, artistic woman pretty much a replica for those who have crossed his path in previous novels.

'The Plot Against America' by Philip Roth

This book is probably even more impactful now than when it was published in 2004. It is effectively a fictional memoir written by a Jewish American boy also called Philip Roth who is growing up in New York City in the late 1930s and 1940s. It is an alternate history in that rather than Franklin Roosevelt being re-elected for a third term in 1940, the aviator Charles Lindbergh wins the Presidency and follows the policy of the America First movement. This means that the USA does not enter the Second World War and curtails aid to the Allies. In addition Nazi German and Imperialist Japanese politicians are welcomed at the White House. Anti-Semitism which was an element of the America First approach grows in strength with moves to relocate Jewish people from the cities out to rural areas of the USA.

Roth holds to the style of the boy's perspective, so at times he jumps up and down the chronology rather than progressing neatly. Philip's concerns about his friends, relations with his brother and cousin and with his parents feature as much as concerns about where the USA is going. His cousin joins the Canadian Army and fights in France; his brother becomes part of the Just Folks movement which sends Jewish children to US farms to be apparently more integrated into WASP US society. Given policies that have been adopted at state and federal level in the past decade, it is very educative to see and think about how such discrimination can be advanced subtly but steadily.

The book succeeds in showing how easily it could have been (and remains especially now) for the USA to slide into an authoritarian state. It also reminds us that Germany did this too, not abruptly, but step-by-step eliminating the rights of Jews until within nine years it had reached extermination. The novel is successful in capturing that kind of 'Cider with Rosie' (1959) perspective of a boy recalling his life. I am sure there are US equivalents, though more Scottish and Irish ones pop up in terms of searches.

I think my two main criticisms are that it seems almost entirely to leave out the black population of the USA from the alternative. The black population of Germany was smaller but it did face discrimination under the Nazis. It seems that, at least, Lindbergh would have adopted apartheid policies towards blacks as well as Jews, especially given there was segregation in the military anyway and many states already had segregated buses, schools, cafes, etc. very much like what was coming in South Africa. 

The other thing is that the book has too much of a pat ending. Lindbergh who flies himself around the USA campaigning simply disappears on a flight back to Washington DC. While oppressive policies follow in the wake of his disappearance, including declaration of war on Canada, soon Roosevelt is re-elected as President and the timeline is 'corrected'. It would seem more realistic is some of Lindbergh's coterie would have remained in power and using the the conspiracies that soon develop around the President's disappearance, use it for negative integration, i.e., using it as 'proof' of the threats the USA faces and so ramp up authoritarian policy. A post-war world world with a (semi-)Fascist USA, the USSR in control of an larger slice of Europe and no Marshall Aid to assist post-war recovery in the remaining democracies would be a bleak picture to hint at even if Roth did not paint it.

Non-Fiction

The Social History of Politics' ed. by Georg Iggers

This is a useful book to read alongside Hans-Ulrich Wehler's 'The German Empire, 1871-1918' (1973) which I read in August: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html Iggers brings together articles and book extracts published between 1954-1979. These look at slices of German society in the Imperial period and various social developments. It is particularly good with Hans Rosenberg in digging into the Junker class and showing that despite a continuity of interests these large landowners from eastern Germany actually changed in make-up and their sources of income in a way which is very much overlooked in general histories of Germany. There are articles on the evolution of the working and its social contexts as well as the middle classes of Germany. Karin Hausen's renowned piece on the impact of home sewing machines reminds us how easily overlooked the significance of a relatively minor innovation can have on society, especially if it is deemed to fall into the 'realm of women'. That is unfortunately still a factor in so much research even 45 years on from the publication of that article. Overall, a crisp, focused read which provides very useful penetrating background for anyone interested in German history.

'Fifty Amazing Secret Service Dramas' edited by Odhams Press Editors

Initially I thought this book, published in 1937, was a collection of fiction stories. However, in fact it is extracts from various memoirs written by 24 different authors. While some names are changed or substituted with just an initial, the bulk of what is covered if factual. Most of the extracts are about the First World War, including the outbreak of the Russian Revolutions, though some, such as the best known one from Robert Baden Powell, focus on the pre-war era; one is about countering gun-running in South Africa in the 1890s and one is about spying in the USA in 1929. There is some corroboration between different accounts for example about the female doctor who controlled the German network in occupied Belgium and the British spymaster "Evelyn" based in Folkestone.

One interesting aspect is the different perspectives. The memoirs are not simply written by British spies, but Belgians, French, Germans, Russians and Americans too. There is some brief coverage of Japanese spy activity at the time of the Russo-Japanese War 1904-05, but not much. Most of the extracts are about human intelligence, but there is interesting information on the early days of radio intelligence and the use in locating submarines. Aircraft also feature and it is interesting to see how the landing of agents in occupied territory was becoming used before the examples we are familiar with from the Second World War.

Being based on real people and events, it does not baulk from simply outlining how people were executed. Many of those featured in the book end up that way, whether male or female and of all ages. Given death rate that these spy missions were carried out against the backdrop of, I suppose readers would not be sentimental. The cover simply shows a blindfolded man standing against a wall awaiting his execution. It is interesting, however, how many blunders or oversights outlined in these accounts were to be repeated in the next world war. This book would be a really useful source for anyone thinking of writing spy or adventure stories set in the first 20 years of the Twentieth Century. 

'Keynes and After' by Michael Stewart

I read the second edition of this book, published in 1972 when the post-war boom was beginning to come to an end and the concept of floating currencies was becoming widely accepted. This book is very useful in explaining why governments behaved in the way they did during the Depressions which in Britain and to a great extent in Germany, filled the 1920s and 1930s when the problem became global. As you might expect the book gives a good summary of Keynesian principles and how his followers took them beyond what Keynes himself had argued. It also addresses monetarism, which despite President Nixon's abandonment of it, was to become the more popular economic theory of the 1970s and 1980s, even if, as Dell showed in 'The Chancellors' (1997): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/11/books-i-read-in-november.html it was never really put into full effect in Britain.

The style of the book is very much like a lecture and it makes useful of very simple examples to explain economic principles and theories. I feel it really retains value in this regard especially for people operating in an era when many monetarist assumptions have become seen as 'the truth', despite hiccoughs such as the boom of the early 1990s and the 'credit crunch'. of the late 2000s.

While retaining value, Stewart's book now seems rather naive. He states that the problem of mass unemployment, at least in industrialised countries is over. Furthermore he says more than once that UK unemployment above 2.5% would be politically unacceptable. However, by 1984 it was at 11.9%. He is accurate in his warnings of persistent balance of payment difficulties and inflation in Britain but does not see that these, rather than unemployment, would quickly come to be seen as the prime economic challenges. He does note that such unemployment would effectively smash union power and lead to a fall in wages, but did not foresee that legislation would accelerate that process.

Stewart does clearly identify the problems of regional unemployment and the need for retraining in both the UK and USA, challenges which have not been appropriately addressed in either country even 50 years on, hence the persistent unemployment from the 'mismatch' of those without work at a time of a high level of vacancies. However, he makes no reference to immigration which played such an important role in Britain and West Germany in supplying labour when demand was high in the 1950s-60s. Nor does he reference cheap oil which again aided the post-war boom while meaning that inflation, still too high in Stewart's eyes, did not reach the levels it would attain from 1973 onwards.

While of its time, this is a useful book for explaining the two main economic theories influencing governments in the late 20th Century. I found it particularly insightful for explaining why British governments were effectively intellectually paralysed to do anything to reduce the impact of the Depression.

Books I Read/Listened To In October

 Fiction

'The Shadow of the Wind' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This is the first part of Ruiz Zafón's renowned tetralogy. It is set in Barcelona, 1945-56. It is a little magic realism, with most elements quite realistic, if Gothic in tone. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books which the protagonist is taken to as a boy and is the home to books that would otherwise be lost has a fantastical element. However, other aspects such as the role of the secret police under the Francoist regime, established right across Spain in 1939, is realistic. Daniel is allowed to pick one book from the cemetery and selects 'The Shadow of the Wind' by Julian Carax an unsuccessful published author from Barcelona who spent much of his life in the inter-war years in Paris. Daniel sets out to discover the story of Carax, especially his subsequent death in Barcelona, and those who knew him that remain. This involves a lot of investigating among deserted buildings of the city and avoiding various nasty characters including the man intent on burning all Carax's work. It is also a coming of age story and Daniel's challenges with the young women he falls for, in part mirror Carax's own.

