Fiction
'The Body on the Beach' by Simon Brett
This is another author that I have met. He came to speak to the writers' group I was a member of, at the time of the publication of the fourth novel in this Fethering series, 'Murder in the Museum' (2003). Brett is a prolific author, having been published since 1975; there are now seventeen books in the Fethering series alone. 'The Body on the Beach' (2000) is the first in that series set in the fictional Sussex town of Fethering, twenty minutes by train from Brighton. Brett loves the charming, almost whimsical detective stories of the inter-war period and though some of his stories are set in the modern day (others are set in the 1920s and the Victorian era), they owe a great deal to the so-called 'golden age' perhaps embodied by Agatha Christie's early work and the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers.
I was rather irritated at the start by the clearly fictional nature of the setting. The village of Fethering is supposedly near Tarring (as in 'tarring and feathering'), perhaps inspired by the real Worthing and Goring-on-Sea (which has a suburb called Ferring) but primarily to be his version of St. Mary Mead. In addition it seems to inhabit that contexts used in novel, a kind of mid-1970s which persists for decades afterwards, as I have noted in Ian McEwan's novels. There is one mobile phone featured, a passing reference to the national lottery and a young woman with a nose stud, but otherwise it could have been set decades earlier. There is a common fictional trope for one of the leading characters Jude (her surname is not revealed until later books) who is a classic middle-aged version of the 'mad pixie dream girl', a kind of hippy who shows others how to live a more relaxed life. Overall I was reminded of the television series about two middle-aged landscape gardeners who investigate crimes, 'Rosemary and Thyme' (broadcast 2003-2007), which might be unsurprising given Brett's other career as a radio producer. These are what are now termed 'cosy/cozy' crime stories, though in this novel there is quite a bit of detail about heroin addiction, a decaying corpse, the eponymous 'body' and youth despair.
As the book progressed I realised that Brett's intention was not so much to write a crime novel but to give him a chance to explore the interactions between various characters in a particular setting. He manages to stay on the right side of the line of stereotyping and even Jude and her uptight neighbour Carole Seddon prove to have greater depths than might be expected. There is a whole host of largely middle aged characters which Brett develops deftly throughout the book. They are not likeable and they may seem over-exaggerated, but in British society it is easy to find real examples; having lived in a small village in Warwickshire for a year, I could draw very tight parallels to people I met there. This, I felt as I read on, was the purpose. Brett obviously knows his audience and effectively holds a mirror up to themselves.
I did not enjoy the novel and while I have the fourth book on my shelf, I will not be in a rush to read it. That is not because I felt the book was poorly written; in fact I welcome Brett's skill with the characters and in how amateurs feasibly could be drawn into investigating a crime. It is just that this is too close to home; I meet too many people like the characters in it on a regular basis, even among my neighbours. I am seeking entertainment rather to have the flaws of the society in which I live thrust so capably back at me.
'Stars and Stripes Triumphant' by Harry Harrison
As someone who has written counter-factual historical analysis as well as 'what if?' stories I am often asked to indicate how feasible a particular scenario might have been. This can be difficult as individuals can vary widely in their judgement of what is feasible and in history, sometimes what happened was the least feasible option, e.g. the Continental forces surviving the winter of 1777/78 intact in the American War of Independence or the Bolshevik forces winning the Russian Civil War 1918-21 against so much armed opposition. In terms of novels, the two most popular scenarios: Nazi Germany winning the Second World War and the Confederacy winning the American Civil War were both highly unlikely on economic and military grounds. However, with the trilogy by Harry Harrison which is concluded by this book, it goes utterly into the realms of fantasy. Harrison does not simply diverge from what happened in history but completely twists it around. Consequently you end up effectively with a steampunk novel with some unlikely alternate history.
Let us remember that, already in this series, the Confederacy turned its back on substantial British support and ended the civil war in a single day. Canada forgot all its ties to Britain and, despite many of residents having come from the USA to escape its culture, now willingly accepted everything they imposed. In the space of two years, the southern states of the USA have been miraculously industrialised, something that President Andrew Johnson, who took over when Lincoln was assassinated and was more supportive of the former Confederate states, was unable to achieve. In passing, the racial tensions of the southern states have been resolved a century before that happened in our world, even if has been resolved. The Americans then launched a perfect invasion of Ireland across the Atlantic, eighty years before they struggled to carry out one across the English Channel in our history. Again they have miraculously resolved the divisions in Ireland in a matter of weeks, problems that have dogged politicians in our world for decades. They have also managed to industrialise Ireland 140 years earlier than achieved during a period of greater peace in our history.
What Harrison forgets in this novel, as with the two that precede it, is that yes, it is great to read about history going down a different path, but there is minimal interest if everything is a foregone conclusion. In this novel the British military is largely passive. Despite two wars against the USA, it does not develop any spy network in the USA nor takes care to monitor US shipping. In contrast, the Russians have a highly developed spy network in Britain that they share with the Americans for some reason. The Americans, despite coming late to building a navy, construct sophisticated steamships with armour so strong nothing the British fire at them from land or sea can even penetrate it, yet US warships can completely destroy a British ironclad ship or modern fort in thirty minutes. Along the way, the Americans invent a new version of the 'bomb ketch', a ship carrying mortars, which the British were using against fortifications in the 1800s but seem to have completely forgotten about by the 1860s. They also develop the internal combustion engine, whereas, in fact, it had been developed in France in 1859 and there were not real cars for another fifteen years. They create simple tanks, fifty years ahead of this happening in our history and they are hundreds of times more reliable than any which went to war in our First World War, hence me seeing this as a steampunk novel.
Aside from how idiotic and incapable of engineering the British are shown, the Americans have complete luck throughout. No-one gets a successful shot in against one of their warships, there are minimal breakdowns and no problems with the weather despite sailing an armada across the Atlantic via Iceland. Even when Britain is invaded, any attempts at warnings are cut off or fail but, in contrast the Americans are able to get accurate information and details from casual observations and amateurs. Throughout, their casualties are minimal, whereas skilled British units are slaughtered to a man. Harrison also forgets that the British were keen purchasers of the Gatling gun, particular versions were made for that market and if threatened with them, they would not have sat idly by and not created or bought in something similar. The Americans have long supply lines even back to their friends in Ireland, let alone to the USA and yet, in the face of this, all the British armies, let alone the militia and yeomanry, evaporate rather than defend their homes.
The other galling thing is that every character speaks so earnestly; none of the Americans is flawed. This adds to the whole sense that this book is a propaganda book for American nationalists. The assumption is that everyone from Canada to Ireland to Britain was stupid and, with a US invasion, would suddenly have woken up to how wonderful the American way was and would have embraced a replica of the US Constitution which had only just abolished slavery, decades after Britain. Ironically the Americans collaborate with Russia which was an autocracy at the time, suggesting that Harrison simply loathes Britons, not undemocratic countries.
The American invaders in the novel are harsher than even the US armies which penetrated Nazi Germany in 1945. Following both world wars it was down to the Germans themselves to decide on the form of government they would have. Yet, in this novel the Americans depose the Queen and abolish the House of Lords. This seems to be largely accepted, provoking no anger from other monarchs across Europe, many of whom were related to Queen Victoria. It is also horribly anachronistic. I would like both of those things to occur, but even now, 150 years later, the monarchy is incredibly popular and no-one, despite election promises, has done more than tweak the House of Lords. As for Scottish independence, given that in 2014, after decades of the Scottish National Party, only 45% of the Scottish population voted for it, you can imagine how much more unpopular it would have been in 1865. Yet, this is of no matter to Harrison, he waves his wand and everyone 'wakes up' to the fact they had been fools before.
This book is poor as it is so imbalanced. It is also frustrating as Harrison has wasted three books that could have been so much better. Looking at what would have happened if Britain had recognised and militarily supported the Confederacy is an excellent starting point for a 'what if?' novel; one that has not been explored much. He could have had the Confederates turn against the British; slavery was always going to be a point of tension and come back to the Union, but to do it in a single day is ridiculous. From there an invasion of Canada could have formed the next book, but with a recognition that many Canadians were Canadians because they did not want to be Americans and that 'democracy' was a derogatory word for most of the 19th century, not simply in Britain but including among Canadian and Irish elites.
Harrison could have had industrialisation of the southern states, even improvement in race relations, but this would take decades, not just a couple of years. Furthermore, there is no tension if there is no jeopardy. An American invasion of Ireland and Britain could have been epic rather than the 'walk in the park' he presents it as. There would have been triumphs and setbacks, casualties too, on both sides especially given how advanced British military might and technology was at the time. Instead, you get a tedious clinical victory that seems to have originated in a wet dream of an American nationalist. I really regret buying this trilogy and understand why Harrison has not returned to 'what if?' history; these books are an embarrassment for him.
'White Eagles Over Serbia' by Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell (1912-90) these days is less well known than his naturalist brother Gerald (1925-95) but published 1933-90. My edition of this book, published in 1957, is labelled as 'An Adventure Story for the Young' which just shows how Young Adult fiction has come in the past 60 years. Even at the time, I would have deemed it 'for the Old' as this spy adventure really has a feel of the inter-war and even turn of the century adventures. It is set in Communist Yugoslavia, but easily the enemies featured could have been some secret police and army of an earlier era. The hero, late middle aged Colonel Methuen, with his gentlemen's club, pipe and his obsession with fly fishing, would have not been out of place in something by Erskine Childers, hence being dated, even for the young of the 1950s.
The story is simple. Methuen is asked by his boss to travel to the border of Serbia and Bosnia, at the time both part of Yugoslavia, where it appears that a number of monarchists are gathering and where another British agent had already been killed while investigating the situation. He is to find out what is attracting this group, named White Eagles after the monarchist insignia, are up to. He is taken to the area and sets up a base, eventually discovering the monarchists and their activity in taking treasure hidden at the start of the Second World War to the coast. They fail and Methuen escapes. He gets back to the British Embassy having achieved very little except witnessing an attempt to smuggle out gold. He has had some close scrapes and in between times some wonderful trout fishing.
The book has some moments of tension. However, it seems largely to be an excuse for Durrell to describe in depth a beautiful and dramatic part of the Balkans and indulge in fantasies of fishing in that environment. In that respect it reminded me a little of 'John McNab' (1925) by John Buchan, though that book is more entertaining though lacking the Cold War trappings and the life-or-death danger. I guess that being able to draw a parallel with a book over a quarter of a century older than 'White Eagles Over Serbia' shows how, despite an attempt to make it current, it was based in an older tradition. It is a quick romp but certainly not a children's or young adult's book. Rather it would appeal more to middle-aged anglers or would-be adventurers, especially those enamoured of the wild beauty of the Balkans.
'The Necropolis Railway' by Andrew Martin
This is the first of nine (so far) stories set in the early 20th century featuring Yorkshireman Jim Stringer a railwayman and from the third book, a steam (railway) detective. The story is set on the real Necropolis Railway which ran between Waterloo Station and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey to transport coffins and mourners. Having been to the cemetery and heard of the railway station is what attracted me to the book. At the age of 19, Stringer is brought down to London to work as an engine cleaner seeing this as the track to becoming a fireman and then a locomotive driver. However, he is expected to spy on his fellow workers to uncover mysterious deaths not simply of railwaymen but also leading members of the company.
Having written quite a lot of historical crime novels I know that there is always a tension between including detail to give it authenticity and yet overdoing this to make it inaccessible to the average reader. I remember when I started including the colours of the various tram lines in 1922 Munich. Martin is an author of non-fiction books on railways and the trouble with this book is that he assumes we are as well. This problem is multiplied by the fact that he uses 1903 slang and that everything is in the first person so there are not even useful asides from the narrator to tell you what on Earth is being referred to. As a result I really struggled to comprehend much of the story. In addition I have no interest of the particular wheel configuration of the locomotive the characters are travelling on, but Martin gives it almost every time.
Almost every character is obnoxious or vicious though some later turn out to be more moderate than they were pretending at the start and others even more treacherous. The settings are incredibly bleak. I accept that this is authentic for the time and place but added to the difficulty of the language turns the reader off even more. The book is unremitting. Then Stringer works out the murderer who has quite thin motives, and the book is transformed, it abruptly lightens up on the language and just at the point it is coming to an end you find it easier to understand what is happening. I accept that Martin's technique might have improved across the successive books, but on the basis of this book I have no desire to read them. I would only recommend them if you are a lover of Edwardian steam trains.
'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' by J.K. Rowling
You would have imagined that, given I have preferred the adventure aspects to the day-to-day details of school life in the Harry Potter novels, I would have relished this one the most. The action only moves to Hogwarts School at the end of the book and then for a huge battle. However, in fact I regret reading this book. Though it is shorter than the previous two (607 pages in my edition; apparently 759 pages in the US edition), unlike them it was broken into two movies. This, I found reflects the longueurs of the novel. Much of the book has Harry, Hermione and Ron (on occasion), traipsing around the British countryside to pretty dreary places and failing. For much of the book, Harry is uncertain if he should be pursuing the horcruxes which hold parts of Lord Voldemort's soul or the three components of the Deathly Hallows which might be able to defeat him. Furthermore the trio generally have no idea where they should be going to find these things. I accept that this may represent how people who are 17-18 feel about life, but it does not make for exciting reading.
In fact it is even worse in the book than in the movie, because it is noted at each stage by Rowling that weeks and weeks drag by. They seem to pass two Christmases and while Harry is almost 17 at the start of the novel, I estimate he must be 19 or thereabouts by the end, suggesting that two school years have gone past though this seems not to impact the same on the pupils of Hogwarts. Furthermore, while there are fascinating revelations about Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape, towards the end of the book, you do feel that Harry has simply been a pawn for these men and that is incredibly disheartening, though Rowling does seem to track back a bit and try to beef up Harry's part in what has happened. Yet, it appears that from his birth he has been a tool of others, again something teenagers must feel, but it is hard to swallow when a hero you have followed over thousands of pages is revealed to be a cipher. The final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort, though long expected, is very untidy and confused. Michael Moorcock has featured such complex stand-offs with seemingly invincible opponents and Rowling is not as good as him at extricating her characters or herself from this situation.
I do commend her portrayal of the developing Fascist state and Voldemort does become far more part of the Establishment than he is shown in the movies. I welcome the fact that she allows a number of Harry's friends and supporters to die. Not doing so would weaken the link to real-life anti-Fascist movements, especially among young people in Nazi Germany, that I feel she is seeking to echo or even highlight in this novel. It is fine to have jeopardy, something too often lacking in contemporary popular novels. However, it adds to the weight bearing down on the reader and means it needs some counter-balance from having more spark from the heroes in the story.
Ultimately, despite the epic nature of some of the scenes in the book, I felt this was a damp squib ending to the series that disappointed me, only lifted a little by the projection 19 years into the future, which by my estimation would be 2026, to see that the heroes have largely settled down to comfy middle class wizard life and racial tension among magic-users is a thing of the past. Neville Longbottom does not seem to get Luna Lovegood as his wife the way he does in the movies, but does end up a professor.
While I accept that Rowling wanted uncertainty and a sense that Harry's victory was not a foregone conclusion, nor that he alone can be a hero without the aid of a wide spectrum of other people, she has gone too far and the books seems to drift far too much. The set pieces which also feature in the movie are exciting, but too much of this book feels directionless. She could have instilled Harry's character with doubt yet not infect the actual novel with that weakness.
'Our Game' by John Le Carré
This is a messy book which turned into a slog. It was published in 1995 when Le Carré appears to have been considering where his books would go next now that the Cold War was at an end. The 'hero' of the book, Tim Cramner is a British spy who previously controlled a loose cannon double agent, Larry Pettifer. By the early 1990s, both men have been retired, though Cramner is only in his mid-forties and Pettifer is younger still, though from the writing you constantly feel they are much older, in their sixties. Cramner has taken over his family's vineyard in Somerset and Pettifer has become a lecturer at the nearby University of Bath, a place it is clear that Le Carré dislikes; he condemns it repeatedly. It is a 1960s university, but it is well-equipped and popular with its students. I guess Le Carré does not see any university outside Oxford or Cambridge as legitimate. I was pleased that this was not set around another Oxford college, but Le Carré still makes the two lead male characters old boys of both Oxbridge and Winchester public school; the title of the book comes from school slang for a peculiar 'wall ball' game played there.