This book has been immensely successful. It was published in 2001 and translated into English in 2004. I am not sure why I had not come across it before, though possibly as given my reading patterns I typically reach books some 15-20 years after they have been successful and they are common in charity shops. I was interested in the setting, having read quite a lot on the Spanish Civil War, but much less on the period afterwards. The Gothic atmosphere is well rendered. The investigation and the sense of jeopardy were handled effectively. I did feel that it went too far in trying to be twisty in its narrative and its revelations and that my patience with how many times it might loop around or parallels be drawn, was probably exhausted by the three-quarter mark, though I continued to the end. Perhaps the petty, and at times violent, nastiness of characters especially towards their children, becomes tiresome after a while.

I have the second book, in the sequence, 'The Angel's Game' (2008) which is a prequel to read. While it was a labour to finish the first book, I did admire the imagination of the author and his portrayal of the settings so will not abandon reading the second one in due course.

'A Question of Blood' by Ian Rankin

I actually listened to the audio book version of this back in August 2018: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html Interestingly, this time round, reading it, I felt that it was actually tighter than I felt back then listening to it. There is some travelling about, but compared to some of Rankin's books I have read in recent months, this felt to be necessary. The fact that Rebus and DS Clarke work together rather than separately for much of the book, may be one reason why aspects do not feel superfluous. The story does move on briskly and as I noted before, not being a standard murder mystery in that the killer is known from the outset, does not undermine the investigation and it is interesting that some of the 'red herrings' are put in intentionally by people working to their own agendas. Thus, overall, I was glad I came back to this book as I was much more satisfied with reading this particular entry in the series, the 14th, then I was listening to it five years ago.

'Breakfast in the Ruins' by Michael Moorcock

While I have read a lot of Michael Moorcock books down the years, this was one, published in 1971, that I had not come across before. It is a short novel (174 pages in my edition) which see the protagonist Karl Glogauer dropping into various versions of himself, usually as a boy in various locations from 1871 to 1990. He is projected into these roles, it appears, through having homosexual sex with an unnamed Nigerian man who he meets in the roof garden cafe of the Derry & Tom's department store, a location regularly turning up in many of Moorcock's books.

Aside from the mode of 'transport' and a vignette set in 1990, there is not much science fiction or fantasy, rather they are quick portrayals of different historical settings including Paris under the Commune, 19th Century Brunswick, Capetown, Havana at the time of the Spanish-American War, the east end of London,  (German) Alsace during the First World War, Kiev during the Russian Civil War (a popular context for Moorcock), New York at the time of Wall Street Crash, Shanghai during the 28th January Incident of 1932 (rather than the Japanese invasion of 1937), Berlin in 1935, Auschwitz in 1944, Tel Aviv in 1947 at the end of British mandate, Budapest in 1956, Kenya in 1959 during the Mau Mau Emergency, with US troops in Vietnam in 1968 and the west end of London (notably Ladbroke Grove another venue Moorcock likes to use) with a prediction of rioting and unemployment in the 1980s which was a reasonably accurate prediction. As you can tell all the settings are grim; often violent.

Also in common with his style, Moorcock mixes in excerpts from newspapers and non-fiction books of various periods. He also presents a moral dilemma at the end of each chapter. In many ways he was the precursor of a lot of what goes on in terms of social media these days. At the time the book must have appeared like a lot of his work, as a challenging text in terms of the incidents it focused on, its very format and the engagement with topics such as homosexuality and abuse. Now such are commonplace features on TV and in books thought non-linear, multi-perspective structures are unpopular with readers even if they do feature in movies and TV series. Consequently what a reader in 2023 is likely to pick up on is the quality of the descriptions of the contexts and in one case quite an engaging short story. Aside from that, it does feel at times as if Moorcock was showing off his ability to be non-traditional in his approach which would have jarred/challenged readers in 1971 much, much more than it does 52 years later.

'Walking on Glass' by Iain Banks

I believed that I had not read this book, though given I get through about 50 per year, perhaps it is to be expected that I forget some from a decade or two ago. This was published in 1985 so I would have had ample time to read it in the past 38 years. It was not as if I was entirely familiar with the book and I did not know the ending. It consists of three strands that we move between in turn. Two of them are about men living in London in 1983/84: Graham Park, an art student and Steven Grout, a man who maybe neuro-diverse or mentally disabled. For much of the novel we see them moving around on a particular day, one in which Graham is going to visit a woman called Sara who he is in love with but has been rather toying with his affections and Steven loses his job as a roadworker. I did not recall either of these stories. 

I did recall the third strand which features a man called Quiss and a woman called Ajayi who come from opposing sides of a war on a different planet or time. They are confined to a vast castle in a bleak landscape and have to play out almost impossible games such as one-dimensional chess, open-plan Go, spotless dominoes, Chinese Scrabble and Tunnel. Working out how to play and completing a game allows them one chance to answer the riddle and be released from the castle. In the depths of the castle are rooms in which other prisoners can insert themselves into the lives of others as a distraction from their imprisonment.

This was Banks's second 'contemporary' book and like 'The Wasp Factory' (1984) combines the mundane with the rather outré aspects. It also points to his other stream of writing as Iain M. Banks, as a science fiction author. Overall the book, rather like its predecessor, shows different personal Hells. It shows how we can construct or at least contribute to constructing contexts which distress us mentally and then fall victim to these; often unable to break out of them even if in (large) part we have built them up in the first place. This does say something about neuro-diversity and mental health, explored less sensitively in the 1980s than now. Unfortunately Banks's 'solution' seems to be simply to seek oblivion, whether that is through self-destruction, suffering a severe injury or simply abandoning even our best work. Added to that it makes a strong message that we should never hope and ultimately the nastiest people in our world will always come out best off.

While it might not be perceived this way, as with 'The Wasp Factory' this novel is effectively a low-key horror story and should be approached in that way. It is an unhelpful musing on the mental worlds we construct and its overall message is that anyone finding themselves in such situations should simply give up, whether on their efforts or indeed life itself. As you can imagine, I did not enjoy this book. It is engaging as it goes along but in all three strands ends up being utterly bleak.

Non-Fiction

'The Weimar Republic' by Eberhard Kolb

This was a good book to read after Wehler's 'The German Empire' (1985) which I read in August: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html Like Wehler, Kolb provides a brisk but focused analysis of the next period in German history, which eschews being dogmatic down any of the lines which became very ensconced in German history in the 1960s-80s. The first part of the book is an account, which really cuts through the confusion and draws attention to aspects which are overlooked. He makes the notable point that the state's democracy had died by 1930, almost three years before Hitler came to power. Kolb dismisses many of the 'easy' answers that have been put forward for the failure of the Weimar Republic and indeed misconceptions, perhaps even myths, that for so long persisted, regarding the rise of the Nazis. The second half of the book looks at research into different themes of the period as it was when this edition, the first in English was published in 1988. The bibliography was updated from the German first edition four years earlier; there is a 2004 edition in English available too. Thus, this book provides a valuable insight into a period of history which retains interest (e.g. 'Babylon Berlin' TV series, which began in 2017 is still running with a 5th season planned) and a good counter to many of the lazy answers that people continue to wheel out about how the republic fell.

Audio Books

'Prince' by Rory Clements; read by Peter Wickham

Set in 1593, this is the third in Clements's series of spy thrillers featuring John Shakespeare, brother to the more famous William. It is very well done with aspects of what you might expect from a modern spy thriller but clearly set in the late Elizabethan period with rich descriptions of all the sights, sounds and smells of the time. Shakespeare works for Robert Cecil, effectively spymaster for Elizabeth I in the last decade or so of her reign. While his father Cecil acted as her Secretary of State, 1590-96, Robert despite being disabled, carried out a growing part of his work before taking on the position 1596-1612.

John is initially set to investigate terrorist incidents using gunpowder against Dutch refugees from the Eighty Years War who have settled in London. There is much tension around these immigrants though it is soon apparent it is being exploited for a range of purposes. John is later sent to find out about the possibility of an unknown Catholic child of Mary, Queen of Scots who it is believed the Spanish fighting against the Dutch and hostile to Britain, are aiming to set on the Scottish and perhaps the English throne too. Between them John and his assistant Boltfoot Cooper investigate around London and especially into Essex for the conspirators.

Clements handles the story well. There is rivalry between John and his fellow agents which adds interesting points of tension and dynamics to the plot. Clements does not hold off from brutality of the times, with regular reference to tortures and violence even to

 John's loved ones. There are vain people and brutal people involved, so the jeopardy feels genuine and there are blind alleys which John goes down. He is capable but not all-seeing, which allows us to feel an affinity with him. Some of the conspirators are rather larger than life, but throughout Clements does ground them with genuine motives and behaviours appropriate for the late 16th Century. There is an epic climax which is built up to well and does not feel ahistorical.