Pettifer continues to be reckless and it turns out has been embezzling funds both from the British and Russians. He goes round seducing women and being a boor. Cramner feels continuing sympathy for the man even though this attachment drags him into deeper and deeper problems with the police and then MI6 certain that he is Pettifer's accomplice. The reader catches on far faster than Cramner why Pettifer took the money and how Cramner's lover, Emma, somewhere in her twenties but a nationally recognised composer, is involved. For all his 'tradecraft' - spy skills in Le Carré-speak, Cramner is fooled throughout the book and suffers incessantly. This is a central problem as no character in the book appeals to you, they all seem to be screwing up the lives of someone else and yet presenting a hypocritical face to the world. Cramner is forced on to the run, something he does pretty poorly despite his training and the book becomes very tedious as he moves from one desultory location to another in dreary vehicles and with dreary assumed identities. There is minimal action; the fights are always over by the time Cramner reaches them even when he heads to the Caucasus to take part in the ethnic fighting there. As with 'Our Kind of Traitor' the book trails off and despite/because of all of Cramner's ineffectual efforts, too little is resolved.
Le Carré needs to go back and read his John Buchan. 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915) shows how the plot of a wrongly-accused man, wrapped up in foreign intrigue as a result of unwanted associations and on the run can be handled dynamically. I suppose Le Carré was writing in the age of 'doorstop' novels rather than slimmer tones. However, the length (416 pages in my edition) detracts from the book. With Cramner traipsing around, bemoaning his life, any dynamism is lost, hence me seeing it as a slog.
Non-Fiction
'Germany and the Approach of War in 1914' by V.R. [Volker] Berghahn
This is another book by someone I have met. I attended a lecture by Berghahn (born 1938) almost thirty years ago now. I cannot remember the subject but I know he explained why he was diverting from the given title and it had something to do with a strike which was on at the time. He came over as a warm, engaging lecturer and I had expected something similar from this book. It was published in 1975 and is rather over-influenced by his earlier book, 'Der Tirpitz-Plan' (1971). Around half of this book focuses on the impact of Admiral von Tirpitz's naval expansion plans of 1897-1912, in far too much detail. Every twist and turn of his progress or halt towards achieving his plan is detailed and it imbalances the book and, in fact, is pretty tedious. Once Berghahn moves off this specific topic and takes a broader perspective, the book improves.
Berghahn comes from the generation of historians of Germany influenced by the work of Fritz Fischer than began to appear in 1961 which reassessed German willingness to go to war in 1914. While adopting that as a basis, Berghahn is less bombastic in his assertions and consequently makes a very convincing argument. Like the Fischerites, especially people like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, he shows how the conservative forces in German society, notably the Kaiser and big landowners were willing to try anything to maintain their supremacy in the face of Germany becoming an modern industrialised state and the consequent rise of Social Democrats and to a lesser extent Christian Democrats. The naval building plan was one element of this as colonialism had been in the 1880s and a focus on strengthening the Army and establishing a Central European economic bloc were to be in the last couple of years before war broke out. Berghahn capably shows that such tactics could not dampen the growth of the main left-wing party in Germany, the SPD and yet at the same time stretched the German economy, compelling reforms of taxation that the conservative forces felt inimical to their position.
Germany was less than it thought itself to be. It lacked the funds to sustain such armament growth, and because of the unwillingness to recruit working class people, even the men to fill the expanded Army and Navy. It lacked the shipyards to rival the rate of British construction and the colonies to provide the troops that France could call upon. It lacked the capital needed to economically dominate the Balkans and left with no friends, it was tied to the crumbling Austria-Hungary. The book, though short (214 pages of text; 46 more of timelines and references) moves painfully slowly but you can see how the German elites around the Kaiser, who despite the trappings of democracy, effectively still ran the state, saw war as the only possible solution for both their domestic political and social worries and their external diplomatic ones. The book makes a very solid case in a convincing way. However, the thrust of the arguments put forward are lost in the day-by-day minutiae that Berghahn feels compelled to include. Berghahn has continued publishing in German and English into the 2000s so I hope that in his later books he has found a style which allows him to deliver his arguments in a more engaging way.
'The Spanish Civil War' by Andrew Forrest
Andrew Forrest is another author that I have met, Some time in the late 1990s I was at a pub in Surrey to watch a jazz band. He was a history tutor at a local college and was there with two students; all three had escaped from the college's 'prom'. They seemed uncomfortable with the growing tradition taken from US high schools of excessive clothing and stretch cars as a way for young people to behave irrationally. Forrest was a musician himself and a fan of jazz.
This book is not a conventional history of the Spanish Civil War, rather it provides the narrative in a very concentrated form, followed by very perceptive analysis and then model answers of how students can use such text to provide good exam or essay answers. Though it is aimed at students, it is an excelled condensed coverage of the war. It demonstrates comprehensive knowledge of all the books that have gone before on the subject (it was published in 2000) and draws on a range of original sources to illustrate what it is saying. The style with the different sections to each chapter can be a challenge if you are simply reading it as a history.
Though I have read numerous books on the subject and taught on it for four years, there was material here and acute analysis, that I had not encountered before. The book is particularly strong in showing that the Spanish Civil War was not a bubble in Spanish history but a link in a chain, connecting back to the De Rivera dictatorship of the 1920s and that the fighting did not cease in 1939 as Franco continued in his goal to kill all 'Reds'. The ongoing covert war that followed in the 1940s has only recently received popular attention through movies. It is also very good on the factions both within the Nationalist and Republican camps.
I recommend this book if you quickly want to engage with the Spanish Civil War or if you believe all the major insights into the war had been written about by the 1970s.
Showing posts with label J.K. Rowling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.K. Rowling. Show all posts
Monday, 31 October 2016
Friday, 30 September 2016
The Books I Read In September
Fiction
'Twelve Women Detective Stories' edited by Laura Marcus
Over the past couple of years I have been working through the various compendiums of crime and spy novels that I must have been in the habit of buying sometime in the past. I have a couple of large ones to go, but this slimmer volume was rather overlooked. It does what it says in the title. It is a collection of twelve short stories featuring women detectives, that were published between 1861-1950. It shows that female detectives while a minority, were not as unknown as they are often assumed to have been especially in the Victorian period. These stories have been written by a mixture of men and women, but interestingly very few of them led to lengthy series and often just a single collection of each character is available.
One of the detectives, Loveday Brooke, the creation of Catherine Louisa Pirkis, I have come across before, but not this particular story. Many of the Victorian tales will appear rather restrained to modern day readers, at times a little naive. This is one reason why Conan Doyle's work has endured because it stands above all his contemporaries whether featuring male or female investigators. This date feel does not mean the stories in this book baulk from violence or a sudden poisoning. Many take advantage of the different ways in which women lived and the heroines are typically skilled at disguise, entering houses of suspects as maids or interior designers. This does not mean they avoid physical action and there are pursuits in sewers, riding over moors, hurrying across countries and around cities, making use of weapons, though in most cases it is the heroine's intelligence and astuteness that allow her to win through. Some of the authors were feminists. notably Charles Allen who had controversially published a book about a woman living with her partner and their child but eschewing marriage.
Many of the stories are around disguise, the theft of jewellery, attempts at deception related to marriage or wills, but these were common tropes of much crime fiction in these periods, especially the Victorian times. Many of the detectives are well off women or middle class women who have fallen on hard times, so have turned to detection as a source of income. However, they have no difficulty mixing in different social circles and have the knowledge of the well-educated. I suppose they are the mothers of female detectives of the first two-thirds of the 20th century before the harder-edged characteristics which are seen in some of these stories came more to the fore.
Of the different stories, my favourite character and one I think could easily be translated into the 21st century is Hagar Stanley, a Roma woman who had been forced from her extended family by the violence of a male relative and has ended up working for a pawnbroker who has died but his heir has not come forward to claim the business. The crime is based on an item she receives at the pawn shop and through her life knowledge she is able to trace what has been happening and to aid her client who she has fallen for anyway. Given the high profile of the Roma and their challenges and the increased use of pawnshops, these stories or a modern version of Hagar would seem an interesting path for a TV series.
Overall while to many readers of contemporary crime fiction these stories will seem dated and even a little naive, they are engaging, highlight the social mores of the times in which they sat and the parameters in which women were compelled to work, but could seek to exceed in such exceptional circumstances as portrayed here.
'Stars and Stripes in Peril' by Harry Harrison
As I noted in July, this is a very jingoistic trilogy, part of a trend in US writing towards trying to show much better and stronger the USA could have been if it had been more nationalistic. Conversely, I have been challenged that what I write is similarly jingoistic for Britain simply because I set stories there and as any regular reader of this blog knows I am very critical of the UK and what it has done. Yet, to even to put it to the fore in a story is deemed inappropriate jingoism and it is nothing on the kind of ardent US nationalism shown in an increasing number of American books. I suppose that is because the concept of the 'manifest destiny' appears as strong today as two centuries ago and things that once would have seemed simply 'what if?' like a vast wall along the US-Mexican border are now actual policy.
I suppose that why I am so frustrated with Harrison is because he had a chance to write a really interesting 'what if?' series. There was a real chance that Britain and France would enter the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy and that would have been something to explore. He could have had the Confederates chaffing against this support even though it was the best chance they had of winning or even simply securing a stalemate. Instead, in a single day, he has the CSA tossing aside support from the largest empire in the world and calling off the civil war so that all Americans can fight together. Harrison forgets that the issue of slavery really only arose as the war went on and the main reason for the split was around how much control the USA had over its constituent parts, hence the Northern forces were often termed by the Southerners as 'Federals' and the Confederacy took the name it did to emphasise this difference. That topic is overlooked in Harrison's books.
There is some reference to the abrupt ending of slavery in 1863 and resistance in the South to the Reconstruction. However, when compared not just to the resistance to the Union plans for the South after the civil war in our world, but to the often violent resistance to civil rights legislation ninety to a hundred years later, it seems incredibly mild. I suppose this is necessary for Harrison to allow the combined forces (though madly still wearing Union and Confederate uniforms while serving) to attack the British Empire. Another political problem for Harrison and I guess it is on this aspect that he is weakest, is his assumption that entire populations will be grateful for suddenly have the US system imposed on them. He forgets that Britain and the USA were semi-democracies in different ways in the 1860s and both were taking steps to expand the franchise. Yet for some reason Canadians are seen as having the scales fall from their eyes when the USA invades and imposes 'democracy' on them. This forgets that many of those Americans who opposed independence had migrated to Canada at the end of the American War of Independence and that even today, 150 years on from when the novel is set, many Canadians feel a close affinity to the UK. If they wanted to live in the USA, especially in 1863, it would have been very easy for them to move there.
In this book, the same thing happens with Ireland. Somehow the Americans manage to make a whole series of technological leaps in one go and ensure that they work almost perfectly. The British Empire despite continuing the war against the USA seems to have single spy. The Americans build warships faster than even during the American Civil War. They are then able to launch a cross-Atlantic invasion of Ireland without difficulty despite facing the largest navy of the day. Harrison argues that this invasion is a form of 'Blitzkrieg' but in fact is more similar to what happened in the First World War. Of course, all of the Irish welcome the American invaders warmly and are happy to adopt their democracy. Magically this resolves the sectarian tensions in Ireland. Given how difficult it proved for the British in Ireland and the fact that sectarian violence continued for over thirty years, this seems highly unfeasible. However, in Harrison's world, all problems are solved by joyous receipt of American processes that no-one else, apparently, was able to work out for themselves.
The British are weak because they have been busy building a road across Mexico to allow soldiers from India to build up for an invasion of US states around the Gulf of Mexico, but the Americans get a march on them and trick them. The British seem not consider simply invading California, which had become a US state in 1850, with Indian forces nor indeed the colonies of British Columbia or Vancouver where the British had bases but was not to become a combined province of Canada until 1871. This mad scheme across Mexico seems simply to be an excuse to show how foolish the British were and how easily they could be tricked.
Overall Harrison was given a great opportunity which he used to produce US propaganda. He wasted an opportunity to look at a realistic 'what if?'. He could have come to very similar conclusions without indulging in the fantasy and infinite luck for the USA fighting a dim, delusional Britain and with the rest of the world simply waiting to be invaded by US forces so that they could receive the systems that they would immediately welcome without question.
'Assassination! July 14' by Ben Abro [Robert Silman and Ian Young]
This book published in 1963 envisages an assassination attempt against French President Charles De Gaulle. He held that office 1959-69. During his life there were 31 assassination attempts against him, the most prominent in 1961 and 1962. He was opposed by organisations called OAS and CNR which were opposed to the granting of independence for Algeria in 1962 and felt that De Gaulle was running a form of dictatorship through his creation of the Fifth Republic in 1959 with far greater power for the President than under the previous French republics and his use of secret police to arrest his opponents, sometimes even from other countries.
This novel focuses on Max Palk, a British agent working for the French authorities who is charged with hunting down those planning to assassinate De Gaulle at a ceremony in Paris on Bastille Day (14th July) a national holiday in France. The book gained notoriety as it featured the killing of a serving head of state and showed a real man, Jacques Soustelle, a French member of parliament in the 1940s, 1950s and 1970s, who served as Governor-General of Algeria, 1955-56. He had been a close ally of De Gaulle's but turned against him. He was a member of the CNR and was associated with OAS, a terrorist organisation. Soustelle tried to sue the authors of this novel in a British court on the grounds of defamation. The publishers withdrew it from sale, but the authors fought the case which ran out of steam when Soustelle was granted an amnesty in 1968 and his Israeli backers stopped funding him.
Other real men appear in the book with their names slightly modified. One is Boudin who represents Georges Bidault, Prime Minister of France, 1946; 1949-50 who became a leading figure in those opposing independence for Algeria and seeking the overthrow of De Gaulle. Though he claimed never to be a member of OAS, he was covered by the 1968 amnesty. The other is Morris, the Prefect of the Paris police who is shown as leading the way in thwarting the assassination attempt. He is based on Maurice Papon whose reputation declined sharply as more and more evidence came out about his involvement with the deportation of Jews during the Second World War; the torture of Algerian insurgents while he was Prefect in part of Algeria; the massacre by police of Algerians in Paris in 1961 and of Communists in 1962. Though he served as a member of parliament at various times 1968-81 and served as a minister, ultimately he was charged with crimes against humanity and imprisoned 1998-2002. So it seems that in reality this 'Morris' was more likely to have supported the assassination than opposed it. It must be remembered as Soustelle failed to do, that this book was fiction.
The most famous book about an assassination attempt against De Gaulle is 'The Day of the Jackal' (1971; movie 1973) by Frederick Forsyth, so it is natural to compare the two books. Though given that by 1971 De Gaulle had died of old age and his opponents politically rehabilitated Forsyth faced less risk. It must be remembered that when Silman and Young wrote the novel, they were undergraduate students who had attended elite private schools in Britain and were studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. Thus, while they had a good grasp of France, they were not experienced authors. As a result, perhaps it is not surprising that their book rather than looking forward to the political thrillers of the later 1960s and the 1970s, instead it looks back to the thrillers of the inter-war period, such as those featuring Bulldog Drummond and Richard Chandos. These featured amateurs charging around Europe getting involved with political scandals and sinister criminals.
There are some good elements to the book. One is when we find out who Palk really is after wondering what his role in the story is. Another is him trying to get into the base of the paratroopers readying to seize power in Paris, barracked in a disused Metro station and then finally when Palk is involved protecting De Gaulle from the actual attempt to kill him at the 14th July ceremony. The role of those sympathetic to the OAS while holding positions in the civil service, police and government is put to good effect and their is a good revelation when we realise who has betrayed Palk.
The weaker parts are when the book begins to seem like a Bulldog Drummond book. In part this seems to stem from their desire to create a secret agent who was utterly unlike James Bond, who was becoming even more into the public eye globally with the movies that followed the successful books, starting in 1964. However, rather than creating a Harry Palmer type character of the kind Len Deighton used in novels 1962-76 (though he was only named in the movies, 1962-66), they end up with some ridiculous scenes in the middle of the book.
The first is when Palk has gone to Switzerland to chase the traitorous member of the government and is held by Soustelle. The way that Soustelle and his comrades decide whether to kill Palk immediately or not is to have him identify the source of a number of quotations; they even offer him clues. He manages just to pull this off and is spared. He later debates with his jailer, a young paratrooper (paratroopers featured frequently in the OAS) and persuades him that he is not really a supporter of the OAS and then reveals that he has caught the paratrooper masturbating. Thus Palk so shames him that the man gives up his pistol and lets Palk shoot him through the back of the skull. These scenes utterly undermine the book and seem pathetic alongside the more feasible assassination plot. I can only imagine that if the publishers had not been in such a rush to get it out, they would have had these altered to something much more realistic.
My edition of the book contains an essay by James D. Le Sueur which gives background details on the authors, who went on to be prominent academics and in far too much detail, information about the course of the libel case. It is interesting but is too long. Overall I was disappointed by this book, but I guess I should not have expected more from the first novel written by two undergraduates brought up on stories of British heroes and 'daring do' produced in the inter-war and early post-war eras.