Overall, there is a lot going on in this book, but it maintained my interest without losing me, right throughout. It runs to almost 13 hours on audio, unabridged. Wickham is called on to do a lot of voices from France, Spain, Scotland and the Netherlands, and most of these are handled well, including the female voices. The only gripe is one of his Dutchmen sounds more Polish, though that only brought home how many parallels there can be felt to be between xenophobia of the the Englands of both Queens Elizabeth. This is part of an 8-book series and I would certainly buy more that I come across whether printed or in audio format.

'End in Tears' by Ruth Rendell; read by Christopher Ravenscroft

I have never read any of Ruth Rendell's novels, though I have seen TV dramatisations of 'A Fatal Inversion' (1987; broadcast on TV 1992) and 'Gallowglass' (1990; broadcast 1992) novels she wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. This novel is the 20th in the Chief Inspector Wexford series and was published in 2005, so after the 48-episode 'The Ruth Rendell Mysteries' TV series (broadcast 1987-2000), which I never saw but was aware on.

The novel is a classic contemporary-set British police procedural novel set in Sussex. A killing of a woman by a lump of concrete being dropped on the car she was travelling in is soon followed by the murder with a brick of a young single mother. This brings Wexford into a complex investigation despite the small range of suspects and it is soon tied up with inheritance, surrogacy and the guardianship of children, with echoes in Wexford's own life. Aside from fewer people having internet access and a lingering discomfort over homosexuality, this book could be set now and Rendell does well in combining modern concerns with a classic crime genre with some tropes, notably the brothers, that would have fitted in earlier decades. It jogs along quite well and the conclusion comes across as believable though perhaps unexpected.

Ravenscroft does reasonably well with the voices, especially as there are a lot of women of differing ages to cover. His Wexford ironically is perhaps his weakest voice and I think this is because he was seeking to emulate the actor George Baker's portrayal of Wexford in the long-running TV series, but at times the deep West County accent wobbles. It would probably have been better for him to deliver his own take on the character's voice.

'Tomorrow Never Dies' by Raymond Benson; read by Simon Vane

As regular readers of this blog will know about five years ago I listened to all of the original Ian Fleming James Bond books in audio format. Since I read 'James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me' (1979) by Christopher Wood, when it came out, I have not read any of the novelisations of the movies until I came across this one. Apparently it is based on an unused version of the movie script. However, in common with what I understand is usual with these novelisations, coming to the book does add quite a lot to the movie. There are back stories to Elliot Carver, Paris, Mr. Stamper and so on which develop these characters. In particular through showing their flaws and their physical traits, the characters especially of Carver and Stamper that we see in the movie, make more sense. There is a whole extra character, a non-binary heir to the Chinese throne who does not even turn up in the movie.

Wai Lin gets more detail too and we see 'behind the scenes' before she encounters Bond. She is, however, portrayed as being 28 (which does seem young to be a Colonel in the Chinese Ministry of State Security) and petite whereas Michelle Yeoh who portrayed her in the movie was 35 at the time and 1.63m (5'4") but shot so she looks little shorter than Pierce Brosnan at 1.86m.

The action scenes are well handled, influenced by the movie, clearly, though in some cases much more practically portrayed and factors such as the need for decompression when coming up from the sunk ship are addressed rather than skipped over as in the movie. Bond also has to use more initiative when aboard the stealth ship than being fully kitted out as he is in the movie. Rather scary is a scene which does not feature in the movie in which Carver outlines the wars he intends to start in the coming years, including a vicious Arab-Israeli conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an American civil war. Benson, or whoever wrote the script back in 1997, had pretty decent insight into the likely conflicts of a quarter of a century into the future.

Simon Vane does well on the accents, just avoiding sounding too stereotypical with the German and Chinese ones. He is clearly influenced by the movie portrayals and captures Jonathan Pryce's Carver well and indeed even Judi Dench's M decently. I would certainly be interested to see other novelisations of the movies though this is rated to be one of the best. The two I have read/heard do add depth to what is shown in the movies; the background stories and the grittier elements do feel to bring them closer to the Fleming books than mainstream movies probably permit.

'A Murder of Quality' by John Le Carré [David Cornwell]; read by John Le Carré

I read the novel of this some time in the past but had forgotten the plot. It is a murder mystery set at a public school. Le Carré was educated at Sherbourne and taught at Eton. Like George Smiley, the protagonist of the novel, Le Carré had been a spy working for both MI5 and MI6 at different times before becoming a novelist. This novel is set in the 1950s with the overhang of the war not too distant. However, a lot of the attitudes and behaviour shown would be no different if you set it, as many authors do, in a British public school of the 21st Century. I suppose this makes it ironically more accessible to readers (even though only a small minority would ever attend such as school) than if it had been set in a grammar school or a secondary modern school of the time.

The wife of schoolmaster is beaten to death with a coaxial cable. Thus reminding us though the context of the public school is a supposedly genteel setting, in fact the brutality of the war and the cheapness of life continued to impact on the attitudes of many in the following years - you sometimes often spot this in Agatha Christie novels of the time and I instantly think of 'A Murder Is Announced' (1950). This novel has a similar element in that Smiley is drawn in after the victim has sent a message predicting her murder.

The novel is brisk but conjures up a range of characters in this constrained setting, which perhaps while they have become stereotypes in the years since, seem to be nuanced when portrayed by Le Carré. He is particularly adept at showing us characters and then completely undermining our perception of them. Some readers might be riled by this, but the author does remind us that even his protagonist's view of people may be far from perfect and especially coming fresh to the locus, largely judges them through what people say about them.

I can see why this novel has retained its appeal as it is almost an exemplar of writing a 20th Century English murder mystery and you feel that Le Carré did it to put himself into that context and show what he could do in that genre rather than spy fiction. It is not common to have the author read their book on audio. This is only the third book I have listened to where that has been the case. It does take Le Carré a little time to get into his performance, perhaps because it was not something he did habitually. However, he is soon well underway and coming from the class and background he is portraying he proves very capable of portraying characters of both genders from that context well. At just 2 hours 30 minutes in total, this is certainly one to listen to (or indeed read) if you have exhausted your collection of Christie, Marsh and Sayers, but want something clever set in a context they would recognise.

Books I Read/Listened To In September

 Fiction

'Resurrection Men' by Ian Rankin

This is the thirteenth book in the Rebus series and was prize winning. Unlike some of the recent preceding ones, this novel has energy. Rebus is sent back to a training college but is working undercover to find out about corrupt police officers. There is an air of uncertainty especially as the case the retrainees are given to work on is one Rebus knows and her does not know if he is as much under suspicion as the men they are working with. In parallel then overlapping, is the case handled by DS Siobhan Clarke. While not named on the covers in many of these stories she is as much a protagonist as Rebus himself. Rebus is still in his relationship with a curator, though a night-time encounter with her seems rather too convenient to be believable. There is quite a lot of tracking back and forth between the college and Edinburgh and Glasgow. Crime boss Big Ger Cafferty appears yet again though some of the focus is on one of his lieutenants. It gets a bit tiresome that he keeps on turning up. However, this novel is decent in terms of the doubts and self-reflection of Rebus and Clarke and how the different threads of the various stories come together.

'Fool's Errand' by Robin Hobb

This is the first of the Tawny Man Trilogy set in the same world as Hobb's Farseer Trilogy, the first book of which I read some while back: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/11/books-i-read-in-november.html Indeed its protagonist is the man who was known as Fitz in that series, but 15 years later when, having renamed himself Tom after all the dramatic adventures of the previous books, is now living a bucolic life with his adopted son and the wolf he is bound to. Hobb's world has two kinds of magic that are genetic inheritances but can be accentuated through training. The Wit allows someone to bind with an animal and communicate with them telepathically. If not handled properly the person can lose themselves in the animal's identity. At the time of this book, the Witted are being persecuted and horribly executed. The other is the Skill which is another form of telepathy allowing sight, i.e. being able to "farsee" and communicate over distances. Tom probably has both abilities. There are also hedge witches with the ability to make charms to achieve low-level magic which actually works.

The first third of the book seems to be going nowhere. We see Tom's quite life while he is visited by various people from his past who know more or less about his history. Most important is the Fool of the title, who had that role at court, but has now reinvented himself as Lord Golden (many nobles names are characteristics such as King Shrewd and Prince Dutiful). He is a kind of alien with unknown abilities but probably a recurring role as a prophet who needs a catalyst in the form of Tom. This section of the novel is effectively a huge recap of the entire Farseer Trilogy which might be a bit tiresome if you have read it, but does mean if you are new from Hobb's work you can get up to (leisurely) speed with her world. Then the rest of the book is a mission into the depths of the country to track down the heir apparent Prince Dutiful who is Witted and has been lured away by a hunting cat.

Hobb has real skill in her writing. Whereas there are some familiar tropes, she has a deftness in turning in ways you do not expect, especially in extracting her protagonists from danger in credible ways. The relationships between the main characters, including Nighteyes the wolf, are handled very well when they are faced with a range of unusual and mundane challenges. In addition to the adventuring with questing and battles, and various bits of magic, it is these relationships which really bare you on in the story. There are no absolutes and even the 'good' characters are grumpy and flawed. I know some readers do not like protagonists who make mistakes, but I feel it means that you can feel you are alongside the characters even though they are existing in a very different world to our own. In addition, despite the fantastical setting there are parallels to our world, notably in suspicion and hostility to those who are seen as 'other' and in turn the negative integration which can make the oppressed become almost fanatical in their defence.

I do not have any more books by Hobb at the present, but if you are looking for well-written fantasy which is credible but not as bleak as grimdark, I can recommend this series.

'Mr. Commitment' by Mike Gayle

This is the second novel by Gayle. I read his first, 'My Legendary Girlfriend' (1998) back in 2016: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-books-i-read-in-may.html Gayle was trumpeted as the male version of Helen Fielding in featuring in a reasonably light way novels looking at relationships in contemporary Britain (largely London). This one features Ben Duffy, known to his friends as 'Duffy' who is an unsuccessful stand-up comedian who aged 28 has been in a relationship with successful advertising executive, Mel for four years. They live at different ends of London and she asks him to move in with her and get married. Duffy spirals into lots of concerns about marriage, not really about commitment but about the trappings that come with marriage, such as consumerism and children. The novel is then a 'will they/won't they' back and forth with other options for both Duffy and Mel appearing. It is very much of the ilk of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' (1994), though with a lot less humour.

Some reviewers feel Gayle has portrayed the male characters as stereotypically useless men. I would disagree as in fact this is one of the challenges, most of the other men in the book, seem to be fully in control of their lives and doing pretty successfully. Many of these kinds of books have a sort of 'soft' social class portrayal of a kind of middle class and people around the fringes, actually doing better than would be the case given costs and low salaries in London. Duffy flat sharing is a reasonable portrayal. Marriage itself comes over as a middle class activity and it is tightly associated with dinner parties and especially in this book visits to Ikea. This seems to be an inescapable context. Even 'Starstruck' (2021-2023) strays into this territory though it is a lot funnier. I guess this was the focus back in the 1990s and is coming around again after different portrayals like 'The Royle Family' (1998-2012) 'Gavin and Stacey' (2007-2019), and 'Two Doors Down' (2013-2023). I know I am comparing a novel to TV series but it does show how few relationship novels I read.

This was not a bad book though what it features was hardly unexpected. It would have been good to have included more humour. Possibly the best thing is it might make young men - though they are unlikely to read it - actually think beyond their immediate needs to their longer term and see that relationships can be achieved without having to buy into the whole 'kit' of middle class consumerism.

'The Montmartre Investigation' by Claude Izner [Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefèvre]

This is the third book in the Victor Legris series. Legris is a book seller living in Paris in the late 19th Century who is also an amateur detective seeking to solve local crimes before the police do. The two authors, sisters who are both Parisian booksellers, are very knowledgeable about France in the period. The book is lovingly detailed in describing all the different districts, their buildings and the residents. Though set in 1891, the fringes of the French capital do open quickly into farmland and an urban goatherd is an important character. The case starts with the murder of a schoolgirl from a boarding school close to Legris's shop which he co-runs with his aged mentor and step-father, Kenji Mori and their assistant, Joseph, an aspiring crime novelist.

A number of people are murdered through the book and Legris and Joseph, often working alone, wheedle their way into various locations to get to the bottom of these and indeed to see if there is a connection between them and what it might be. The first killing might even be a case of mistaken identity and as a result Mori's goddaughter comes to stay at the bookshop. There is a lot of following people around the streets of Paris. There is also a lot of visiting the nightclubs, notably 'Le Moulin Rouge' and 'Le Chat Noir', where the protagonists happen to run into every famous Parisian artist, writer and composer of the time, which does feel rather artificial. Legris's lover is a painter, Tasha and it is nice to see an amateur detective who is not celibate, even if his relationship is complicated. 

There is a lot of interest in this novel. The details of the settings and the people are fascinating. The murder mystery is pretty clever and not that easily to predict, but avoids deus ex machina being needed to resolve it. The prime drawbacks are that there is a lot of tramping around and the tone seems off. This may be due to it being in translation from French. Despite a series of brutal murders, starting off with a stabbed girl, the tone is persistently light. This is fuelled by quirky customers at the bookshop, Legris having women throwing themselves at him, Joseph's mother' Legris on-off relationship and Tasha's disapproval of his investigating and so on. It may have greater gravity in the original French, but in English, despite points of interest it comes off uncomfortably jarring.

'Half A King' by Joe Abercrombie

This novel is set in a different world from, 'The Blade Itself' (2006) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html This one has a more Nordic flavour and focuses on states around the so-called Sundered Sea, a roughly circular sea with rather bleak moors, forests and fens around it and various cities on its shores. It focuses on Yarkvi, the second son of the King of Gettland who was born with a withered arm with only a thumb and one finger on his hand. With his father and elder brother dead, he is called back from training as a Minister - a celibate kind of combined herbalist, diplomat, advisor, order to be king. On a revenge mission to a neighbouring state his uncle attempts to kill him and takes the throne. Yarvi survives but ends up as a galley slave, then later escapes with others from the galley to make the arduous journey back to Gettland to recover his birthright.

Though Abercrombie aimed for this to be a young adult book; a little less 'grimdark', and it is a bit shorter than 'The Blade Itself' and much shorter than later books in that series, it is still pretty much a gritty read, with lots of death and suffering along the way. The book is not high fantasy and at times if someone told you it was set in genuine Nordic history you could almost believe it, including when a One God is put in place over the 409 gods worshipped before. With uncles and a widowed mother in a Nordic realm, there are heavy overtones of 'Hamlet' (1601). The portrayals of this bleak context are well done and the action moves along briskly. The portrayal of the characters is handled well and as Abercrombie notes in an interview at the end of the edition I have the focus on one point of view throughout and a small set of characters at any one time means the character development is rich. Some might foresee the twists at the end, but I found they were well handled.

If I see more books in the series I would certainly pick them up.

Non-Fiction

'What is History?' by E.H. Carr

This is a series of four lectures that Carr gave in 1961. Despite its age it has really stood the test of time (though it does refer to all historians as 'he' and talks about the USSR) in terms of its exploration of perspectives on history. It is a short book (159 pages in my edition) however covers a whole range of issues that still need to be thought about. Examples include whether anything in history is 'inevitable' and how historians are impacted by their attitudes of their own time when looking at attitudes of the past and whether we can ever be really objective. In some ways the book comes to a proto-Post Modernist approach which was to develop in the next thirty years, emphasising the looking at context rather than insisting that our perspective is somehow greater than others without checking this. He also points out how Western-centric so much of history is in the West and how this neglects histories that in the life of humanity have had huge impacts.

Despite its age, this book is very deft and putting questions that historians especially in the period of so much dubious 'history' appearing online, need to keep asking themselves and using to check their work. If you are interested in the study of history, I feel this book remains relevant especially in what it asks.

Audio Book

'The Collectors' by David Baldacci; read by Steven Pacey

This is the second book in Baldacci's Camel Club series. I listened to the third book back in 2020: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html It is typical of many of the CD audio books that seem to turn up in charity shops. The 'Camel Club' is a collection of misfit middle-aged and elderly men with various backgrounds largely in intelligence or the military who get wrapped up in conspiracies and solving crimes, led by Oliver Stone a former CIA assassin who now lives and tends a cemetery. In this one the gang investigate the killing of a librarian at the Library of Congress where one of them works and the assassination of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. There is a parallel story about a con artist and her gang ripping off an Atlantic City gangster, which overlaps with the main story as she was the former wife of the librarian.

There is a lot of chasing around Washington DC but the solution of what is going on is reasonably well handled.  Some of the technology, especially used in the con, seems dated, even for 2006 when the book came out. Unlike 'Stone Cold' (2007) which I listened to back in 2020, the language is a bit less tough-guy throughout and it is more a gang of quirky sort-of amateurs solving what is going on which turns out to be spying and treason.

Pacey does well with a range of distinctive American voices and is not bad with the few female voices that appear. This is not the sort of book that I would have gone out and bought but it is fine enough for listening to while commuting.