'Canto for a Gypsy' by Martin Cruz Smith
Smith is best known for his 1981 novel, 'Gorky Park' (movie 1983), a murder mystery set in the USSR, but this book was published in 1975 and features Romano Gry (a.k.a. Roman Grey), a Roma antiques dealer in New York who speaks Magyar and is asked to oversee the display of the Crown of St Stephen, the Holy Crown of Hungary which was passed to US soldiers at the end of the Second World War. In the novel it is on display before being returned to Hungary. This was prescient of Smith because this is what actually happened in 1978. In the story the crown is stolen and may have been substituted. There is also speculation whether the crown in US possession was genuine or a previous copy. The story is short (160 pages) and ends up pretty frantic set around what has happened to the crown centred on St Patrick's Cathedral in New York w here it has been on display.
Smith shows his knowledge of Romany language and culture and indeed of contemporary Hungary pretty well in this book and Gry is an interesting hero with attitudes and values which would typically differ from the average American, for example in finding a horse for a young man living on the edge of the city. However, it becomes far too confusing with all the uncertainty over the various characters and especially their motives. This is not helped by the claustrophobic feeling of the novel, largely focused on a single location. It is clear that Smith improved in his writing and that 'Gorky Park' was properly acclaimed for providing a taut thriller using settings, people and attitudes not familiar to an Anglo-American audience. You can see signs of that skill in this book, but they needed refinement to prevent it coming over as too chaotic to follow in a pleasant way.
'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' by J.K. Rowling
As I have commented before, I came to the books only having watched the movies a number of times each. As the series progresses the books and the movies diverge to a greater extent. As a result only a couple of central scenes in this book are replicated in the movie; others are very different. Thus, coming to the book it was as if, while featuring a number of characters I know well, that it was a new story for me. I recognise that I have been working up to a realisation that I should have noticed long ago. Rowling is far less concerned with the adventures, which feature prominently in the movies. Instead she is primarily interested in Harry Potter as a boy growing up.
Yes, he lives in very exceptional circumstances, but she spends a great deal of time, especially as the series progresses with focus on his day-to-day life. He is now in what would be Year 12 in the current British system and beginning his N.E.W.T.s, equivalent of 'A' Levels, so much of the time is spent going on about lessons and future careers for Potter and other pupils. Now that he is 16 there is also a lot more about girlfriends and the tensions this can raise.
So it is very much a school book with magic and the threat of a superpowered wizard seeking to be dictator on the side. I did wonder one thing about Hogwarts School and that that was, because they do not have normal lessons just ones about magic, whether their skills in mathematics, English language, let alone computing and science, are neglected. This neglect becomes more apparent in this book as Ron Weasley struggles to correctly spell certain English words.
The book in my edition is 160 pages shorter than 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' which I read last month. The length allows Rowling to feature a whole host of people who do not turn up in the movies or only in passing, but it is not as cumbersome as the previous volume. This gives it a greater tautness and this allows the drama of the story, the element I like best compared to mundane school-day stuff to be more dynamic. As a result I found this as very satisfying read even though I had a rough idea of what was going to happen.
'Our Kind of Traitor' by John Le Carré
I was recently given four Le Carré books and as this one had recently been released as a movie I decided to start with it. While I have watched the television series and movie based on his Smiley books and his 'The Night Manager', the only other one I had read was 'A Murder of Quality' (1962) which was only his second novel. This one was published in 2010 but refers to the 2008 financial crash and the latter days of the New Labour government in Britain. It features a couple, a male lecturer at University of Oxford, Perry and a female barrister, Gail who come into some money and holiday in Antigua where they meet a Russian gangster involved in money laundering and his extended family. The novel is about these two aiding a small sub-section of MI6 in aiding the Russian to defect to Britain bringing details of his business before he is disposed of by the gangsters who no longer need him.
The first half of the book is shown in retrospective as the two leads recount what they saw and heard on Antigua. Le Carré should be commended for trying out a different form and having a disjointed narrative that is not linear and in which a number of players show us their perspective and what they know. This extends to two of the British agents and to a lesser extent a couple of their colleagues. Sometimes people complain that Le Carré has dialogue reminiscent of the 1970s, but I think in this book he manages to break that. Indeed in some ways he goes a little too far with members of MI6 seeming to buy into the fluctuating New Labour ideology which has a nod to ethical foreign policy but is happy to collaborate with international dubious people. Possibly more accurately, there is a railing against misogyny especially in how Perry treats Gail when things become difficult. Saying that Gail's career trajectory seems much more credible than Perry's. Both of them do seem 'young fogies' and in this seem to refer back to inter-war thrillers, especially their love of tennis and Perry's mountaineering skills. However, I used to meet some people of that kind of upper middle class ilk and they do tend to become old before their years. Likewise, when I met the head of MI5 and chairman of the D Notice Committee, they spoke in the way the agents do here, but that was twenty years ago now.
Just over halfway the book moves on to a linear narrative though with regular switching between the points of view of Perry, Gail and Luke, one of the agents. I guess Le Carré could not have continued looking back without revealing who survived, so reducing the sense of jeopardy, but it also seems to slacken the pace of the novel as the scenes move to Paris and then Switzerland. Le Carré is pretty good at showing 'innocents' being caught up in such business, which is often a challenge to make credible. He draws parallels between money launderers, high financiers and the governments who have an ambivalent attitude to both without this being plastered on as a theme and appearing very relevant to the time when it was set. The ending is abrupt and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but I suppose that is fair for a thriller. Some of the jeopardy seems rather let go when it could have contributed to the tension, so you feel a little at the end as if he had tired of the project. Overall, not a bad book. Le Carré makes good use of thorough research and this cannot be accused of being a book left over from the Cold War. I welcome his use of an alternative structural approach and it is a shame it could have not been sustained right through the book as it added energy.
Non-Fiction
'Beyond 9 to 5: Your Life in Time' by Sarah Norgate
As has been the case with a number of books I have read this year, this one is written by an author I have met. Before it was published I used to meet her cycling along a cycle path near my house and in a pub near where a friend of mine lived. Very naively and foolishly, I thought she was attracted to, or at least interested in, me. However, it turned out she much preferred younger, taller men with shaven heads. I finally recognised that she simply took pity on me. Given what you find out about Norgate in this book, that was no surprise as she is shown as an important academic in studies of the mind, taking part in a number of experiments; she has clearly travelled extensively and was an athlete. It is no surprise that she saw a man who did not even own a car at the time, as rather pathetic though worthy of compassion. Perhaps the latter aspect came from her work in psychology.
The book is a work of popular science, though it is backed by thorough references, particularly to numerous experiments regarding human perception and its engagement with time. It is one of a series of 11 books in the 'Maps of the Mind' series published by the Open University in 2006. It is written in an easy style with personal anecdotes and speculations mixed in with the scientific evidence. It works through different facets of mental and physical engagement with time, for example, issues of longevity and their impact on how we see time; how light is important in how we appreciate time; the impact of what we experience in the womb; cultural perceptions of time, notably differing between countries focused on rushing around and those with a more relaxed situation and the experiences of particular groups of people such as life sentence prisoners, autistic people, blind people and people with terminal diseases and dementia.
The book is interesting and easy to get through. The main problem is that so much information is communicated in 152 pages of text (plus 29 pages of references) that your head is left spinning and you tend to forget what you have just covered, so ironically, it is probably best to read this book slowly, far slower than the day-and-a-half that it took me. I am rather concerned by the sweeping portrayals of particular countries as have a single approach to time and despite promising to do so, Norgate does not reconcile how Japan is rated as one of the most frenetic countries and yet has excellent longevity. However, on the other side, she does well in predicting the future and the impact of mobile devices and how we interact that has only increased in the decade since the book was published.
Overall, I felt this was an alright book. Its main challenge for me was that reading it felt so frenetic with so much information being thrown at me in quick succession, leaving me feeling uncomfortable with it and only taking away a few lessons from reading it.
'Target: De Gaulle' by Christian Plume and Pierre Démaret
This seemed to be the logical book to read after 'Assassination! July 14'. However, I had already been reminded of it by watching the penultimate episode of Series 2 of 'Bulman'. It was entitled 'W.C. Fields was Right' and was broadcast in 1987 - the title refers to the statement by Fields: 'never work with children or animals' as both a boy and a dog feature. In the story the book is referred to by name and has the same dust cover as my copy, though it seems to have been wrapped around a fatter book, perhaps so it is more visible on screen. The episode sees a one-armed gangster played by Tony Doyle (1942-2000) using explosives fixed to a dog in an attempt to assassinate one of his rivals. This approach to assassination is mentioned in passing as one of many considered to be tried on De Gaulle and is envisaged being carried out, using three dogs, at the start of 'Assassination! July 14'.
Anyway, back to the book itself. It was published in French in 1973 and in English the following year. As a result the authors were able to interview many of those who were involved in the 31 known assassination attempts against Charles De Gaulle between 1944-64. They write in a brisk style which carries you through the technicalities and the continuous bad luck that the would-be assassins faced. They are pretty good at articulating the complexity of the OAS and the connected CNR, the main groups bent on assassinating De Gaulle once he became President in 1958 and certainly as he moved Algeria to independence 1960-62. The various factions and groupings are complex and you need to follow carefully, but they do not make it as inaccessible as some do. They also highlight groups such as the Old General Staff, which remain shady even today. They are certainly good at highlighting how the assassins constantly benefited from a fifth column of sympathetic soldiers, police, civil servants and politicians who gave them refuge and particularly advice and how this counter-balanced police penetration of the OAS and the willingness of De Gaulle to have suspects abducted and promptly executed. Another strength of the book is the authors' analysis of how assassins were tracked down by the police, whether by accident or through detective work. Thus, they can convincingly fill the gaps in what remains a patchy official record.
This book is embedded in a particular period of modern history and some of this will be unfamiliar to people of today. However, as a non-fiction book it manages to straddle being detailed and informative, balancing both the assassins and those who would catch them and yet being written in an engaging rather than 'train spotter' style to the issues. Overall it is a very interesting book especially if, like the writers of 'Bulman' you are looking for a good idea for a plot.
'Twelve Women Detective Stories' edited by Laura Marcus
Over the past couple of years I have been working through the various compendiums of crime and spy novels that I must have been in the habit of buying sometime in the past. I have a couple of large ones to go, but this slimmer volume was rather overlooked. It does what it says in the title. It is a collection of twelve short stories featuring women detectives, that were published between 1861-1950. It shows that female detectives while a minority, were not as unknown as they are often assumed to have been especially in the Victorian period. These stories have been written by a mixture of men and women, but interestingly very few of them led to lengthy series and often just a single collection of each character is available.
One of the detectives, Loveday Brooke, the creation of Catherine Louisa Pirkis, I have come across before, but not this particular story. Many of the Victorian tales will appear rather restrained to modern day readers, at times a little naive. This is one reason why Conan Doyle's work has endured because it stands above all his contemporaries whether featuring male or female investigators. This date feel does not mean the stories in this book baulk from violence or a sudden poisoning. Many take advantage of the different ways in which women lived and the heroines are typically skilled at disguise, entering houses of suspects as maids or interior designers. This does not mean they avoid physical action and there are pursuits in sewers, riding over moors, hurrying across countries and around cities, making use of weapons, though in most cases it is the heroine's intelligence and astuteness that allow her to win through. Some of the authors were feminists. notably Charles Allen who had controversially published a book about a woman living with her partner and their child but eschewing marriage.
Many of the stories are around disguise, the theft of jewellery, attempts at deception related to marriage or wills, but these were common tropes of much crime fiction in these periods, especially the Victorian times. Many of the detectives are well off women or middle class women who have fallen on hard times, so have turned to detection as a source of income. However, they have no difficulty mixing in different social circles and have the knowledge of the well-educated. I suppose they are the mothers of female detectives of the first two-thirds of the 20th century before the harder-edged characteristics which are seen in some of these stories came more to the fore.
Of the different stories, my favourite character and one I think could easily be translated into the 21st century is Hagar Stanley, a Roma woman who had been forced from her extended family by the violence of a male relative and has ended up working for a pawnbroker who has died but his heir has not come forward to claim the business. The crime is based on an item she receives at the pawn shop and through her life knowledge she is able to trace what has been happening and to aid her client who she has fallen for anyway. Given the high profile of the Roma and their challenges and the increased use of pawnshops, these stories or a modern version of Hagar would seem an interesting path for a TV series.
Overall while to many readers of contemporary crime fiction these stories will seem dated and even a little naive, they are engaging, highlight the social mores of the times in which they sat and the parameters in which women were compelled to work, but could seek to exceed in such exceptional circumstances as portrayed here.
'Stars and Stripes in Peril' by Harry Harrison
As I noted in July, this is a very jingoistic trilogy, part of a trend in US writing towards trying to show much better and stronger the USA could have been if it had been more nationalistic. Conversely, I have been challenged that what I write is similarly jingoistic for Britain simply because I set stories there and as any regular reader of this blog knows I am very critical of the UK and what it has done. Yet, to even to put it to the fore in a story is deemed inappropriate jingoism and it is nothing on the kind of ardent US nationalism shown in an increasing number of American books. I suppose that is because the concept of the 'manifest destiny' appears as strong today as two centuries ago and things that once would have seemed simply 'what if?' like a vast wall along the US-Mexican border are now actual policy.
I suppose that why I am so frustrated with Harrison is because he had a chance to write a really interesting 'what if?' series. There was a real chance that Britain and France would enter the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy and that would have been something to explore. He could have had the Confederates chaffing against this support even though it was the best chance they had of winning or even simply securing a stalemate. Instead, in a single day, he has the CSA tossing aside support from the largest empire in the world and calling off the civil war so that all Americans can fight together. Harrison forgets that the issue of slavery really only arose as the war went on and the main reason for the split was around how much control the USA had over its constituent parts, hence the Northern forces were often termed by the Southerners as 'Federals' and the Confederacy took the name it did to emphasise this difference. That topic is overlooked in Harrison's books.
There is some reference to the abrupt ending of slavery in 1863 and resistance in the South to the Reconstruction. However, when compared not just to the resistance to the Union plans for the South after the civil war in our world, but to the often violent resistance to civil rights legislation ninety to a hundred years later, it seems incredibly mild. I suppose this is necessary for Harrison to allow the combined forces (though madly still wearing Union and Confederate uniforms while serving) to attack the British Empire. Another political problem for Harrison and I guess it is on this aspect that he is weakest, is his assumption that entire populations will be grateful for suddenly have the US system imposed on them. He forgets that Britain and the USA were semi-democracies in different ways in the 1860s and both were taking steps to expand the franchise. Yet for some reason Canadians are seen as having the scales fall from their eyes when the USA invades and imposes 'democracy' on them. This forgets that many of those Americans who opposed independence had migrated to Canada at the end of the American War of Independence and that even today, 150 years on from when the novel is set, many Canadians feel a close affinity to the UK. If they wanted to live in the USA, especially in 1863, it would have been very easy for them to move there.
In this book, the same thing happens with Ireland. Somehow the Americans manage to make a whole series of technological leaps in one go and ensure that they work almost perfectly. The British Empire despite continuing the war against the USA seems to have single spy. The Americans build warships faster than even during the American Civil War. They are then able to launch a cross-Atlantic invasion of Ireland without difficulty despite facing the largest navy of the day. Harrison argues that this invasion is a form of 'Blitzkrieg' but in fact is more similar to what happened in the First World War. Of course, all of the Irish welcome the American invaders warmly and are happy to adopt their democracy. Magically this resolves the sectarian tensions in Ireland. Given how difficult it proved for the British in Ireland and the fact that sectarian violence continued for over thirty years, this seems highly unfeasible. However, in Harrison's world, all problems are solved by joyous receipt of American processes that no-one else, apparently, was able to work out for themselves.
The British are weak because they have been busy building a road across Mexico to allow soldiers from India to build up for an invasion of US states around the Gulf of Mexico, but the Americans get a march on them and trick them. The British seem not consider simply invading California, which had become a US state in 1850, with Indian forces nor indeed the colonies of British Columbia or Vancouver where the British had bases but was not to become a combined province of Canada until 1871. This mad scheme across Mexico seems simply to be an excuse to show how foolish the British were and how easily they could be tricked.
Overall Harrison was given a great opportunity which he used to produce US propaganda. He wasted an opportunity to look at a realistic 'what if?'. He could have come to very similar conclusions without indulging in the fantasy and infinite luck for the USA fighting a dim, delusional Britain and with the rest of the world simply waiting to be invaded by US forces so that they could receive the systems that they would immediately welcome without question.
'Assassination! July 14' by Ben Abro [Robert Silman and Ian Young]
This book published in 1963 envisages an assassination attempt against French President Charles De Gaulle. He held that office 1959-69. During his life there were 31 assassination attempts against him, the most prominent in 1961 and 1962. He was opposed by organisations called OAS and CNR which were opposed to the granting of independence for Algeria in 1962 and felt that De Gaulle was running a form of dictatorship through his creation of the Fifth Republic in 1959 with far greater power for the President than under the previous French republics and his use of secret police to arrest his opponents, sometimes even from other countries.