The Books I Read In July

 Fiction

'The Falls' by Ian Rankin

This is the 12th Rebus novel and as I have noted before, the stories by this stage of reading are less like murder mysteries and more like slipping into the next instalment of an ongoing story. Given that much is police procedural it is rather like watching an episode of 'The Bill' (broadcast 1983-2010). The daughter of a wealthy family living outside Edinburgh has disappeared. She seems to have been involved in an online puzzle game which sent her seeking clues around the city as well as further afield. This is quite a common trope these days, but much fresher when this book was published in 2001. Her disappearance may also be connected to the appearance of wooden dolls in coffins, which have been associated with other disappearances/murders over the previous thirty years. Rebus weaves in and out of the main search, though contrary to what Rankin says in the introductory essay DC Siobhan Clarke actually appears quite a bit and collaborating with him as well as other colleagues in trying to solve the issue of the puzzle. Being able to connect to the internet on the go using laptops was a novelty then so it is something Rankin explores.

As usual, Rebus is a bit of a mess (though he does get a half-decent relationship in this one) and gets in trouble for his approach. He goes to interesting places in both Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside and as usual runs up against privileged people obstructing the investigation. There is uncertainty about the perpetrator and that provides some mystery as we see the various suspects. However, as is the case with these later books, it rather goes on too long and so loses the energy that a shorter novel would have had. It is comfortable rather than challenging to be reading a Rebus book of this vintage, as I say, rather like sitting down to watch a random episode of 'The Bill'.

'Book of Days' by Gene Wolfe

This is a very odd bundle of 18 short stories by Wolfe. I knew 'How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion' which is a reasonable counter-factual story in a world where Hitler has become leader of Germany but there has been no Second World War and Churchill is a journalist. Some others are just odd notably 'St. Brandon' written in a faux-Irish folktale style and seeming unfinished. 'Car Sinister' about mating cars is just weird, but the sort of thing you might expect. 'Forlesen' seems to be about some tedious afterlife and is pretty tedious. 'Paul's Treehouse' and 'Three Million Square Miles' seem to be observing something about US society but I did not get the message if they were. 'How the Whip Came Back' is more effectively disturbing combining a dystopian view of a restoration of slavery with a sexual perversion. 'The Changeling' is more simply an unsettling story. Wolfe clearly expected computer dating to be far more effective than has proven to be the case and while you can see some examples of his prescience, only on occasion within a few of the stories does anything really jump out as striking.

'Lustrum' by Robert Harris

This is the sequel to 'Imperium' (2006) which I read in 2020: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/06/books-i-read-in-june.html  It continues the story of Marcus Cicero (106-43 BCE) during his period as Consul and then in the subsequent years when with the rise of Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) his position and indeed his life comes under increasing threat. It is seen from the perspective of his slave secretary, Tiro (perhaps 103-4 BCE). 

What Harris continues to do as in the previous book, is take actual events and portray them in a very gripping way. He manages very well to communicate the complexities of various political, legal and religious procedures of the Roman Republic. Having it seem by Tiro means we get little pen portraits of the different individuals involved but also a range of details about the houses, the artworks, the clothing of people of the time. Tiro is not an unreliable narrator but he is opinionated which adds a richness to the story.

Harris is also successful in making us feel real jeopardy for the individuals involved and both the impossible positions Cicero was put into and the price he made for his errors. In addition, you do see techniques being employed that are familiar from politics of the 21st Century too. While I have not read every book Harris has written of those I have, six in total now, together 'Imperium' and 'Lustrum' are the best and I found them really engaging. I do recommend them even if they would not normally appeal to you.

The Books I Read In May

 Fiction

'The Nonborn King' by Julian May

As this was a 2013 re-release I had not realised it was the third book in The Saga of Exiles tetralogy. I had also not realised that like Robin, in the USA, Julian is a woman's name, so had assumed, being British, that the author was a man. I had often come the first book in the series, 'The Many-Colored Land' (1981) but was not tempted to read it at the time. I am glad I did not. This book is almost a stereotype of overblown 1980s fantasy, that I had assumed, due to the portrayal of women, was written by a middle-aged man; May was 52 when it was published in 1983.

It is not really fantasy as it starts as science fiction, with the development of psionic abilities and Earth joining an inter-galactic confederation of species with psionic abilities. However, through a wormhole various people are sent into exile in the Pliocene era 5.3-2.6 million years ago, probably at the start of that era as in this volume we see the Mediterranean basin being reflooded. Travelling back in time, humans from the future meet two branches of the same species of humanoid aliens, the Tanu and the Firvulag that they alternatively combine with or fight

This book is filled with lots of factional battles over 'France', Spain', south-western Germany and parts of the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic seaboard of North America. The reflooding of the Mediterranean is caused by a powerful psionic woman. A powerful human psionic ridiculously called Aiken Drum (as in the song) sets himself up as ruler of 'Brittany' and the book is a rather laboured coming to war of various factions. The psionics like magic and the principalities make it feel like fantasy, though occasional high-tech vehicles and weapons turn up periodically.

Despite being republished in 2013, this book as racist epithets and a generally negative view of women, even down to the myth of the vagina dentata. If I had not known better I would have assumed the book was written by a socially isolated man living in the Mid West living out his pubescent fantasies of time travel and superpowers to secure him women as partners even against their will. I can understand why these books were successful but there was a lot better fantasy around even back in the 1980s, let alone now.

'The Songlines' by Bruce Chatwin

I do not really know if this counts as fiction. Chatwin was a travel writer and it is hard to know if the incidents (there is no plot) that he describes were fictional or real. I guess it counts as 'semi-autobiographical'. Anyway, the book is about an author travelling around central Australia finding out about how Aborigines map the country through songs that allow them to pass on the history and geography of places they move through, the different creatures they identify with, the boundaries between different tribes but also as a shared way of communicating across dialects and languages of the people of the sub-continent. That in itself is interesting. However, the portrayal of the author travelling to various locations to discuss this approach with various people is incredibly seedy. You feel that everything he encounters is worn out and on the verge of collapse, many of the people completely lost in the world, prey to alcoholism or simply the break-down of human impact on such a harsh environment. In the last quarter of the book, Chatwin even gives up on this for a while and simply lists short snippets from various sources trying to portray humans as naturally nomadic rather than settled.

Overall, a very dissatisfying book. I would have preferred to read his analysis of the song lines referring to the people he met and spoke to about them, rather than levering it all in what proves to be a dreary, depressing 'story'.

'Set in Darkness' by Ian Rankin

This is the eleventh book in the Rebus series and I realise I have read so many now, that I no longer look for any of them to be better or worse than the one before, they just are. It is like we periodically drop into John Rebus's life to see how he is getting along. These are increasingly more 'slice of life' novels that happen to be about an unhealthy dysfunctional police officer going about his business in Edinburgh. These sense of the drive of the mystery in these books has entirely faded for me. Three disparate threads and the uncovering of murders involving property developers from the 1970s as a result of the building of the Scottish Parliament (the book was published in 2000), is deftly handled rather than thrilling. There are tropes such as the long-established gangsters and the wealthy family with secrets, so at times, if it were not for the interaction between Rebus and his colleagues, whether friends or opponents, it would feel rather like an episode of a soap opera like 'Dallas'. It is reasonably well woven together and the descriptions of various parts of Edinburgh remain interesting. I still have four more in the series to read of 13 more Rebus novels published since then - there are various short story collections/novellas too. I am content to work through the ones I have but despite copies turning up regularly in charity shops (I now live in Scotland), I am not rushing out to collect them.

'The Ocean at the End of the Lane' by Neil Gaiman

As it explains in an interview in the back of the edition I had, while this superficially seems to be a children's book, featuring a man remembering the fantastical situations that developed when he was living in rural Sussex as a boy. I suppose it counts as magic realism. As noted in the interview some of the horrors have are from an adult perspective which is why I probably found this story far more unsettling than say the Harry Potter stories, even though the protagonist is a 7-year old boy. He falls in with the grandmother, mother and daughter of  a neighbouring house who are a kind of immortal guardians trying to stop misguided rather than evil creatures coming through to cause harm on Earth. It moves along at a pace and for all the fantasy, has a kind of realistic edge. It is set in the late 1960s and I was 7 in 1974, so I can envisage much of 'ordinary' setting and especially the attitudes of adults that are portrayed. It moves along briskly and like all of Gaiman's work is well crafted. I did feel some parallels with 'Good Omens' that Gaiman wrote with Terry Pratchett published in 1990 and 'A Wrinkle in Time' (1962) by Madeleine L'Engle and unsurprisingly it has proven as popular as those two. It has a similar appeal, encompassing the fantastical but rooted in some kind of reality.