This novel focuses on Max Palk, a British agent working for the French authorities who is charged with hunting down those planning to assassinate De Gaulle at a ceremony in Paris on Bastille Day (14th July) a national holiday in France. The book gained notoriety as it featured the killing of a serving head of state and showed a real man, Jacques Soustelle, a French member of parliament in the 1940s, 1950s and 1970s, who served as Governor-General of Algeria, 1955-56. He had been a close ally of De Gaulle's but turned against him. He was a member of the CNR and was associated with OAS, a terrorist organisation. Soustelle tried to sue the authors of this novel in a British court on the grounds of defamation. The publishers withdrew it from sale, but the authors fought the case which ran out of steam when Soustelle was granted an amnesty in 1968 and his Israeli backers stopped funding him.
Other real men appear in the book with their names slightly modified. One is Boudin who represents Georges Bidault, Prime Minister of France, 1946; 1949-50 who became a leading figure in those opposing independence for Algeria and seeking the overthrow of De Gaulle. Though he claimed never to be a member of OAS, he was covered by the 1968 amnesty. The other is Morris, the Prefect of the Paris police who is shown as leading the way in thwarting the assassination attempt. He is based on Maurice Papon whose reputation declined sharply as more and more evidence came out about his involvement with the deportation of Jews during the Second World War; the torture of Algerian insurgents while he was Prefect in part of Algeria; the massacre by police of Algerians in Paris in 1961 and of Communists in 1962. Though he served as a member of parliament at various times 1968-81 and served as a minister, ultimately he was charged with crimes against humanity and imprisoned 1998-2002. So it seems that in reality this 'Morris' was more likely to have supported the assassination than opposed it. It must be remembered as Soustelle failed to do, that this book was fiction.
The most famous book about an assassination attempt against De Gaulle is 'The Day of the Jackal' (1971; movie 1973) by Frederick Forsyth, so it is natural to compare the two books. Though given that by 1971 De Gaulle had died of old age and his opponents politically rehabilitated Forsyth faced less risk. It must be remembered that when Silman and Young wrote the novel, they were undergraduate students who had attended elite private schools in Britain and were studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. Thus, while they had a good grasp of France, they were not experienced authors. As a result, perhaps it is not surprising that their book rather than looking forward to the political thrillers of the later 1960s and the 1970s, instead it looks back to the thrillers of the inter-war period, such as those featuring Bulldog Drummond and Richard Chandos. These featured amateurs charging around Europe getting involved with political scandals and sinister criminals.
There are some good elements to the book. One is when we find out who Palk really is after wondering what his role in the story is. Another is him trying to get into the base of the paratroopers readying to seize power in Paris, barracked in a disused Metro station and then finally when Palk is involved protecting De Gaulle from the actual attempt to kill him at the 14th July ceremony. The role of those sympathetic to the OAS while holding positions in the civil service, police and government is put to good effect and their is a good revelation when we realise who has betrayed Palk.
The weaker parts are when the book begins to seem like a Bulldog Drummond book. In part this seems to stem from their desire to create a secret agent who was utterly unlike James Bond, who was becoming even more into the public eye globally with the movies that followed the successful books, starting in 1964. However, rather than creating a Harry Palmer type character of the kind Len Deighton used in novels 1962-76 (though he was only named in the movies, 1962-66), they end up with some ridiculous scenes in the middle of the book.
The first is when Palk has gone to Switzerland to chase the traitorous member of the government and is held by Soustelle. The way that Soustelle and his comrades decide whether to kill Palk immediately or not is to have him identify the source of a number of quotations; they even offer him clues. He manages just to pull this off and is spared. He later debates with his jailer, a young paratrooper (paratroopers featured frequently in the OAS) and persuades him that he is not really a supporter of the OAS and then reveals that he has caught the paratrooper masturbating. Thus Palk so shames him that the man gives up his pistol and lets Palk shoot him through the back of the skull. These scenes utterly undermine the book and seem pathetic alongside the more feasible assassination plot. I can only imagine that if the publishers had not been in such a rush to get it out, they would have had these altered to something much more realistic.
My edition of the book contains an essay by James D. Le Sueur which gives background details on the authors, who went on to be prominent academics and in far too much detail, information about the course of the libel case. It is interesting but is too long. Overall I was disappointed by this book, but I guess I should not have expected more from the first novel written by two undergraduates brought up on stories of British heroes and 'daring do' produced in the inter-war and early post-war eras.
'Canto for a Gypsy' by Martin Cruz Smith
Smith is best known for his 1981 novel, 'Gorky Park' (movie 1983), a murder mystery set in the USSR, but this book was published in 1975 and features Romano Gry (a.k.a. Roman Grey), a Roma antiques dealer in New York who speaks Magyar and is asked to oversee the display of the Crown of St Stephen, the Holy Crown of Hungary which was passed to US soldiers at the end of the Second World War. In the novel it is on display before being returned to Hungary. This was prescient of Smith because this is what actually happened in 1978. In the story the crown is stolen and may have been substituted. There is also speculation whether the crown in US possession was genuine or a previous copy. The story is short (160 pages) and ends up pretty frantic set around what has happened to the crown centred on St Patrick's Cathedral in New York w here it has been on display.
Smith shows his knowledge of Romany language and culture and indeed of contemporary Hungary pretty well in this book and Gry is an interesting hero with attitudes and values which would typically differ from the average American, for example in finding a horse for a young man living on the edge of the city. However, it becomes far too confusing with all the uncertainty over the various characters and especially their motives. This is not helped by the claustrophobic feeling of the novel, largely focused on a single location. It is clear that Smith improved in his writing and that 'Gorky Park' was properly acclaimed for providing a taut thriller using settings, people and attitudes not familiar to an Anglo-American audience. You can see signs of that skill in this book, but they needed refinement to prevent it coming over as too chaotic to follow in a pleasant way.
'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' by J.K. Rowling
As I have commented before, I came to the books only having watched the movies a number of times each. As the series progresses the books and the movies diverge to a greater extent. As a result only a couple of central scenes in this book are replicated in the movie; others are very different. Thus, coming to the book it was as if, while featuring a number of characters I know well, that it was a new story for me. I recognise that I have been working up to a realisation that I should have noticed long ago. Rowling is far less concerned with the adventures, which feature prominently in the movies. Instead she is primarily interested in Harry Potter as a boy growing up.
Yes, he lives in very exceptional circumstances, but she spends a great deal of time, especially as the series progresses with focus on his day-to-day life. He is now in what would be Year 12 in the current British system and beginning his N.E.W.T.s, equivalent of 'A' Levels, so much of the time is spent going on about lessons and future careers for Potter and other pupils. Now that he is 16 there is also a lot more about girlfriends and the tensions this can raise.
So it is very much a school book with magic and the threat of a superpowered wizard seeking to be dictator on the side. I did wonder one thing about Hogwarts School and that that was, because they do not have normal lessons just ones about magic, whether their skills in mathematics, English language, let alone computing and science, are neglected. This neglect becomes more apparent in this book as Ron Weasley struggles to correctly spell certain English words.
The book in my edition is 160 pages shorter than 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' which I read last month. The length allows Rowling to feature a whole host of people who do not turn up in the movies or only in passing, but it is not as cumbersome as the previous volume. This gives it a greater tautness and this allows the drama of the story, the element I like best compared to mundane school-day stuff to be more dynamic. As a result I found this as very satisfying read even though I had a rough idea of what was going to happen.
'Our Kind of Traitor' by John Le Carré
I was recently given four Le Carré books and as this one had recently been released as a movie I decided to start with it. While I have watched the television series and movie based on his Smiley books and his 'The Night Manager', the only other one I had read was 'A Murder of Quality' (1962) which was only his second novel. This one was published in 2010 but refers to the 2008 financial crash and the latter days of the New Labour government in Britain. It features a couple, a male lecturer at University of Oxford, Perry and a female barrister, Gail who come into some money and holiday in Antigua where they meet a Russian gangster involved in money laundering and his extended family. The novel is about these two aiding a small sub-section of MI6 in aiding the Russian to defect to Britain bringing details of his business before he is disposed of by the gangsters who no longer need him.
The first half of the book is shown in retrospective as the two leads recount what they saw and heard on Antigua. Le Carré should be commended for trying out a different form and having a disjointed narrative that is not linear and in which a number of players show us their perspective and what they know. This extends to two of the British agents and to a lesser extent a couple of their colleagues. Sometimes people complain that Le Carré has dialogue reminiscent of the 1970s, but I think in this book he manages to break that. Indeed in some ways he goes a little too far with members of MI6 seeming to buy into the fluctuating New Labour ideology which has a nod to ethical foreign policy but is happy to collaborate with international dubious people. Possibly more accurately, there is a railing against misogyny especially in how Perry treats Gail when things become difficult. Saying that Gail's career trajectory seems much more credible than Perry's. Both of them do seem 'young fogies' and in this seem to refer back to inter-war thrillers, especially their love of tennis and Perry's mountaineering skills. However, I used to meet some people of that kind of upper middle class ilk and they do tend to become old before their years. Likewise, when I met the head of MI5 and chairman of the D Notice Committee, they spoke in the way the agents do here, but that was twenty years ago now.
Just over halfway the book moves on to a linear narrative though with regular switching between the points of view of Perry, Gail and Luke, one of the agents. I guess Le Carré could not have continued looking back without revealing who survived, so reducing the sense of jeopardy, but it also seems to slacken the pace of the novel as the scenes move to Paris and then Switzerland. Le Carré is pretty good at showing 'innocents' being caught up in such business, which is often a challenge to make credible. He draws parallels between money launderers, high financiers and the governments who have an ambivalent attitude to both without this being plastered on as a theme and appearing very relevant to the time when it was set. The ending is abrupt and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but I suppose that is fair for a thriller. Some of the jeopardy seems rather let go when it could have contributed to the tension, so you feel a little at the end as if he had tired of the project. Overall, not a bad book. Le Carré makes good use of thorough research and this cannot be accused of being a book left over from the Cold War. I welcome his use of an alternative structural approach and it is a shame it could have not been sustained right through the book as it added energy.
Non-Fiction
'Beyond 9 to 5: Your Life in Time' by Sarah Norgate
As has been the case with a number of books I have read this year, this one is written by an author I have met. Before it was published I used to meet her cycling along a cycle path near my house and in a pub near where a friend of mine lived. Very naively and foolishly, I thought she was attracted to, or at least interested in, me. However, it turned out she much preferred younger, taller men with shaven heads. I finally recognised that she simply took pity on me. Given what you find out about Norgate in this book, that was no surprise as she is shown as an important academic in studies of the mind, taking part in a number of experiments; she has clearly travelled extensively and was an athlete. It is no surprise that she saw a man who did not even own a car at the time, as rather pathetic though worthy of compassion. Perhaps the latter aspect came from her work in psychology.
The book is a work of popular science, though it is backed by thorough references, particularly to numerous experiments regarding human perception and its engagement with time. It is one of a series of 11 books in the 'Maps of the Mind' series published by the Open University in 2006. It is written in an easy style with personal anecdotes and speculations mixed in with the scientific evidence. It works through different facets of mental and physical engagement with time, for example, issues of longevity and their impact on how we see time; how light is important in how we appreciate time; the impact of what we experience in the womb; cultural perceptions of time, notably differing between countries focused on rushing around and those with a more relaxed situation and the experiences of particular groups of people such as life sentence prisoners, autistic people, blind people and people with terminal diseases and dementia.
The book is interesting and easy to get through. The main problem is that so much information is communicated in 152 pages of text (plus 29 pages of references) that your head is left spinning and you tend to forget what you have just covered, so ironically, it is probably best to read this book slowly, far slower than the day-and-a-half that it took me. I am rather concerned by the sweeping portrayals of particular countries as have a single approach to time and despite promising to do so, Norgate does not reconcile how Japan is rated as one of the most frenetic countries and yet has excellent longevity. However, on the other side, she does well in predicting the future and the impact of mobile devices and how we interact that has only increased in the decade since the book was published.
Overall, I felt this was an alright book. Its main challenge for me was that reading it felt so frenetic with so much information being thrown at me in quick succession, leaving me feeling uncomfortable with it and only taking away a few lessons from reading it.
'Target: De Gaulle' by Christian Plume and Pierre Démaret
This seemed to be the logical book to read after 'Assassination! July 14'. However, I had already been reminded of it by watching the penultimate episode of Series 2 of 'Bulman'. It was entitled 'W.C. Fields was Right' and was broadcast in 1987 - the title refers to the statement by Fields: 'never work with children or animals' as both a boy and a dog feature. In the story the book is referred to by name and has the same dust cover as my copy, though it seems to have been wrapped around a fatter book, perhaps so it is more visible on screen. The episode sees a one-armed gangster played by Tony Doyle (1942-2000) using explosives fixed to a dog in an attempt to assassinate one of his rivals. This approach to assassination is mentioned in passing as one of many considered to be tried on De Gaulle and is envisaged being carried out, using three dogs, at the start of 'Assassination! July 14'.
Anyway, back to the book itself. It was published in French in 1973 and in English the following year. As a result the authors were able to interview many of those who were involved in the 31 known assassination attempts against Charles De Gaulle between 1944-64. They write in a brisk style which carries you through the technicalities and the continuous bad luck that the would-be assassins faced. They are pretty good at articulating the complexity of the OAS and the connected CNR, the main groups bent on assassinating De Gaulle once he became President in 1958 and certainly as he moved Algeria to independence 1960-62. The various factions and groupings are complex and you need to follow carefully, but they do not make it as inaccessible as some do. They also highlight groups such as the Old General Staff, which remain shady even today. They are certainly good at highlighting how the assassins constantly benefited from a fifth column of sympathetic soldiers, police, civil servants and politicians who gave them refuge and particularly advice and how this counter-balanced police penetration of the OAS and the willingness of De Gaulle to have suspects abducted and promptly executed. Another strength of the book is the authors' analysis of how assassins were tracked down by the police, whether by accident or through detective work. Thus, they can convincingly fill the gaps in what remains a patchy official record.
This book is embedded in a particular period of modern history and some of this will be unfamiliar to people of today. However, as a non-fiction book it manages to straddle being detailed and informative, balancing both the assassins and those who would catch them and yet being written in an engaging rather than 'train spotter' style to the issues. Overall it is a very interesting book especially if, like the writers of 'Bulman' you are looking for a good idea for a plot.
Wednesday, 31 August 2016
The Books I Read In August
Fiction
'A Fool's Alphabet' by Sebastian Faulks
Given that I received this book from the friend of mine who also supplied me with 'Perfume: The Story of a Murderer' (1985) by Patrick Süskind, 'Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy' (1991) by Jostein Gaarder and 'Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe' (1991) by Bill Bryson, I should have realised that this book was going to be of that kind - pretentious and lacking entertainment.
'A Fool's Alphabet' has twenty-six chapters set in locations across the world beginning with each of the letters of the alphabet; the chapters are recounted in alphabetical rather than chronological order. They cover incidents in the life of Pietro Russell; a few of his father Raymond Russell and one about his grandfather, between 1914 and 1991 (i.e. in Hobsbawm's 'short 20th century'), though most chapters are set in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes the named location is simply the starting point and most of the chapter is actually about somewhere else entirely or, indeed actually about a different year to the one given in that title.
In theory, some mystery of Pietro Russell, a British man with an Italian mother, is supposed to come together as you read through the book and see short incidents from across his life and that of a couple of his relatives. The only mystery is how a man is unhappy who has been sent to a crammer so he can get ahead; travels extensively; has wealthy largely pleasant friends; runs his own business; has a sustained relationship with a beautiful woman that even he recognises is out of his league and then marries, has three healthy children with and cheats on a Belgian woman far less patronising and harsh than most Belgian women.
For part of the time he undergoes psychotherapy, simply because he feels unlovable, nothing more serious than that. Yet, the treatment seems to provide no benefit and he simply cheats on his wife before regretting it. I do not know if Faulks lives in such a privileged existence to imagine that this is a hard life. In fact Pietro should be aware that he has done far better not simply than his father and grandfather who fought (though admittedly survived) the two world wars, let alone many of the other people he encounters. You quickly come to resent this ungrateful man and it is always difficult to enjoy reading incidents through the eyes of a character you come to despise.
The only good thing about this book are the descriptions of the different locations. You get some well crafted vignettes of different locations with real care to detail so that nothing anachronistic appears despite the jumping through the decades. It would have been better if different characters appeared in each, perhaps together providing some overarching 'message' about life. Instead we end up with the fragmented story of a character who is easy to abhor.
'Funeral for Figaro' by Ellis Peters
I can understand why crime authors like the settings of theatre or the opera for their stories. There are often a lots of jealousy and passion; people coming and going through the crime scene; ample opportunity for disguise and yet there is a fixed circle of characters, something which is often required for a crime story. They end up as some of the most tedious or irritating novels the author can produce. Michael Dibdin's, 'Cosi Fan Tutte' (1997) is, in no doubt, his worst book. This one is seen through the eyes of the owner of the theatre who is also director of the operas, Johnny Truscott. He is a bit of a mess and poor, as a widower, raising his 19-year old daughter, called Hero (she is known as 'Butch'; Peters saddles her young female characters with unpleasant nicknames, e.g. 'Tossa' from 'The Piper on the Mountain'), who is bent on marrying one of the singers; this gives away the age of the novel. However, at least Truscott is not as pathetic and unlikeable as Tom Kenyon, the 'narrator' in 'Flight of a Witch' that I read last month.
This Peters story is around a very peculiar repertory opera house run by a man who operated small boats for clandestine Allied missions during the Second World War (the book was published in 1962). Using an assortment of opera singers; technical staff largely left over from his wartime crew and others who he rescued from Occupied Europe, he runs a regular rotation of operas, bringing in better known performers for leading roles. One of these is murdered, apparently by a sword used by another character in the 'The Marriage of Figaro'. Among the small group there are many with reason to kill the man, sometime collaborator in wartime Austria.
The problem with this book, setting aside how unattractive 'luvvie' performers are both in real life and in fiction, is that it is scrappy. Too much of it is about opera; even the detective involved, this time Inspector Musgrave rather than Felse, is an opera fan and spends a lot of time critiquing the performances rather than trying to solve the crime. You need to have a reasonable grasp of opera to comprehend what is going on. However, in general you do not really care about the characters sufficiently and unusually for Peters, except for a surprising car crash, there is no sense of jeopardy. There are some good twists in the closing couple of chapters and unusually for a British crime novel, the detective goes home blaming the wrong person for the crime. Overall, however, except for the closing sections this is a rather dull story which especially in the opening sections is difficult to follow unless you are a fan of Mozart operas.
'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' by J.K. Rowling
This is the fifth book in the Harry Potter series and as I have noted in reading the previous ones, as they progress they diverge more and more from the movies. In part this is because they increase in length and to cover all the incidents, sub-plots and characters which feature in the book would need a mini-series. My edition of this book was 766 pages long. The other trend I have noted before, continues and expands in this book. Rowling is more concerned with Harry Potter as a schoolboy than she is with him as an adventurer. The concluding battle is far more complex than it is shown in the movie, but the majority of the book is about summer holidays and school days, especially revising for and taking the OWLS exams, the magic equivalent of GCSEs. This aspect is less interesting to me than the adventure, but as I have noted before, that is probably because I am a man rather than a boy.
Rowling handles the schoolboy aspects well, especially Potter's on-off intimate relationship with Cho Chang, his feelings for and his disappointment about his late parents and his godfather, plus all his doubts about his study. However, covering all these pretty mundane elements at such length saps the book of dynamism which remained apparent especially in the first three books. In part this reflects Rowling's success as publishers are happier to let an author write what they want without editing it down, once they are a sure-fire success as Rowling had become by this stage. This could have been a punchier book if it had been trimmed down; it could have easily have been 200 pages shorter and still have been engaging, perhaps more so. Rowling's writing certainly has improved since the first book and some will find this a rich book to really sink into. However, I think with length much of the excitement, more apparent in earlier books, has been dissipated.
'Bonaparte's Sons' by Richard Howard
This book published in 1997 was the first in a series of six books running to 2002, about Alain Lausard, a fictional soldier in the 5th Dragoon Regiment of Napoleon's Army. I am very surprised that he got this book let alone another five published. I suppose publishers are always looking for new historical series and they guessed that this one would appeal to those who had read Bernard Cornwell's series, published 1981-2007, about Richard Sharpe, a British rifleman in the late 18th century and early 19th century, largely during the Napoleonic Wars. Howard starts with an often neglected part of the period, Napoleon's campaign in northern Italy. His historical detail is fine it is just that the writing is painfully clunky. I suppose these days the art of editing is unaffordable to companies and more relies on the author getting it right. When he wrote this book, it seems Howard lacked such skill. In one description of a battle he says the cannon 'opened up' four times.
Unlike Cornell, for example, Howard is unable to get descriptions of weapons of the time into the story without sounding like a technical manual, e.g.:
'Canister shot consisted of a tin case which ruptured on leaving the barrel, transforming the cannon into a massive shotgun as it released up to eighty one-ounce balls which had been packed tightly within. Heavy case was also used, a more lethal version which could send up to forty three-ounce metal balls to its target in excess of 450 feet per second.'
With the weather, conversely, he becomes very poetic, e.g.:
'The sun itself was a massive burnished orb slipping slowly below the horizon, its dying light the colour of bloodstained bronze. Birds returning to their nests were black arrowheads against the crimson backdrop.'
The story works on a familiar premise about a group of prisoners pressed into service in the army, in this case to defend revolutionary France in 1797. The start is very much like the Second World War movie, 'The Dirty Dozen' (1967), though it uses stereotypes and the poor religious character simply mouths almost identical statements throughout the entire book; the womanizer does little better. Though Lausard is the prime focus this does not stop Howard jumping between the perspectives of different characters sometimes in consecutive sentences; towards the book we get to see the views of newcomers to the unit and even hear conversations held in German, a language spoken by only one of the French soldiers. I have written stories featuring small units of soldiers and it can be difficult to cover battles from just one view and to have sufficient distinction between each of the soldiers in the unit. However, Howard is inefficient in his writing, seeming to thinking that repeating the same statements will provide character to each one rather than just emphasising how shallowly developed they all are.
The battle scenes are fine and dramatic and there is a sense of jeopardy as you are not certain who will be injured or killed. There are extensive descriptions of the wounds various men suffer. The scene in the hospital comes over like a catalogue. I guess Howard wanted it to sound gritty and realistic, but again, repetition does not add anything, indeed it blunts the emotion trying to be communicated. The first book is always tricky as you have to establish the characters and have them trained, etc. Howard seems to feel that he needs an adventure, but because he is wasteful, this seems tacked on, far too briefly at the end; its conclusion is incredibly rushed. He might have done better to start with this and then have Lausard reflecting on what had happened to bring them to this situation and the men showing their various traits by how they act during the escapade - this is something that is done pretty well in 'The Dirty Dozen' especially the rapist portrayed by Telly Savalas whose obsession upsets the whole mission. These days, however, I know that many readers insist on a linear narrative and feel unhappy if you jump around in chronology.
Clearly someone appreciated Howard's work sufficiently to publish six of his novels. Perhaps they improve as they progress. I think Howard certainly needed to become very familiar with the Sharpe novels and see how you can effectively work a story in such a context and from such a perspective.
Non-Fiction
'Fascism' by Noël O' Sullivan
Rather than being a history book this is a political philosophical analysis of Fascism. O'Sullivan does focus on Nazism and Italian Fascism, rather dismissing any other strands, notably monarchical fascism and clerico-fascism as pale imitations of these with nothing original within them. O'Sullivan pays particular attention to the constitution, the Charter, of the short-lived republic of Fiume, the Regency of Carnaro Gabriele D'Annunzio, (1863–1938) established 1919-20. He sees this as the best articulation of a Fascist perspective.
Across the latter three-quarters of the book, he makes a very convincing case that Fascism arose from philosophical and political changes really starting around the time of the French Revolution then strengthening through the 19th century to provide fertile ground for Fascism in the 20th century. He looks at factors such as the redefinition of freedom as something within an individual rather than exterior, the rise of the concept that a better society could only be achieved by the efforts of people, rather than, as for example previous, devotion to God and, the sense that struggle and sacrifice, typically through warfare, were 'good' of themselves as well as paving the way for the desired society. There was also the aspect promoted particularly by Napoleon Bonaparte, that the leader was always right and should be able simply to command utter loyalty in the 'struggle' even if his directions turned out to be contradictory. This provides an engaging case. His attempt to portray Fascism as 'directed activist' in contrast to 'passive activist' let alone 'limited' forms of government works less effectively and given what he says earlier on about the similarities between Fascism and Communism, it then seems artificial as he does later to try to portray them as very different in terms of this degree of activism.
The central problem with this book is in its first part. O'Sullivan is utterly scathing of any previous interpretation of Fascism provided by historians and politicians up to that date (the book was published in 1983). He dismisses them as naive and foolish, seeking to through aside all of the attempts to analyse and synthesise on the political movement. This makes very difficult reading and undermines the faith you have in O'Sullivan. There is a sense that he damages his academic credibility in making sustained attacks on others in the field, with no concession. It also rouses suspicions that he is less confident in his own line than one might expect and so feels he must blow away every last alternative before turning to his thesis. I advise you to avoid Chapter 1 entirely.
'A Fool's Alphabet' by Sebastian Faulks
Given that I received this book from the friend of mine who also supplied me with 'Perfume: The Story of a Murderer' (1985) by Patrick Süskind, 'Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy' (1991) by Jostein Gaarder and 'Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe' (1991) by Bill Bryson, I should have realised that this book was going to be of that kind - pretentious and lacking entertainment.
'A Fool's Alphabet' has twenty-six chapters set in locations across the world beginning with each of the letters of the alphabet; the chapters are recounted in alphabetical rather than chronological order. They cover incidents in the life of Pietro Russell; a few of his father Raymond Russell and one about his grandfather, between 1914 and 1991 (i.e. in Hobsbawm's 'short 20th century'), though most chapters are set in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes the named location is simply the starting point and most of the chapter is actually about somewhere else entirely or, indeed actually about a different year to the one given in that title.
In theory, some mystery of Pietro Russell, a British man with an Italian mother, is supposed to come together as you read through the book and see short incidents from across his life and that of a couple of his relatives. The only mystery is how a man is unhappy who has been sent to a crammer so he can get ahead; travels extensively; has wealthy largely pleasant friends; runs his own business; has a sustained relationship with a beautiful woman that even he recognises is out of his league and then marries, has three healthy children with and cheats on a Belgian woman far less patronising and harsh than most Belgian women.
For part of the time he undergoes psychotherapy, simply because he feels unlovable, nothing more serious than that. Yet, the treatment seems to provide no benefit and he simply cheats on his wife before regretting it. I do not know if Faulks lives in such a privileged existence to imagine that this is a hard life. In fact Pietro should be aware that he has done far better not simply than his father and grandfather who fought (though admittedly survived) the two world wars, let alone many of the other people he encounters. You quickly come to resent this ungrateful man and it is always difficult to enjoy reading incidents through the eyes of a character you come to despise.
The only good thing about this book are the descriptions of the different locations. You get some well crafted vignettes of different locations with real care to detail so that nothing anachronistic appears despite the jumping through the decades. It would have been better if different characters appeared in each, perhaps together providing some overarching 'message' about life. Instead we end up with the fragmented story of a character who is easy to abhor.
'Funeral for Figaro' by Ellis Peters
I can understand why crime authors like the settings of theatre or the opera for their stories. There are often a lots of jealousy and passion; people coming and going through the crime scene; ample opportunity for disguise and yet there is a fixed circle of characters, something which is often required for a crime story. They end up as some of the most tedious or irritating novels the author can produce. Michael Dibdin's, 'Cosi Fan Tutte' (1997) is, in no doubt, his worst book. This one is seen through the eyes of the owner of the theatre who is also director of the operas, Johnny Truscott. He is a bit of a mess and poor, as a widower, raising his 19-year old daughter, called Hero (she is known as 'Butch'; Peters saddles her young female characters with unpleasant nicknames, e.g. 'Tossa' from 'The Piper on the Mountain'), who is bent on marrying one of the singers; this gives away the age of the novel. However, at least Truscott is not as pathetic and unlikeable as Tom Kenyon, the 'narrator' in 'Flight of a Witch' that I read last month.
This Peters story is around a very peculiar repertory opera house run by a man who operated small boats for clandestine Allied missions during the Second World War (the book was published in 1962). Using an assortment of opera singers; technical staff largely left over from his wartime crew and others who he rescued from Occupied Europe, he runs a regular rotation of operas, bringing in better known performers for leading roles. One of these is murdered, apparently by a sword used by another character in the 'The Marriage of Figaro'. Among the small group there are many with reason to kill the man, sometime collaborator in wartime Austria.
The problem with this book, setting aside how unattractive 'luvvie' performers are both in real life and in fiction, is that it is scrappy. Too much of it is about opera; even the detective involved, this time Inspector Musgrave rather than Felse, is an opera fan and spends a lot of time critiquing the performances rather than trying to solve the crime. You need to have a reasonable grasp of opera to comprehend what is going on. However, in general you do not really care about the characters sufficiently and unusually for Peters, except for a surprising car crash, there is no sense of jeopardy. There are some good twists in the closing couple of chapters and unusually for a British crime novel, the detective goes home blaming the wrong person for the crime. Overall, however, except for the closing sections this is a rather dull story which especially in the opening sections is difficult to follow unless you are a fan of Mozart operas.
'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' by J.K. Rowling
This is the fifth book in the Harry Potter series and as I have noted in reading the previous ones, as they progress they diverge more and more from the movies. In part this is because they increase in length and to cover all the incidents, sub-plots and characters which feature in the book would need a mini-series. My edition of this book was 766 pages long. The other trend I have noted before, continues and expands in this book. Rowling is more concerned with Harry Potter as a schoolboy than she is with him as an adventurer. The concluding battle is far more complex than it is shown in the movie, but the majority of the book is about summer holidays and school days, especially revising for and taking the OWLS exams, the magic equivalent of GCSEs. This aspect is less interesting to me than the adventure, but as I have noted before, that is probably because I am a man rather than a boy.
Rowling handles the schoolboy aspects well, especially Potter's on-off intimate relationship with Cho Chang, his feelings for and his disappointment about his late parents and his godfather, plus all his doubts about his study. However, covering all these pretty mundane elements at such length saps the book of dynamism which remained apparent especially in the first three books. In part this reflects Rowling's success as publishers are happier to let an author write what they want without editing it down, once they are a sure-fire success as Rowling had become by this stage. This could have been a punchier book if it had been trimmed down; it could have easily have been 200 pages shorter and still have been engaging, perhaps more so. Rowling's writing certainly has improved since the first book and some will find this a rich book to really sink into. However, I think with length much of the excitement, more apparent in earlier books, has been dissipated.
'Bonaparte's Sons' by Richard Howard
This book published in 1997 was the first in a series of six books running to 2002, about Alain Lausard, a fictional soldier in the 5th Dragoon Regiment of Napoleon's Army. I am very surprised that he got this book let alone another five published. I suppose publishers are always looking for new historical series and they guessed that this one would appeal to those who had read Bernard Cornwell's series, published 1981-2007, about Richard Sharpe, a British rifleman in the late 18th century and early 19th century, largely during the Napoleonic Wars. Howard starts with an often neglected part of the period, Napoleon's campaign in northern Italy. His historical detail is fine it is just that the writing is painfully clunky. I suppose these days the art of editing is unaffordable to companies and more relies on the author getting it right. When he wrote this book, it seems Howard lacked such skill. In one description of a battle he says the cannon 'opened up' four times.
Unlike Cornell, for example, Howard is unable to get descriptions of weapons of the time into the story without sounding like a technical manual, e.g.:
'Canister shot consisted of a tin case which ruptured on leaving the barrel, transforming the cannon into a massive shotgun as it released up to eighty one-ounce balls which had been packed tightly within. Heavy case was also used, a more lethal version which could send up to forty three-ounce metal balls to its target in excess of 450 feet per second.'
With the weather, conversely, he becomes very poetic, e.g.:
'The sun itself was a massive burnished orb slipping slowly below the horizon, its dying light the colour of bloodstained bronze. Birds returning to their nests were black arrowheads against the crimson backdrop.'
The story works on a familiar premise about a group of prisoners pressed into service in the army, in this case to defend revolutionary France in 1797. The start is very much like the Second World War movie, 'The Dirty Dozen' (1967), though it uses stereotypes and the poor religious character simply mouths almost identical statements throughout the entire book; the womanizer does little better. Though Lausard is the prime focus this does not stop Howard jumping between the perspectives of different characters sometimes in consecutive sentences; towards the book we get to see the views of newcomers to the unit and even hear conversations held in German, a language spoken by only one of the French soldiers. I have written stories featuring small units of soldiers and it can be difficult to cover battles from just one view and to have sufficient distinction between each of the soldiers in the unit. However, Howard is inefficient in his writing, seeming to thinking that repeating the same statements will provide character to each one rather than just emphasising how shallowly developed they all are.