Non-Fiction

'The Thirty Years War' by Peter Limm

This is a slim volume which draws on translations of documents of the time to illustrate the points Limm is making. He is no better than anyone else at disentangling the to and fro fighting that raged over western and central Europe in the mid-17th Century. The strength lies in the analysis which follows. There is crisp insight into the impacts of the war, showing how, contrary to many portrayals of it as a real divide in history, it saw many continuities. The war did cause economic harm, but this was actually part of longer trends as were the military developments which it highlighted rather than provoked. Overall this is a perceptive book which certainly, I felt, increased my knowledge of the politics, economy and society of the countries impacted and challenged simplistic assumptions very often seen.

The Books I Read In March

 Fiction

'The Amulet of Samarkand' by Jonathan Stroud

This is a children's book that is often likened to the Harry Potter series. Stroud actually makes a passing jibe at apprentice wizards being sent to boarding schools to learn their craft. Though there is a sense of a world of magic, it intrudes more into the actual world than in the Potter novels. The British parliament is entirely run by wizards who provide ministers. There is that kind of mid-20th Century undefined time period, though used in many British novels, not just fantasy ones; at times it seems to have hangovers from the Victorian era, echoed by the fact that Britain is the centre of an empire run on magic and fighting on continental Europe with its arch-rival centred on Prague.

Magic in this world is centred on the use of demons/spirits of various strengths, thus what wizards can predominantly do is summon such creatures and put them to work. This culturally appropriates Middle Eastern spirits including djinn and afrits, with no explanation how Europeans came to be using them.The hero of the story, Nathaniel, apprenticed to the ineffectual Arthur Underwood at the age of five manages to secure a djinni, Bartimaeus, a middle-ranked creature in effect to exact revenge on those who have been cruel to him throughout his childhood. However, this then draws him into a conspiracy to trigger a coup d''état. The treatment of Nathaniel is very reminiscent of Victorian novels too but by the end it turns into a magic adventure story in a contemporary setting with which we are familiar.

While you can draw parallels to the Potter books, Stroud works hard to distinguish them. Nathaniel for much of the book is driven by revenge. Unlike Harry Potter he is also very isolated, his parents having sold him into apprenticeship and others he relies on briefly being killed. The main strength though is the fact that the alternate chapters are told by Bartimaeus a rather world worn and cynical creature who is ancient and has his own antagonisms going back many centuries; he is able to shape shift too. It is interesting the trilogy is named after him rather than Nathaniel.

While more juvenile than I had expected, the novel is engaging and I enjoyed it. If I see the following two books in the series I would buy them.

'The Friends of Harry Perkins' by Chris Mullin

Like a lot of people of my generation I was very influenced by the dramatisation of Mullin's book 'A Very British Coup' (novel 1982; TV series 1988 available still to watch on All4: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/a-very-british-coup). Harry Perkins was the left-wing Labour politician elected Prime Minister in that previous novel, before being forced from office by the Americans. This book is set in the 2010s following the Brexit vote. Mullin in the introduction outlines the challenges of trying to have this novel feature characters from the first, some 35 years before. He has to make some of them have very long lives. I feel it would have been much better for him to set one or more books sometime in those three decades or to bring in a new cast, even if they were children of the previous characters.

The novel is effectively a 'what if?' history. Perkins remained in parliament and it has gone through many years of Conservative rule, leading to the referendum and Brexit withdrawal but under different politicians to those we know in our world. Labour at the start of the novel is led by a woman. Fred Thompson who was a minor character in the previous book rises to be Labour leader, though to the left of Sir Keir Starmer and manages to win an election in the late 2010s. Overall the book feels very rushed with so much to cover - including Thompson's private life - in a short book.

The climax is telegraphed well in advance. It feels rather like a book which Mullin has to work out various irritations. Thompson and his coterie still mourning Perkins meet in an Austrian restaurant very akin to 'The Gay Hussar' where Michael Foot and his gang used to dine regularly. Mullin is clearly distressed by the killing of Jo Cox and felt that he had to look at that danger for politicians too. Thus, there is a real mish-mash of elements which are straitjacketed into the framework he had created for 'A Very British Coup' while failing to have the genuine jeopardy of that context.

There was a lot which could have been done better in this book. It would have been interesting for him to explore the challenges of a left-wing leader in the current age, even if he avoided comparisons with Corbyn. It would have also been interesting to look at why Labour has never actually had a female leader, whereas the Conservatives have had three who have become prime ministers. The personal violence against MPs would have been another area to explore. However, Mullin seems to have felt shackled to his earlier successful book and in this one as a result has a context in which he cannot really handle all the various elements successfully or, as he effectively admits in the foreword, feasibly.

'Dead Souls' by Ian Rankin

This is the 10th Inspector John Rebus novel and it is strange that only getting this far through the series, I am feeling that as an author Rankin is reaching the standard that he was strangely acclaimed for almost right from the outset. 

This is a very messy novel, with Rebus back on alcohol; his daughter temporarily confined to a wheelchair after the accident in the previous novel, and in an on/off relationship with his lover Patience. There are a number of components which it takes a long time to see are related, but in many ways this makes it feel rather more like an account of genuine detective work. Rebus is angered when he finds a convicted paedophile who has served his time in prison has been housed in the area and effectively sets out to take revenge by 'outing' him. While he begins to regret this decision later, he is too late. There are also the suicide of a colleague and the disappearance of the son of old friends, one of whom Rebus dated when a young man in Fife and he finds he remains attracted to, while also has questions about his own path triggered. There is also a murderer repatriated from the USA to Edinburgh who is allowed to get away with playing with both the police and a journalist; a very slimy character who seems largely untouchable even when he beats up Rebus and later a retired detective too. Added to that there is case against two child abusers at a children's home and who the third man was with them on a particular occasion.

The book has quite a toing and froing, but Rankin manages not to lose the reader. There are long sections of self-reflection but again he just manages to keep these from getting repetitive or tedious. While most of the questions are resolved, there is no big conclusion and that adds to the sense of realism. Rebus even more than before comes over as a world-weary detective running up a string of horrific incidents, injustice and the unsolvable. This novel might frustrate readers looking for a clear tying off of elements, but I feel it is one of the better ones in the Rebus series.

'Talon' by Julie Kagawa

A lot of fantasy, especially that written by women gets 'dumped' into the YA category no matter its focus or the characters. This novel, is very clearly both fantasy and YA. It is one of numerous books in recent years featuring dragons living in contemporary society who are able to shift to being humans. The last one of these I read was 'Chasing Embers' (2016) by James Bennett (not the one by Rachel Skatvold): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/03/books-i-read-in-march.html and this is a now well-established sub-genre.  

Kagawa includes the urban fantasy/dystopian tropes of sinister authoritarian organisations - Talon which rules over dragons putting them into a rigid caste system when they mature but eliminates 'weaklings' and renegades and the Order of St. George a human organisation of highly trained soldiers whose mission is to kill all dragons they encounter. Kagawa gets in a lot of YA tropes - teenaged sister and brother sent to spend the summer on the beach in California, surfing, star-crossed first loves, at the mall, at the funfair, two handsome dudes for the heroine to be torn between, one a mysterious biker.

Ember and her twin brother Dante - rather giveaway names for dragons! - are sent to Crescent Beach for their last phase of training before allocation in the Talon caste system. They have to prove that they can blend in with humans and naturally make friends. The focus is primarily on Ember who falls for another visitor to the town, a 17-year old called Garret, unaware that from orphaned child he has been trained as an excellent soldier for the Order and has been sent to Crescent Beach to hunt down new 'sleeper' dragons. You can probably tell how this unfolds in a very Montagues and Capulets way. Biker Riley, also attracts Ember's attention as he is a 'rogue' dragon, Cobalt, who has broken away from the authoritarian rule of Talon and is hunted by both them and the Order.

I read this book expecting it rather to go through the motions. We see first person through the eyes of Ember and Garrett and later Riley too. However, Kagawa's writing has to be commended that even with so many tropes, she rises above them to provide a genuinely gripping, fast paced story which appears to have genuine jeopardy while also grappling with the challenges that 'ordinary' US teenagers face as they approach adulthood. In addition, there are unexpected twists and I felt she ably dodged some of the possible expected outcomes. While I would not rush out and buy the next book, if I came across I would buy it. Kagawa certainly makes a strong argument for people not looking down on fantasy, even those books, which aim clearly to appeal to a YA audience.

Non-Fiction

'Nazism 1919-1945. Volume 4: The German Home Front in World War II' ed. by Jeremy Noakes

This fourth volume came out in 1998 so while the document numbering continues on from the previous three volumes (the page numbering does not) it is a bit apart from those volumes published 1983-88 (themselves drawing on 1970s volumes organised differently). They all got new covers in the 2000s. In addition, while Geoffrey Pridham is still alive today, this fourth volume was edited only by Jeremy Noakes.