The battle scenes are fine and dramatic and there is a sense of jeopardy as you are not certain who will be injured or killed. There are extensive descriptions of the wounds various men suffer. The scene in the hospital comes over like a catalogue. I guess Howard wanted it to sound gritty and realistic, but again, repetition does not add anything, indeed it blunts the emotion trying to be communicated. The first book is always tricky as you have to establish the characters and have them trained, etc. Howard seems to feel that he needs an adventure, but because he is wasteful, this seems tacked on, far too briefly at the end; its conclusion is incredibly rushed. He might have done better to start with this and then have Lausard reflecting on what had happened to bring them to this situation and the men showing their various traits by how they act during the escapade - this is something that is done pretty well in 'The Dirty Dozen' especially the rapist portrayed by Telly Savalas whose obsession upsets the whole mission. These days, however, I know that many readers insist on a linear narrative and feel unhappy if you jump around in chronology.
Clearly someone appreciated Howard's work sufficiently to publish six of his novels. Perhaps they improve as they progress. I think Howard certainly needed to become very familiar with the Sharpe novels and see how you can effectively work a story in such a context and from such a perspective.
Non-Fiction
'Fascism' by Noël O' Sullivan
Rather than being a history book this is a political philosophical analysis of Fascism. O'Sullivan does focus on Nazism and Italian Fascism, rather dismissing any other strands, notably monarchical fascism and clerico-fascism as pale imitations of these with nothing original within them. O'Sullivan pays particular attention to the constitution, the Charter, of the short-lived republic of Fiume, the Regency of Carnaro Gabriele D'Annunzio, (1863–1938) established 1919-20. He sees this as the best articulation of a Fascist perspective.
Across the latter three-quarters of the book, he makes a very convincing case that Fascism arose from philosophical and political changes really starting around the time of the French Revolution then strengthening through the 19th century to provide fertile ground for Fascism in the 20th century. He looks at factors such as the redefinition of freedom as something within an individual rather than exterior, the rise of the concept that a better society could only be achieved by the efforts of people, rather than, as for example previous, devotion to God and, the sense that struggle and sacrifice, typically through warfare, were 'good' of themselves as well as paving the way for the desired society. There was also the aspect promoted particularly by Napoleon Bonaparte, that the leader was always right and should be able simply to command utter loyalty in the 'struggle' even if his directions turned out to be contradictory. This provides an engaging case. His attempt to portray Fascism as 'directed activist' in contrast to 'passive activist' let alone 'limited' forms of government works less effectively and given what he says earlier on about the similarities between Fascism and Communism, it then seems artificial as he does later to try to portray them as very different in terms of this degree of activism.
The central problem with this book is in its first part. O'Sullivan is utterly scathing of any previous interpretation of Fascism provided by historians and politicians up to that date (the book was published in 1983). He dismisses them as naive and foolish, seeking to through aside all of the attempts to analyse and synthesise on the political movement. This makes very difficult reading and undermines the faith you have in O'Sullivan. There is a sense that he damages his academic credibility in making sustained attacks on others in the field, with no concession. It also rouses suspicions that he is less confident in his own line than one might expect and so feels he must blow away every last alternative before turning to his thesis. I advise you to avoid Chapter 1 entirely.
Sunday, 31 July 2016
The Books I Read In July
Fiction
'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'
As I have noted before, I come to read the Harry Potter series from watching the movies more than once each. This book marks a jump in length from its predecessors; my edition had 636 pages. As with the previous volumes I have read, the story largely focuses on Harry's life at school. The adventure element forms a smaller part than in the movies.
The book introduces characters that do not feature in the movie, including magical creatures, additional house elves and members of the Ministry of Magic and of the Weasley family. There is also a sub-plot about Hermione Granger campaigning for the rights of house elves, an enslaved species in the magic world. The gaps between the three trials that Harry has to undertake are longer but the portrayal of the challenges themselves, especially the first one, are far shorter than how they are shown in the movie. This is a shame especially as little Quidditch features in this book. It also includes lengthy exposition especially towards the end.
I like the book because it has these various sub-plots and the reappearance of teachers who largely disappear in the movie. It is also good at seeing the qualms in Harry's mind, both standard teenage concerns and the risks of facing his nemesis, Lord Voldemort who experiences a leap forward in strength in this book. Overall it is not a bad book, but I wanted more of the adventure and less of the vacillations of Potter, but then I guess it is aimed at someone who is 14 and not 48. As yet, however, I have not been put off completing the series.
'Rumpole's Return' by John Mortimer
Though, as I noted last month, Horace Rumpole, unlike the characters around him, never seems to age, in this book he has retired. He has gone to live in Florida where his son is an academic. Interestingly his daughter-in-law is pregnant but continues to smoke. Rumpole soon tires of life in Florida and returns to his old chambers when called upon by a former colleague. The story is pretty much a murder mystery with Rumpole and his son gathering evidence on both sides of the Atlantic to help Horace make a defence in a murder case. The story is alright but is a little unsatisfactory in the comings and goings of Rumpole and the question whether he could really retire and then return. He has not sold his London flat and his wife comes back from Florida after him too. By the end of the book the status quo ante has been re-established. I accept that some of this stems from the fact that these are stories based on what was proving to be a successful television series and so the drivers are those of broadcasting than how an author might work a novel or series of short stories. The notable change especially from the first book in the series, is the lack of humour, the only funny bit is a repeat of a joke told in an earlier book. It passes the time to see Rumpole and the quirky characters around him with the addition of interesting aspects of English law and forensic science, but it lacks the engagement of the first book and I do wonder if it is a case of diminishing returns.
'Flight of A Witch' by Ellis Peters
This is another of Peters's books featuring members of the Felse family. This one was published in 1964 and so George Felse has just been promoted from Detective Sergeant to Detective Inspector and his son Dominic is a sixth former. Both appear in this book, but as is common for Peters, they are supporting rather than leading characters. As in many of her books set in England it is based in the border region with Wales, but unlike in 'City of Gold and Shadows' (1973) by which time George is a Detective Chief Inspector, the region is portrayed very bleakly. The story is centred on an 18-year old girl (the age of majority until 1970 was 21 so people below that age were still considered children though they could have sex at 16, they could not vote), called Annet [sic] Beck. One difference from the mid-1960s compared to today when more people have children in their 40s than their 20s in Britain, a child of a couple who had turned 40, as Annet is, was expected to be 'wrong' in some way. Annet disappears for five days and is connected to a crime committed in Birmingham. The bulk of the story is about finding out what happened to her during those five days and who was the man with her involved with the crime. There are a range of suspects and George Felse aided by Dominic and a friend of his, plus one of Dominic's teachers, Tom Kenyon, seek to eliminate the suspects and force the actual man involved out of cover.
Ellis does jump around between points of view but less often than in some of her other Felse books. The steady investigation and the elimination of a number of seemingly likely suspects is handled well. The main problem is how bleak the book is. This is not simply a result of the dreary setting, but also because so much of the story is seen through the eyes of Tom Kenyon, foolishly besotted with Annet who is the daughter of his landlord and bitter throughout as a result. He comes across as a very pathetic character able to contribute much to developments and in fact spends the bulk of the climax a dumb, incapacitated spectator. The trouble is that you often identify even if only distantly with the perspective of the one showing the story. Looking through the eyes of George or Dominic consistently would have been alright. However, seeing so much through Tom's eyes makes you feel dirty. Unlike Annet he has no form of redemption or even like the criminal, of release. He ends being humiliated by one of his pupils and has any potential for affection spured. As a result you feel that his life is pointless. That is no way to be engaged with a novel.
'Stars and Stripes Forever' by Harry Harrison
I know there is a current tendency for many authors to write 'what if?' novels which accentuate the greatness of the USA or show how it would have benefited from having more of the attitudes of the Confederate States in its make-up. This book published in 1998 can certainly be seen as one of the first such alternate history books. It starts well, looking at the real incident of the stopping of the British ship, the 'Trent', in 1861 which was carrying two representatives of the Confederate States to address Queen Victoria and Emperor Napoleon III, by a Union naval ship. This was violation of Britain's neutrality in the American Civil War and added to British support for the CSA. Due to its military failings, Britain never formally recognised the Confederate States but did build warships for their navy. In this alternative, Queen Victoria is angered and her husband Prince Albert is weakened by the illness that was killing him, slightly earlier than in our world. As a result a strongly worded ultimatum goes to President Lincoln and this leads to Britain entering the war on the side of the Confederates. So far, so feasible. These elements take you to almost half way through the book.
Of course, some people argue that no 'what if?' book is feasible, because it is not what happened. This is despite the fact that in real history it is the least likely thing that happens. In this book, one British naval party makes a mistake in bad weather and so assaults Biloxi, a Confederate town rather than Deer Island which is occupied by Union troops. The British forces go on the rampage for some reason through the town looting and raping. This is seen as sufficient to immediately encourage the Confederate forces to call for a ceasefire from the Union. Within a day of the British mistake, Union and Confederate troops are fighting side-by-side against the British both in the Mississippi and then in New York state. Very quickly President Lincoln meets with Jefferson Davis, President of the CSA and they agree on joint action against the British in 1862, setting aside the two years of civil war and the issues that provoked it, very speedily. The combined forces not only go on to eject the British from the USA, but provoke the French-speaking Lower Canada to break from Britain, then seize the remainder of British territories in North America bar Newfoundland and easily capture all the British Caribbean islands. A Francophone uprising against British rule is probably the most feasible of those steps, there having been one in 1837-38 which had to be put down by the military. Setting that aside, at the same time the CSA Congress agrees to the ending of slavery and then abolishes itself effectively returning all the seceded states to the Union by 1863.
There seems so much which is rushed through in this alternative. Yes, Lincoln wanted to end the war but would not do so at any cost. He did not recognise the CSA as a legitimate state or Jefferson as a proper President. Meeting him in the way he does in this book would suggest to many that the CSA was being treated as a sovereign country. In our history, even after the CSA had been soundly beaten in 1865, many found ways around abolition of slavery and did not roll over easily. Harrison points out that at the end of the war in 1865, combined, the USA and CSA had an army larger than any European country and he believes that this army could have defeated all those armies fighting in unison, let alone just the British armed forces. This overlooks the fact that it took the Union Army until 1865 to defeat the Confederates, even with a comprehensive blockade. Furthermore it overestimates the strength of the Confederate forces, dependent on poor equipment, to fight British regulars and win easily. Somehow, overnight the two sides of the bitter conflict set aside their differences and they are empowered, especially the Confederate troops, with a new vigour and indeed skill.
The other thing is that the British keep making mistakes and the Americans make none. In addition, new equipment and weapons are pressed into service with minimal difficulty and are used appropriately throughout; the ships needed are always in the right place at the right time and do not malfunction when needed for victory. The British, in contrast, cling to old ways. The war portrayed is largely a re-run of the War of 1812, which is a fair estimate of what might have happened. However, everything that could go wrong does so for the British and even the civilian population of Washington D.C. prove to better, more committed fighters than British regulars. The Confederates are shown largely, with a few notable exceptions, as being happy in an instant to stop fighting the very men who drove them to leave the Union and throw over their hard-won allies, the British immediately, making no use of them to leverage any concessions from Lincoln; they simply swallow return to the Union as it was and abolition of slavery just because John Stuart Mill says it is the right thing to do.
Overall the book suggests somehow that the American Civil War was simply an error and the two sides were only fighting half-heartedly for what they believed in, despite their differences being so severe to lead to war in the first place. To Harrison it only needed a rather feeble invasion in a couple of points to overcome these differences in a matter of days and set the USA to be able to severely damage the largest empire of the day with a handful of iron-clad ships, almost always in perfect working order. This book starts well, but then Harrison slips into a jingoist fantasy. He could have reached a similar conclusion much more feasibly, especially given that this is the first book in a trilogy. Yet, for some reason he feels compelled to rush it all through making it highly unrealistic. I can only think this comes from a great deal of arrogance as he writes at the end of the book: 'Events, as depicted in this book, would have happened just as they are written here.' Even an author of a novel about true historical events cannot claim that. In this case many historians and authors would argue that the path this book lays out is far from having been likely even with the British error. This could have been a far better book, but for a fan of alternate history books it will be very frustrating to read.
Non Fiction
'The Economic Impact of the Cold War' by James L. Clayton
This book was published in 1970 so only covers the first half of the Cold War and it is primarily focused on the impact on the US economy. It starts by looking at a range of economic/political perspectives on what defence spending does to an economy. However, its central focus is a very astute analysis of the so-called military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower identified in 1961, i.e. the intimate connections between government departments, especially the Department of Defense and big companies particularly in aeronautics, ordnance and engineering. It shows that despite the USA portraying itself as the home of free enterprise, in fact the billions of dollars in defence contracts from 1941 onwards led to a large chunk of the US economy really being a complicit cartel, a kind of corporatist economy more familiar in Fascist states than democratic ones.
The book draws on a wide range of contemporary sources, putting both sides of the case, both broadly, e.g. on whether defence spending boosted or drained the economy and on specifics such as the Vietnam War and ABMs (Anti-Ballistic Missiles) both of which were controversial at the time. The book is very interesting on how uneven defence spending has been across the USA and shows that the current day prosperity of California and Texas was promoted by vast defence-related spending in these states in the post-war period. It reminds of schemes that have long been forgotten and highlights the waste and poor quality often produced from such expenditure. Thus, the analysis is of the kind which could be applied to governmental spending today as we are familiar with similar stories for example in software developed for the health service and air traffic control. It is also the only book that I have read that presents a negative view of the US efforts to put a man on the Moon and how the money spent on the missions provided little benefit for the country and could have been better spent.
While the book looks at a single country over a particular period of its history, the way it analyses the situation and provides frameworks for this analysis, it is an engaging book which can be taken forward to use as a basis for analysis of state-commercial relations especially on vast schemes the output of which is difficult to measure in tangible terms of success.
'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'
As I have noted before, I come to read the Harry Potter series from watching the movies more than once each. This book marks a jump in length from its predecessors; my edition had 636 pages. As with the previous volumes I have read, the story largely focuses on Harry's life at school. The adventure element forms a smaller part than in the movies.
The book introduces characters that do not feature in the movie, including magical creatures, additional house elves and members of the Ministry of Magic and of the Weasley family. There is also a sub-plot about Hermione Granger campaigning for the rights of house elves, an enslaved species in the magic world. The gaps between the three trials that Harry has to undertake are longer but the portrayal of the challenges themselves, especially the first one, are far shorter than how they are shown in the movie. This is a shame especially as little Quidditch features in this book. It also includes lengthy exposition especially towards the end.
I like the book because it has these various sub-plots and the reappearance of teachers who largely disappear in the movie. It is also good at seeing the qualms in Harry's mind, both standard teenage concerns and the risks of facing his nemesis, Lord Voldemort who experiences a leap forward in strength in this book. Overall it is not a bad book, but I wanted more of the adventure and less of the vacillations of Potter, but then I guess it is aimed at someone who is 14 and not 48. As yet, however, I have not been put off completing the series.
'Rumpole's Return' by John Mortimer
Though, as I noted last month, Horace Rumpole, unlike the characters around him, never seems to age, in this book he has retired. He has gone to live in Florida where his son is an academic. Interestingly his daughter-in-law is pregnant but continues to smoke. Rumpole soon tires of life in Florida and returns to his old chambers when called upon by a former colleague. The story is pretty much a murder mystery with Rumpole and his son gathering evidence on both sides of the Atlantic to help Horace make a defence in a murder case. The story is alright but is a little unsatisfactory in the comings and goings of Rumpole and the question whether he could really retire and then return. He has not sold his London flat and his wife comes back from Florida after him too. By the end of the book the status quo ante has been re-established. I accept that some of this stems from the fact that these are stories based on what was proving to be a successful television series and so the drivers are those of broadcasting than how an author might work a novel or series of short stories. The notable change especially from the first book in the series, is the lack of humour, the only funny bit is a repeat of a joke told in an earlier book. It passes the time to see Rumpole and the quirky characters around him with the addition of interesting aspects of English law and forensic science, but it lacks the engagement of the first book and I do wonder if it is a case of diminishing returns.
'Flight of A Witch' by Ellis Peters
This is another of Peters's books featuring members of the Felse family. This one was published in 1964 and so George Felse has just been promoted from Detective Sergeant to Detective Inspector and his son Dominic is a sixth former. Both appear in this book, but as is common for Peters, they are supporting rather than leading characters. As in many of her books set in England it is based in the border region with Wales, but unlike in 'City of Gold and Shadows' (1973) by which time George is a Detective Chief Inspector, the region is portrayed very bleakly. The story is centred on an 18-year old girl (the age of majority until 1970 was 21 so people below that age were still considered children though they could have sex at 16, they could not vote), called Annet [sic] Beck. One difference from the mid-1960s compared to today when more people have children in their 40s than their 20s in Britain, a child of a couple who had turned 40, as Annet is, was expected to be 'wrong' in some way. Annet disappears for five days and is connected to a crime committed in Birmingham. The bulk of the story is about finding out what happened to her during those five days and who was the man with her involved with the crime. There are a range of suspects and George Felse aided by Dominic and a friend of his, plus one of Dominic's teachers, Tom Kenyon, seek to eliminate the suspects and force the actual man involved out of cover.
Ellis does jump around between points of view but less often than in some of her other Felse books. The steady investigation and the elimination of a number of seemingly likely suspects is handled well. The main problem is how bleak the book is. This is not simply a result of the dreary setting, but also because so much of the story is seen through the eyes of Tom Kenyon, foolishly besotted with Annet who is the daughter of his landlord and bitter throughout as a result. He comes across as a very pathetic character able to contribute much to developments and in fact spends the bulk of the climax a dumb, incapacitated spectator. The trouble is that you often identify even if only distantly with the perspective of the one showing the story. Looking through the eyes of George or Dominic consistently would have been alright. However, seeing so much through Tom's eyes makes you feel dirty. Unlike Annet he has no form of redemption or even like the criminal, of release. He ends being humiliated by one of his pupils and has any potential for affection spured. As a result you feel that his life is pointless. That is no way to be engaged with a novel.
'Stars and Stripes Forever' by Harry Harrison
I know there is a current tendency for many authors to write 'what if?' novels which accentuate the greatness of the USA or show how it would have benefited from having more of the attitudes of the Confederate States in its make-up. This book published in 1998 can certainly be seen as one of the first such alternate history books. It starts well, looking at the real incident of the stopping of the British ship, the 'Trent', in 1861 which was carrying two representatives of the Confederate States to address Queen Victoria and Emperor Napoleon III, by a Union naval ship. This was violation of Britain's neutrality in the American Civil War and added to British support for the CSA. Due to its military failings, Britain never formally recognised the Confederate States but did build warships for their navy. In this alternative, Queen Victoria is angered and her husband Prince Albert is weakened by the illness that was killing him, slightly earlier than in our world. As a result a strongly worded ultimatum goes to President Lincoln and this leads to Britain entering the war on the side of the Confederates. So far, so feasible. These elements take you to almost half way through the book.
Of course, some people argue that no 'what if?' book is feasible, because it is not what happened. This is despite the fact that in real history it is the least likely thing that happens. In this book, one British naval party makes a mistake in bad weather and so assaults Biloxi, a Confederate town rather than Deer Island which is occupied by Union troops. The British forces go on the rampage for some reason through the town looting and raping. This is seen as sufficient to immediately encourage the Confederate forces to call for a ceasefire from the Union. Within a day of the British mistake, Union and Confederate troops are fighting side-by-side against the British both in the Mississippi and then in New York state. Very quickly President Lincoln meets with Jefferson Davis, President of the CSA and they agree on joint action against the British in 1862, setting aside the two years of civil war and the issues that provoked it, very speedily. The combined forces not only go on to eject the British from the USA, but provoke the French-speaking Lower Canada to break from Britain, then seize the remainder of British territories in North America bar Newfoundland and easily capture all the British Caribbean islands. A Francophone uprising against British rule is probably the most feasible of those steps, there having been one in 1837-38 which had to be put down by the military. Setting that aside, at the same time the CSA Congress agrees to the ending of slavery and then abolishes itself effectively returning all the seceded states to the Union by 1863.
There seems so much which is rushed through in this alternative. Yes, Lincoln wanted to end the war but would not do so at any cost. He did not recognise the CSA as a legitimate state or Jefferson as a proper President. Meeting him in the way he does in this book would suggest to many that the CSA was being treated as a sovereign country. In our history, even after the CSA had been soundly beaten in 1865, many found ways around abolition of slavery and did not roll over easily. Harrison points out that at the end of the war in 1865, combined, the USA and CSA had an army larger than any European country and he believes that this army could have defeated all those armies fighting in unison, let alone just the British armed forces. This overlooks the fact that it took the Union Army until 1865 to defeat the Confederates, even with a comprehensive blockade. Furthermore it overestimates the strength of the Confederate forces, dependent on poor equipment, to fight British regulars and win easily. Somehow, overnight the two sides of the bitter conflict set aside their differences and they are empowered, especially the Confederate troops, with a new vigour and indeed skill.
The other thing is that the British keep making mistakes and the Americans make none. In addition, new equipment and weapons are pressed into service with minimal difficulty and are used appropriately throughout; the ships needed are always in the right place at the right time and do not malfunction when needed for victory. The British, in contrast, cling to old ways. The war portrayed is largely a re-run of the War of 1812, which is a fair estimate of what might have happened. However, everything that could go wrong does so for the British and even the civilian population of Washington D.C. prove to better, more committed fighters than British regulars. The Confederates are shown largely, with a few notable exceptions, as being happy in an instant to stop fighting the very men who drove them to leave the Union and throw over their hard-won allies, the British immediately, making no use of them to leverage any concessions from Lincoln; they simply swallow return to the Union as it was and abolition of slavery just because John Stuart Mill says it is the right thing to do.
Overall the book suggests somehow that the American Civil War was simply an error and the two sides were only fighting half-heartedly for what they believed in, despite their differences being so severe to lead to war in the first place. To Harrison it only needed a rather feeble invasion in a couple of points to overcome these differences in a matter of days and set the USA to be able to severely damage the largest empire of the day with a handful of iron-clad ships, almost always in perfect working order. This book starts well, but then Harrison slips into a jingoist fantasy. He could have reached a similar conclusion much more feasibly, especially given that this is the first book in a trilogy. Yet, for some reason he feels compelled to rush it all through making it highly unrealistic. I can only think this comes from a great deal of arrogance as he writes at the end of the book: 'Events, as depicted in this book, would have happened just as they are written here.' Even an author of a novel about true historical events cannot claim that. In this case many historians and authors would argue that the path this book lays out is far from having been likely even with the British error. This could have been a far better book, but for a fan of alternate history books it will be very frustrating to read.
Non Fiction
'The Economic Impact of the Cold War' by James L. Clayton
This book was published in 1970 so only covers the first half of the Cold War and it is primarily focused on the impact on the US economy. It starts by looking at a range of economic/political perspectives on what defence spending does to an economy. However, its central focus is a very astute analysis of the so-called military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower identified in 1961, i.e. the intimate connections between government departments, especially the Department of Defense and big companies particularly in aeronautics, ordnance and engineering. It shows that despite the USA portraying itself as the home of free enterprise, in fact the billions of dollars in defence contracts from 1941 onwards led to a large chunk of the US economy really being a complicit cartel, a kind of corporatist economy more familiar in Fascist states than democratic ones.
The book draws on a wide range of contemporary sources, putting both sides of the case, both broadly, e.g. on whether defence spending boosted or drained the economy and on specifics such as the Vietnam War and ABMs (Anti-Ballistic Missiles) both of which were controversial at the time. The book is very interesting on how uneven defence spending has been across the USA and shows that the current day prosperity of California and Texas was promoted by vast defence-related spending in these states in the post-war period. It reminds of schemes that have long been forgotten and highlights the waste and poor quality often produced from such expenditure. Thus, the analysis is of the kind which could be applied to governmental spending today as we are familiar with similar stories for example in software developed for the health service and air traffic control. It is also the only book that I have read that presents a negative view of the US efforts to put a man on the Moon and how the money spent on the missions provided little benefit for the country and could have been better spent.
While the book looks at a single country over a particular period of its history, the way it analyses the situation and provides frameworks for this analysis, it is an engaging book which can be taken forward to use as a basis for analysis of state-commercial relations especially on vast schemes the output of which is difficult to measure in tangible terms of success.
Tuesday, 31 May 2016
The Books I Read In May
Fiction
'The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories' by Rudyard Kipling
In many ways I should not have been surprised by this book. I know Kipling as an author of stories set in British-ruled India; it was published first in 1888. Though I have not read any of his books before, I have seen movies of 'Kim' (novel 1901; movie 1950) and the movie of the main story in this book released in 1975; I have seen extracts of the cartoon version of 'The Jungle Book' (stories 1894-5; movie 1967 and 2016). Perhaps, as a result I expected more action and even humour from this collection of short stories. The humour that is tried seems very contorted and specific to a very particular time and place. I could imagine it would not have gone down well even with readers of the time who were not associated with colonial rule in India or with the military. Overall in the first part of the book in particular, you get a very narrow focus and a great deal of repetition.
Many of the settings in Simla, the hill town that British officials, officers and their families would retreat to when the plains of India became too hot. They are largely set in the 1880s and the first third of the book features stories primarily about extra-marital affairs rendered in similar ways. They are largely tedious and made inaccessible for a modern reader by a combination of Victorian grammar and slang mixing both English and pseudo-Hindi terms. As the book progresses there is a move to ghost stories which is an improvement, though the first of these, 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' itself stems from an extra-marital affair.
There is the eponymous story but it is presented very differently to the movie in that we only hear it third hand with one of the heroes recounting it to a British journalist in central India. It has all the elements but so far removed from the action lacks a sense of tension and conversely is rushed. There are three stories about various adventures, misadventures and poor treatment of small boys which may have been Kipling reflecting on his own childhood and probably was an element of him preparing for 'Kim' and 'The Jungle Book Stories' but lacking the charm of those; the confused battle involving two drummer boys, 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft' takes this another step.
You do learn quite a bit about this very small slice of British society abroad and even the geography of Simla and the surrounding area. However, the short stories, even when trying to be humorous say very little. I can contrast them sharply with the short stories of Herman Charles Bosman, best known for 'Mafeking Road and Other Stories' (1947) that my girlfriend is currently reading to me. Now, these were published sixty years after Kipling's collection. However, by focusing on rural Transvaal in the 1900s they provide a similar context of a small society in the latter phase of British imperialism, with a mixture of specific slang, in this case old Afrikaans words. Yet the quality of Bosman's short stories put Kipling's in the shade. Bosman is able to take the small incidents that appear in the restricted context and turn out both humorous and wistful stories that are excellently crafted. Having both books on the go at the same time has shown me the poor quality of this particular collection of Kipling's.
'The Piper on the Mountain' by Ellis Peters
This was one of six novels written by Peters not featuring the 12th century monk Brother Cadfael. The book was published in 1966 and sort of centres on the amateur detective, Dominic Felse. In this story he is a 2nd Year undergraduate English Literature student at the University of Oxford. He gets drawn into the investigation by 1st Year student Theodosia Barber (affectionately known as 'Tossa'!) into the death of her former step-father while walking in the Lower Tatra Mountains of Slovakia, at the time in Communist Czechoslovakia. Though the Cold War was in full flow when the book was written Peters seemed to expect growing detente. The story, while in London and Oxford is perfunctory, there is nothing to really show you the time or the place and it could be any one of a hundred novels of this era. It becomes far better when Dominic and Tossa go on a touring holiday with other students, female/male twins. Peters really conjures up the setting of that area of Slovakia; its wildlife and people, while avoiding stereotypes. She seems far better informed about this rural region than she does about towns in Britain.
Though there is a death and a murder, this is really more like a spy adventure featuring bright young things, charging around. The story effectively becomes a modernised Dornford Yates (1885-1960; published 1914-56) book, especially the Richard Chandos stories (published 1927-49) which were often in Central Europe. Peters does well to produce a sense of jeopardy, which shows how people writing short (it is only 162 pages), adventure stories can do this, something lacking in spy stories I have read recently. The twist is pretty good. In many ways it was an old fashioned story even at the time it was written, but if you are willing to accept it, that is fine.
The main flaw in the early part of the book is that Peters jumps between a number of points of view, sometimes even on a single page. It is only after the halfway point that Felse becomes the clear hero, that this situation settles down. I am surprised an editor did not pick this up at the time. It is not a bad book and the scenes where the heroes are pinned down by a sniper are handled notably well. I do not expect to be stretched by the other five books, but I certainly will not throw them away at this stage.
'Mourning Raga' by Ellis Peters
This is another book by Peters featuring Dominic Felse and Theodosia Barber who are now girlfriend/boyfriend and a further year on at University of Oxford. Being in the mid-sixties (the book was published in 1969, which being three years after the first book they would have finished their studies by now if it was contemporaneous) they do not sleep together. Peters is able to produce a sound reason for sending them to New Delhi to accompany the 14-year old half-American/half-Indian daughter of a movie star back to her father in India. The girl, Anjli, is kidnapped and the bulk of the story is about recovering her. There are numerous big male Indian characters whose personalities dominate the book and push Felse and Barber into the background, it is far less their story than 'The Piper on the Mountain' though perhaps that was intentional to have Indian characters in the lead. While Peters does draw characteristics of different types of Indians, notably contrasting Punjabis and Bengalis, she does seem intent to show India as a modern country. As in the previous novel she clearly knows her location well and gives immense detail of New Dehli, not simply the tourist sites but how it was growing and developing in the 1960s. It is a twisty plot and at times the number of characters can be a little overwhelming. This is not aided by her repeating the tendency from the previous book of abruptly switching points of view often on the same page and you can be uncertain whose eyes you are seeing through, further adding to the two 'lead' characters seeming to be pushed into second place.
Despite the references to fashion of the late 1960s, this feels like a modern book which you could present as a television drama now. I admire the effort Peters puts into the panoply of characters and her largely avoiding taking a Western-tinted view on India. However, this would have been a more pleasant read if she had kept tighter rein on the perspective. I know it can be useful when trying to put twists in the plot, but by the closing chapter you are left rather breathlessly bewildered. I suppose for a mystery writer that is not too bad a thing, but as a reader despite this being a short book (159 pages in my edition) you have to really pay attention.
'Nine Tomorrows' by Isaac Asimov
I have not read any books by Asimov before even though he published tens of them. I think I was put off by expecting them to be very much 'hard' science fiction about pondering the vastness of space in dreary spaceships. This is a collection of short stories originally published 1956-58. They compare favourably with the John Wyndham collection of roughly the same era that I read last month. On occasion there is a feeling that they are dated, especially in referring to miniature film and taped books, though these would have seemed feasible even just twenty years ago. Indeed the development of computers on to molecular processing still seems ahead of its time.
Some of the concepts Asimov covers have become very common in writing since he explored them, but I think it is his skill as an author that keeps them seeming fresh in how he looks at them. He does ponder big issues but without the stories becoming ponderous in the way I feared. 'Profession' looks at young people in a society in which your profession is decided, a theme taken up in many dystopias and indeed had featured in 'Brave New World' (1931) well before this story. Yet Asimov shows the challenges of this approach and what a society might need. 'The Feeling of Power' could easily be produced today and actually echoes something I have experienced in the past two years. With a long-running interplanetary battle reaching stalemate, the humans come up with a new 'invention' that rather than relying on computers to calculate everything humans can be trained to do it, so introducing elements to thwart their opponents and at a cheaper price. A couple of years ago, I was challenged to do some cubed numbers in my head and did them faster than a colleague could type them into their phone, so this kind of issue remains current.
There are a couple of almost science fiction detective mysteries. 'The Dying Night' is clever in that the murderer is detected as a result of the behaviour they exhibit resulting from the planet in the solar system they have been based on. 'I'm in Marsport without Hilda' feels more dated really in the way it shows the investigator having an extra-marital affair rather than how he decides which of the three businessmen is a drugs smuggler. I wonder if there are other such detective/SF crossovers; I can only really think of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (1968).
'The Gentle Vultures' with its obsession with nuclear war might seem dated, but it does provide an interesting alien view of Earth, different to those who simply come in peace or those who just want to conquer and is good at getting the alien mindset across. 'The Troubles of the World' turns out to be cleverer than you might first expect. It seems to combine aspects of what would had featured two years before in 'The Minority Report' (short story 1956; movie 2002) with something like the computers in '2001: A Space Odyssey' (novel and movie, 1968) and 'Dark Star' (movie, 1974). 'Spell My Name with an 'S'' again shows its age because of Cold War references but also establishes tropes that now often feature in science fiction about how destined we are to live a certain life, whether out future is predictable and if a small change can bring about a very different outcome; the 'Back to the Future' movie trilogy (1985-90) is just one among many that build on those questions.
'The Last Question' is a bit more of what I expected - big questions about the universe across millennia and a rather trite ending. 'The Ugly Little Boy' about snatching people and objects from the past to study them in the present is another theme which is now common but fresher when this story was written. Towards the end you might expect the outcome but it has a welcome humanity about it.