This book might seem to have a rather narrow focus but in fact is a really useful supplement especially to Volumes 2 and 3. For example, Volume 4 looks at the concentration camps whereas Volume 3 focused on the extermination camps. Volume 4 picks up from the pre-war analysis of Nazi Germany's economy and society seen in Volume 2 and so on. Thus, while coming late, it really rounded out the series. There are chapters in Volume 4 which cover aspects often neglected by general surveys of the Nazi regime, notably welfare, attitudes to youth and women and indeed to sex. Things such as the NSV welfare body; the evacuation of children from bombed cities and morale, all are handled well and provide a useful counter-balance to portrayals of these aspects of the British wartime experience which have been covered more extensively.

One point is that while there are lots of useful documents and sources referenced in Volume 4, they tend to be included in full, which can lead to extensive (small print) sections that you sometimes feel are not adding and that the smaller extracts pointing to the kernel of the issue to be discussed, used in the earlier volumes were often more effective.

Another point which I meant to raise when reviewing Volume 3 back in January:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-book-i-read-in-january.html was how scarily current the rhetoric which appears throughout these books seems to a reader in the early 2020s. I know it is easy to label alt right politicians and commentators as 'Fascists' or 'Nazis' but reading through the texts translated into English, you keep hearing echoes of what you might hear if you turn on the television these days. 

The whole attitude from Hitler, Goebbels, et al, that they were at the same time, supremely powerful and assured of victory yet always insisting that they were the real victims; that others were responsible for the conflicts, is so often used nowadays and it is very unsettling when a turn of phrase you read meshes precisely with what you can hear or read quoted from contemporary politicians. I guess the BBC TV series, 'The Nazis: A Warning from History'  (1997; my emphasis) had it spot-on in that title. It is not a question of bandying about terms like Nazi, it is much more about seeing these unsettling parallels and knowing to what they can lead. As I used to remind students, every single step towards the use of Auschwitz was bad; right from the ending of German democracy and removal of civil rights from Jews.

This has been an excellent series of books and while there is a lot to cover, if you really want an insight to the Nazi regime, because of the use of many hundreds of original sources, I would heartily recommend these books.

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.

The Books I Read In November

Fiction

'Black and Blue' by Ian Rankin

It is interesting that the editions of Rankin's books I am reading have an introductory essay from the author about where he was in his career when he wrote the particular book. While this is the eighth book in his Rebus series, he still felt he was only just coming to the end of his kind of apprenticeship period. I guess a kind of scrappiness is something that is characteristic of Rankin's writing but though maybe he felt it took him time to get into producing these books, the rough edges do not seem to have put off readers. Perhaps this is because the tone seems to be appropriate for his character and the cases he deals with.

This one has quite a lot of running back and forth and is almost too inter-twined for its own good. A number of disparate cases including a man committing suicide while being tortured prove to be connected and link the drugs trade in Glasgow with that in Aberdeen especially supplying oil rig workers - the book was published in 1997 when the industry still seemed to have a glorious future. There is too much jammed into this book. There are environmental protestors one of whom is missing, maybe murdered. There is a separate element about Rebus being grilled about his involvement with the framing of another killer in the past which leads him having to be accompanied everywhere and leads to him giving up alcohol. There are also corrupt police involved and a parallel story which was not really necessary of a serial killer called Johnny Bible seeking to copy the genuine killer of the late 1960s Bible John. While the latter has never been found, Rankin features him as a character through whose eyes we see.

While there are some interesting elements including seeing a portrayal of 1990s Aberdeen and Shetland as well as Edinburgh, it is very much as if Rankin is trying too hard to get all these themes in when there was sufficient in the parallel plots to provide two, perhaps three novels. It does get rather tedious with all the travelling back and forth even when it shows you different settings. The distinctiveness of each of these is reduced by him putting in so much. Overall, while it has some good elements, it is too ragged, too full to be really engaging.

'Devices and Desires' by K.J. Parker [Tom Holt]

Not to be confused with the books of the same title by P.D. James [Phyllis James/White] or Kate Hubbard. This is another book in which less could have been more. It is a straight forward fantasy in a kind of non-magical late medieval style setting. While there are some nomadic tribes and an exotic 'old country' which provides mercenaries, the story is mainly focused around the city state of the Republic of Mezentine, a kind of Venice-like place which has a monopoly on the most advanced engineering, but is choking itself by barring innovations which go against the established specifications and the internecine fighting of guilds and bureaucracy. The two other states featured are mountain neighbours, with a low level of technological development, the Duchy of Eremia and the Duchy of Valdis which is wealthier due to silver deposits. The chief military engineer from Mezentine, Ziani Vaatzes escapes execution for creating a toy which is not compliant with specifications and finds refuge in Eremia which he equips with some of the Mezentine technology allowing the duchy to hold off invasion.

I have two problems with the novel. One is that we flit among the points of view of a number of different characters often very abruptly, taking us back and forth between Mezentine and the duchies and then within them, so bringing in sub-plots about a sense of duty and correspondence between the Duke of Eremia and Duchess of Vadania. This makes the book which is 706 pages in my edition a slow read as you have to keep reorientating yourself to whose view you are now seeing and then mercenary generals are also thrown into the mix.

The other thing is that it feels that Parker is trying to pull off a satirical, almost whimsical attitude in the vein of Jonathan Swift. He seeks to satirise perhaps fantasy writing or the real world elements that lay behind it. We see him take on bureaucracy, the attitudes of nobility, merchants, the military and engineers - especially tinkerers in their garages. This is done in a kind of affectionate way and yet it jars. It is not deft enough to be Swift or funny enough to be Terry Pratchett. It leaves a bitter taste when Parker describes torture, wounding and death. It would have been a lot better if either more light hearted, or particularly, if Parker had played it straight and put in a real sense of jeopardy and grimness rather than pulling his punches in an attempt to be satirical.

Non-Fiction
'Nazism 1919-1945. 2: State, Economy and Society, 1933-1939', ed. by J. [Jeremy] Noakes and G. [Geoffrey] Pridham

As with volume 1, this book is very useful in reminding you about aspects of the Nazi regime which these days too often get overlooked in general coverage. In its different sections, again drawing on speeches, articles, accounts and reports, it shows you the machinery of the regime and its contradictions. It considers a range of themes such as agriculture, the Nazi party and the state; women and young people. It is particularly strong on the economic aspects showing the growing militarised situation and how this was organised, pretty chaotically. There are also useful sections on public opinion and on anti-Semitism, important contexts ahead of Volume 3.

For me I think the most interesting aspect was simply how much conflict there was within the Nazi regime, aided by Hitler favouring a Social Darwinist approach to the development of the society and so at different times in different locales one of the sides would come out on top but elsewhere at other times another party or state agency would win through. We do see how the 'little Hitlers' were empowered and fought for supremacy often at a small, local level or in one sector. There was conflict within the Nazi party itself as well as outside it. In many ways you end up wondering how it managed to last so long without imploding, in part perhaps due to the efficiency of the civil service caste in Germany that while asserting its authority, did nothing to undermine the Nazi machine as a whole.

I feel this is a useful book for those interested in understanding how a dictatorship might work and showing how the Nazi regime was far from being a monolith, instead a seething mass of individual jealousies and attempts to grab power by men in various sectors and locations in the country and increasingly beyond too.

Books I Read In August

 Fiction

'Oh, Play That Thing!' by Roddy Doyle

I have read a number of Roddy Doyle books down the years (and watched dramatisations) so am familiar with Doyle's punctuation style, '-' to indicate dialogue and '(-' to indicate dialogue remembered from the past. I had not read 'A Star Called Henry' (1999) which precedes this book. However, as this novel sees the eponymous main character, Henry Smart, relocate from being a terrorist in Ireland to being a man willing to try anything for work in the USA, I thought that would not be a big problem. As it is, Doyle refers back so much to what happened in the previous novel that you can easily pick up the thread. Smart has emigrated in 1924 in large part to stay ahead of those wishing to kill him as a result of his actions during Ireland's battle for independence and the subsequent civil war. 

Smart ends up in New York and gets work as a sandwich board man and seller of illicit alcohol, the Prohibition being on. He hooks up with various women but they are sketchily drawn, often known by sobriquets like the 'the half sister' I imagine to show the shallowness of Smart connection to them. Too many violent men want to prevent Smart developing a business and he is repeatedly forced to flee further West as a kind of con man and odd-job man until he ends up in Chicago as jazz legend Louis Armstrong's minder. Then by a massive coincidence Smart runs into his own wife and daughter. The book, very episodic from the outset steadily unravels from then on, especially after Armstrong lets him go. Smart and his family (they have a son too now) become hoboes during the 1930s but become separated and by the end of the book Smart is somehow in the late 1940s randomly running into movie stars. The last sections of the book become as incoherent as a Hal Duncan or Michael Moorcock novel. It is as if Doyle has no idea how to end it.

The best bits of this book are the settings. Doyle does very well at conjuring up New York, Chicago and some smaller US towns in the 1920s and 1930s very evocatively. There are also great scenes around the performances, not just in jazz clubs and with Armstrong, but also when one of Smart's girlfriends becomes an evangelical demagogue, making use of Smart's connections to Armstrong to make records of her speeches. Doyle is great on performance as we know from 'The Commitments' (1987). There are some great ideas in here, but they are not woven together in a way that really carries the reader onward and instead the book becomes a real slog. Something more narrowly focused, perhaps just around working with Armstrong would have made the strong parts shine rather than be subdued in narrative that really loses the plot.

'Let It Bleed' by Ian Rankin

I guess I have at times accused Rankin of becoming a little directionless in some of his novels too, though never to the scale which Doyle does in 'Oh, Play That Thing! (2004). Perhaps because as in the essay in the front of my edition of this novel, Rankin explains how it was going to be a movie, it is tighter than some of the Rebus stories. It is connected into what has proceeded, though with a bit of an ellipsis as you tend to find, so that Rebus has reconnected with his daughter but has moved out from living with his lover Patience. In this novel, in fact, he gets no sex, but continues with his alcoholism back in his old flat. He is aided by two loyal colleagues, notably DC Siobhan Clarke who plays a growing role in the novels and is almost like the flip-side daughter for Rebus.

Starting with a messed-up kidnapping which ends in dramatic death, this story does connect into a lot of issues facing Edinburgh and indeed Scotland, when it was published, i.e.1995, still under a Conservative government with the dregs of Thatcherite attitudes and with steps towards the resurrection of the Scottish Parliament four years later in the New Labour era. With its scenes of local government corruption, people making use of police and criminal contacts, this novel does feel very much in step with dramas of the 1980s/90s like 'Edge of Darkness' (1985), 'Centrepoint' (1990) 'Natural Lies' (1992) and though more light-hearted, in the same area, 'The Beiderbecke Affair' (1985) and its sequels. 

The sense in the 1980s that anything that created jobs was sacrosanct no matter what compromises had to be made still rings through this novel. There is also that aspect coming out of the 1960s that the wealthy and well-connected would often make use of the criminal class is also here. Rankin handles these well trodden ideas pretty well. He manages to balance the sense that people in power are untouchable no matter how corrupt with Rebus actually making some progress, which is a relief for the reader. There is both gritty violence white collar crime. As always Rankin makes good use of Edinburgh and the surrounding areas; the rich and the poor. Overall this is one of the best Rebus novels I have read and indeed could be read standalone without having to be familiar with the preceding six novels in the series.

Non-Fiction

'Nazism 1919-1945. 1: The Rise to Power, 1919-1934' ed. by J. [Jeremy] Noakes and G. [Geoffrey] Pridham

This is the first of four volumes of document readers on Nazism that began to be published in the mid-1970s but were revised and restructured in the 1980s with the new fourth volume appearing in 1998. What they are is a collection of translated documents illustrating what the Nazis were saying at different stages and what people were saying about them. They are connected by some narrative of events by Noakes and Pridham. Thus, the books differ from a standard history of the Nazi Party or indeed Germany at the time. This approach means that aspects which can sometimes be overlooked in some histories stand out. In this volume, for example, we learn much more about the factionalism and rivalries in the party and about the issues around the SA's part in it especially after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. Also interesting are the views of members of the public from diaries about how they viewed the rise of the Nazis and the dilemmas that, for example, the Catholic Centre Party faced in terms of opposing or condoning the Nazis' actions. As is typical by the time the scale of the danger was apparent to many it was too late to stop. Some readers might find issues around tensions in what was an ill-balanced federal state too bureaucratic, but I think it is interesting to see how small states and Bavaria ploughing its own legal furrow were a doorway in for the Nazis. They also remind us that even before Hitler had become Chancellor there had been a coup d'état against the centre-left government of Prussia, the state which covered 3/5ths of Germany.

Despite the age of this book, it remains perceptive and an interesting angle on the rise of the Nazis. It is very accessible to the general reader as well as history students and academics. It is liable to give you insights into what happened and how, even if you feel you know the story pretty well already. I will read the other three volumes in the coming months.

Books I Read In June

 Fiction

'Who Was David Weiser?' by Pawel Huelle; translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones

If you do not like unreliable narrators then this is certainly a book to avoid. It is set in the summer of 1957 in northern Poland though goes on erratically into the future, probably the 1970s or 1980s. It is written in the first person and dodges around chronologically as the narrator talks about the investigation by teachers, local officials and the police into the disappearance of David Weiser, a Jewish boy at the narrator's school. The activities of the narrator and his various primary-school friends across the summer are recounted at length. It also keeps coming back to their engagement with Weiser and his girlfriend Elka. Weiser is a kind of Svengali character who seeks adoration from the narrator and his friends, largely through his semi-detached engagement with them, making use of munitions left over from the Second World War and perhaps pulling off genuine magic such as flying as well as odd but more down-to-Earth activities like dancing to Elka's pipe and playing football in a disinterested but highly skilled way.

The novel is engaging, richly portraying a particular time and place that does not feature in English-language writing. The characters are well drawn and you do have an interest in what happened to David and indeed Elka, though the outcomes for the two are different. The trouble is that the parameters are so constrained that it soon becomes tedious, going back and forth in time between the events that unfolded, the questioning of the boys and then references to later decades. After a while you feel like you have seen it all multiple times and in the end it felt a lot longer than its 220 pages. The idea and attention to detail are good. In a short story they would have been highly engaging, but everything is stretched far too thin and as a result the charm that the book initially has is soon utterly worn away and you lose interest in what finally happened whether for real or as a result of some magic realism.

'Mortal Causes' by Ian Rankin

In December I retrieved the remaining 10 Rebus books that I had in storage. As a result I came back to the series for the first time since May 2019. This is not a bad story, though as before I feel at times Rankin has lots of ideas that he does not really know how to take forward. There are odd things like Rebus sleeping with a lawyer he encounters even though he is living with his girlfriend. It seemed out of character and did very little to advance the story unless she is going to turn up in subsequent books. The story is a mish-mash of involvement of Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitaries receiving funding from the USA and importing arms via Scotland. The book opens with the scene of a torture and execution and Rebus gets entwined with different elements of the paramilitaries and numerous individuals both on that side and in various police units. Intrigue is fine but at times you do begin to wonder what the point is. I must say, though, that final fifth of the book works far better than the preceding sections and you wish that Rankin had kept tighter control over the variety of characters and various developments to raise the entire book to that quality.

'The Salmon of Doubt' by Douglas Adams

I misunderstood what this book was. In the middle of it are a couple of novelettes one featuring Dirk Gently and one Zaphod Beeblebrox, assembled posthumously from various fragments. However, the rest of the book is made up of various articles and transcripts that Adams made down the years, some are very short. They effectively form a kind of biography of the closing years of his life and the topics that interested him notably conservation of species and technology. In terms of technology Adams was very perceptive and accurately predicted things like texting with your thumbs on phones and the search for a universal charger format. Individual articles featured are interesting enough, but really this is a book for serious Adams fans who want to know a little more about the man they admire, but for the general reader there is little here.

Non-Fiction

'The Black Angels' by Rupert Butler

As I noted when I read Butler's 'Gestapo' (1981) - not to be confused with the subsequent illustrated versions: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/04/books-i-read-in-april.html  - Butler was very much part of that populist history for sale in branches of Woolworths and newsagents. This book which focuses on the Waffen SS, though at times touches on other branches of the SS, is less sporadic than 'Gestapo' and the book is a pretty comprehensive study of how the Waffen SS developed and where they served. Butler does feature atrocities committed by the units, especially against Allied soldiers. However, he struggles to avoid slipping into hagiography and so praises the courage and speed of the Waffen SS units. He really downplays the strength of the opposition to them, notably in France, and over-estimates the strength and level of machinery that the German side had. He, also, like many populist historians of the war, sees Blitzkrieg as something carefully planned in advance and used in Poland as much as France rather than largely developing from the behaviour of reckless generals, ignoring orders. The hagiography becomes apparent too when he begins to speak of the East European SS units that were created and you feel that he sees them as a slur on the honour of the SS and to blame for atrocities, not seeming to recognise that his derogatory racial stereotyping was akin to the attitudes of the SS themselves. There are interesting elements in the book in terms of where the SS fought and their contribution to various campaigns, notably the so-called Battle of the Bulge. However, you cannot help by being unsettled by the extent to which Butler is an enthusiast for the SS and sees admirable traits in many of their soldiers, even while outlining the atrocities they committed.