Overall I was presently surprised by this collection. It was not as heavy or gloomy as I had anticipated and Asimov shows off a skill in short story writing that maybe contributes a great deal to that. Even though the collection is now so old, it still has a lot to say to many of the issues we are facing today as all the best science fiction does. I certainly am more likely to pick up an Isaac Asimov book if I come across one in the future, especially if it has short stories rather than a full novel.
'My Legendary Girlfriend' by Mike Gayle
This book published in 1998 was billed as a male version of 'Bridget Jones's Diary' (1996), There are similarities. One is that it is broken up in chronological chunks, though unlike Helen Fielding's book covering months, Gayle's does it over a matter hours stretching from a Friday afternoon through a weekend to a Monday morning. This is part of the problem with the book and makes it unattractive. It is horribly claustrophobic. The lead character, Will Kelly spends a lot of his time in a shabby flat which he takes no care of, with brief journeys to convenience stores and a pub in the Archway area of London and to Highgate Cemetery with unpleasant or desultory interactions with almost everyone.
A lot of the book, as the title suggests is about relationships. He has lengthy telephone conversations with a range of people, not many of whom are sympathetic characters. The lack of other social media dates the book. Kelly obsesses over the girlfriend who dumped him three years earlier, after three years together; the anniversary of the relationship is on his birthday, the Sunday of the weekend. Though it is a short book (215 pages in the edition I had which has very small type), it drags terribly. You become angry with Will Kelly for being such a slob and being so lazy with his life. Unlike with Bridget Jones, there is very little humour in the situation. Perhaps, Gayle, being a former agony uncle felt unable to raise humour from problems facing many young people in London, notably appalling accommodation at expensive rents and the loneliness especially in Britain in which people are so busy 'networking' that they have no time to be with their 'friends'.
The ending is rushed and has a resolution which seems incongruous given how gloomy the rest of the book has been. You may say I would have enjoyed it more if I had read it when in my 20s, but I think it would have been impossible then to face up to this story which echoed so much of the problems of my own life and without the happy ending that Kelly gets.
'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban' by J.K. Rowling
By the third book in the Harry Potter series you feel that Rowling has really got into her stride in writing novels and this is very polished, especially if set alongside the first book. For those, like me, who know the Potter stories best from the movies, this one diverges even more than the previous two. The broad outline of events are the same, but many of the details are very different. In some ways I think the movie line is less jerky and makes better use of the time travel aspect. The climax with Harry, Ron and Hermione finding out who is lying is much messier in the book and leaves you rather confused; it is clearer in the movie. The Divination teacher, Sybil Trelawney, gets a far bigger role in the book than the movie and she predicts many things accurately, to some degree putting Hermione in a dimmer light than she otherwise has. Her classroom is also very otherworldly in the books.
Overall, the flavour of this book is darker than the movie version. This gets you ready for the aspects which become increasingly apparent as the book persists. The complexity of adult relationships, notably friendships, is not skirted over. The dark flavour is added to by the fact that the humour of the movie is rather overshadowed in the book and as before, Harry's treatment by the Dursleys, however much light is made of it, still grates as abuse. I suppose this is somewhat of a plot device to make Harry happy to spend more time at his boarding school, even during the holidays. As before in the books, the working of the school seems to be Rowling's central focus, much more than is apparent in the movies. In particular in this story where the climax is a revelation rather than battling a monster, what is the focus on action on screen, is only a small piece of the book and indeed the aftermath continues well after this climax is concluded. I enjoyed the book but am increasingly conscious that I am reading what is primarily a school novel rather than a fantasy novel.
Non-Fiction
'The Knight and the Merchant' by Grant Uden
In my childhood in the 1970s school libraries often had many books written in the 1950s and 1960s which featured great people and great events of history. Some would have a fictional story involving children encountering these people or being present at the events. With an eagerness for history I was often directed to read such books. I remember 'The Grey Apple Tree' by Vera Cumberlege (1965) about the Battle of Hastings and the work of Geoffrey Trease, unsurprising given that he published 113 books in a career stretching from 1934-97. Also numerous were books which lacked the fictional element and were a biography of some famous person's life. However, even in these, the language was often very descriptive and at sometimes bombastic and even a little jingoistic, in a way referencing the sense of 'New Elizabethan' Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, proud of its history but looking to the future too.
My copy of 'The Knight and the Merchant' (1965) certainly fits the latter pattern. I see that it comes from a library and has been cancelled. Where I got it from, I have no idea, perhaps from a jumble sale at a school. The book narrates in rich terms, the lives of Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers (1440-83) and William Caxton (1421-91). Woodville was very much involved in the Wars of the Roses and became brother-in-law to King Edward IV (1442-83; ruled 1461-70 and 1471-83). Both men had very interesting careers which is presumably why they were selected. The Woodville family rose from being poor knights to serving the king directly. Anthony was involved in battles of the Wars of the Roses, but was also a keen jouster and later a vigorous pilgrim. Caxton was a successful cloth merchant who lived in Bruges for much of his adult life and became the leading representative of British merchants in the Low Countries. He attracted the attention of the court of the Duke of Burgundy and through this of Anthony Woodville. Caxton changed career at the age of 50, setting himself up as a printer in London and some of his early work was commissioned through Woodville.
Various incidents from the lives of the two men, especially when their paths crossed. Through it we learn a lot about the Wars of the Roses and life among the merchant and noble classes of 15th century England and the near Continent. It does not pull its punches in terms of death and execution. However, it is written in a style that really carries you along. It is reinforced through quotations taken from texts of the time. As a popular history book, despite its age, it works well and very effectively highlighted some facets of late medieval history that I was not overly familiar with. I certainly feel I have a better grasp of the Wars of the Roses and indeed of early printing in England and I guess that was the point of the book.
'The Fire and the Rose' by Arthur Bryant
This is a digest of chapters from a number of history books written by Bryant in the 1960s. This edition published in 1972 was offered as part of a promotion by Shell petrol stations, March-May 1972. It may have come from my grandfather who enjoyed popular history books and getting deals from petrol stations; I still use plates he got through petrol station promotions in the 1980s. Bryant like Uden is part of that mid-20th century tendency to try to interest the general public in history through presenting it as dramatic narrative. Bryant takes less of a patriotic approach than the Shell packaging and seems influenced at least to some extent by the 'everyday history' approach which reached its zenith in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Despite all the chapters being written by the same man, they vary considerably in quality and interest. The chapter on the escape from Dunkirk by the British and French forces in 1940 is the weakest, saying very little about what happened or why, just going on about the psychological impact which Bryant sees as the basis of the Allied victory. The chapter on the Battle of Crécy and the one on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 are both good in concisely giving the background, in the first in military developments in the second in terms of socio-economic ones, that allow a good understanding of why the outcome was as it turned out. The narrative carries you along without being melodramatic. The same can be said for the chapter on the 1842 northern uprising a less well known element of British history, but here giving the context of deprivation in factory towns it is comprehensible and the changes Bryant shows it initiated might be unexpected.
The chapter on the escape of King Charles II could have been engaging but really becomes a list of locales he visited. It is interesting to see how far he ranged. The blind obedience to him by Royalists and his minimal concern about the fate they might have faced for aiding him is galling for a modern reader. The fact that he let them kiss his hand as a supposedly fine reward, sums it up. The chapter on the Great Fire of London from Samuel Pepys perspective is alright, though really tells us more about Pepys the philanderer than the course of the fire, though it shows the impact clearly. The Retreat to Corunna chapter is the longest. It raised the perception of the commander Sir John Moore in my eyes. It is highly disparaging of the Spanish and Portuguese being overly obsessed on martial spirit. It portrays the very bleak circumstances of the country and the retreat but detached from how people behaved as a result. The chapter on the Battle of Waterloo is reasonable and brings out how close the British, if not the Prussians, came to losing.
Overall a curious book that would not be produced nowadays and certainly would not be promoted by petrol stations, whether patriotic or not. There is some good historical writing here but on occasion too many of Bryant's hang-ups intrude and weaken significantly chapters that could have been far better.
'The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories' by Rudyard Kipling
In many ways I should not have been surprised by this book. I know Kipling as an author of stories set in British-ruled India; it was published first in 1888. Though I have not read any of his books before, I have seen movies of 'Kim' (novel 1901; movie 1950) and the movie of the main story in this book released in 1975; I have seen extracts of the cartoon version of 'The Jungle Book' (stories 1894-5; movie 1967 and 2016). Perhaps, as a result I expected more action and even humour from this collection of short stories. The humour that is tried seems very contorted and specific to a very particular time and place. I could imagine it would not have gone down well even with readers of the time who were not associated with colonial rule in India or with the military. Overall in the first part of the book in particular, you get a very narrow focus and a great deal of repetition.
Many of the settings in Simla, the hill town that British officials, officers and their families would retreat to when the plains of India became too hot. They are largely set in the 1880s and the first third of the book features stories primarily about extra-marital affairs rendered in similar ways. They are largely tedious and made inaccessible for a modern reader by a combination of Victorian grammar and slang mixing both English and pseudo-Hindi terms. As the book progresses there is a move to ghost stories which is an improvement, though the first of these, 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' itself stems from an extra-marital affair.
There is the eponymous story but it is presented very differently to the movie in that we only hear it third hand with one of the heroes recounting it to a British journalist in central India. It has all the elements but so far removed from the action lacks a sense of tension and conversely is rushed. There are three stories about various adventures, misadventures and poor treatment of small boys which may have been Kipling reflecting on his own childhood and probably was an element of him preparing for 'Kim' and 'The Jungle Book Stories' but lacking the charm of those; the confused battle involving two drummer boys, 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft' takes this another step.
You do learn quite a bit about this very small slice of British society abroad and even the geography of Simla and the surrounding area. However, the short stories, even when trying to be humorous say very little. I can contrast them sharply with the short stories of Herman Charles Bosman, best known for 'Mafeking Road and Other Stories' (1947) that my girlfriend is currently reading to me. Now, these were published sixty years after Kipling's collection. However, by focusing on rural Transvaal in the 1900s they provide a similar context of a small society in the latter phase of British imperialism, with a mixture of specific slang, in this case old Afrikaans words. Yet the quality of Bosman's short stories put Kipling's in the shade. Bosman is able to take the small incidents that appear in the restricted context and turn out both humorous and wistful stories that are excellently crafted. Having both books on the go at the same time has shown me the poor quality of this particular collection of Kipling's.
'The Piper on the Mountain' by Ellis Peters
This was one of six novels written by Peters not featuring the 12th century monk Brother Cadfael. The book was published in 1966 and sort of centres on the amateur detective, Dominic Felse. In this story he is a 2nd Year undergraduate English Literature student at the University of Oxford. He gets drawn into the investigation by 1st Year student Theodosia Barber (affectionately known as 'Tossa'!) into the death of her former step-father while walking in the Lower Tatra Mountains of Slovakia, at the time in Communist Czechoslovakia. Though the Cold War was in full flow when the book was written Peters seemed to expect growing detente. The story, while in London and Oxford is perfunctory, there is nothing to really show you the time or the place and it could be any one of a hundred novels of this era. It becomes far better when Dominic and Tossa go on a touring holiday with other students, female/male twins. Peters really conjures up the setting of that area of Slovakia; its wildlife and people, while avoiding stereotypes. She seems far better informed about this rural region than she does about towns in Britain.
Though there is a death and a murder, this is really more like a spy adventure featuring bright young things, charging around. The story effectively becomes a modernised Dornford Yates (1885-1960; published 1914-56) book, especially the Richard Chandos stories (published 1927-49) which were often in Central Europe. Peters does well to produce a sense of jeopardy, which shows how people writing short (it is only 162 pages), adventure stories can do this, something lacking in spy stories I have read recently. The twist is pretty good. In many ways it was an old fashioned story even at the time it was written, but if you are willing to accept it, that is fine.
The main flaw in the early part of the book is that Peters jumps between a number of points of view, sometimes even on a single page. It is only after the halfway point that Felse becomes the clear hero, that this situation settles down. I am surprised an editor did not pick this up at the time. It is not a bad book and the scenes where the heroes are pinned down by a sniper are handled notably well. I do not expect to be stretched by the other five books, but I certainly will not throw them away at this stage.
'Mourning Raga' by Ellis Peters
This is another book by Peters featuring Dominic Felse and Theodosia Barber who are now girlfriend/boyfriend and a further year on at University of Oxford. Being in the mid-sixties (the book was published in 1969, which being three years after the first book they would have finished their studies by now if it was contemporaneous) they do not sleep together. Peters is able to produce a sound reason for sending them to New Delhi to accompany the 14-year old half-American/half-Indian daughter of a movie star back to her father in India. The girl, Anjli, is kidnapped and the bulk of the story is about recovering her. There are numerous big male Indian characters whose personalities dominate the book and push Felse and Barber into the background, it is far less their story than 'The Piper on the Mountain' though perhaps that was intentional to have Indian characters in the lead. While Peters does draw characteristics of different types of Indians, notably contrasting Punjabis and Bengalis, she does seem intent to show India as a modern country. As in the previous novel she clearly knows her location well and gives immense detail of New Dehli, not simply the tourist sites but how it was growing and developing in the 1960s. It is a twisty plot and at times the number of characters can be a little overwhelming. This is not aided by her repeating the tendency from the previous book of abruptly switching points of view often on the same page and you can be uncertain whose eyes you are seeing through, further adding to the two 'lead' characters seeming to be pushed into second place.
Despite the references to fashion of the late 1960s, this feels like a modern book which you could present as a television drama now. I admire the effort Peters puts into the panoply of characters and her largely avoiding taking a Western-tinted view on India. However, this would have been a more pleasant read if she had kept tighter rein on the perspective. I know it can be useful when trying to put twists in the plot, but by the closing chapter you are left rather breathlessly bewildered. I suppose for a mystery writer that is not too bad a thing, but as a reader despite this being a short book (159 pages in my edition) you have to really pay attention.
'Nine Tomorrows' by Isaac Asimov
I have not read any books by Asimov before even though he published tens of them. I think I was put off by expecting them to be very much 'hard' science fiction about pondering the vastness of space in dreary spaceships. This is a collection of short stories originally published 1956-58. They compare favourably with the John Wyndham collection of roughly the same era that I read last month. On occasion there is a feeling that they are dated, especially in referring to miniature film and taped books, though these would have seemed feasible even just twenty years ago. Indeed the development of computers on to molecular processing still seems ahead of its time.
Some of the concepts Asimov covers have become very common in writing since he explored them, but I think it is his skill as an author that keeps them seeming fresh in how he looks at them. He does ponder big issues but without the stories becoming ponderous in the way I feared. 'Profession' looks at young people in a society in which your profession is decided, a theme taken up in many dystopias and indeed had featured in 'Brave New World' (1931) well before this story. Yet Asimov shows the challenges of this approach and what a society might need. 'The Feeling of Power' could easily be produced today and actually echoes something I have experienced in the past two years. With a long-running interplanetary battle reaching stalemate, the humans come up with a new 'invention' that rather than relying on computers to calculate everything humans can be trained to do it, so introducing elements to thwart their opponents and at a cheaper price. A couple of years ago, I was challenged to do some cubed numbers in my head and did them faster than a colleague could type them into their phone, so this kind of issue remains current.
There are a couple of almost science fiction detective mysteries. 'The Dying Night' is clever in that the murderer is detected as a result of the behaviour they exhibit resulting from the planet in the solar system they have been based on. 'I'm in Marsport without Hilda' feels more dated really in the way it shows the investigator having an extra-marital affair rather than how he decides which of the three businessmen is a drugs smuggler. I wonder if there are other such detective/SF crossovers; I can only really think of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (1968).
'The Gentle Vultures' with its obsession with nuclear war might seem dated, but it does provide an interesting alien view of Earth, different to those who simply come in peace or those who just want to conquer and is good at getting the alien mindset across. 'The Troubles of the World' turns out to be cleverer than you might first expect. It seems to combine aspects of what would had featured two years before in 'The Minority Report' (short story 1956; movie 2002) with something like the computers in '2001: A Space Odyssey' (novel and movie, 1968) and 'Dark Star' (movie, 1974). 'Spell My Name with an 'S'' again shows its age because of Cold War references but also establishes tropes that now often feature in science fiction about how destined we are to live a certain life, whether out future is predictable and if a small change can bring about a very different outcome; the 'Back to the Future' movie trilogy (1985-90) is just one among many that build on those questions.
'The Last Question' is a bit more of what I expected - big questions about the universe across millennia and a rather trite ending. 'The Ugly Little Boy' about snatching people and objects from the past to study them in the present is another theme which is now common but fresher when this story was written. Towards the end you might expect the outcome but it has a welcome humanity about it.
Overall I was presently surprised by this collection. It was not as heavy or gloomy as I had anticipated and Asimov shows off a skill in short story writing that maybe contributes a great deal to that. Even though the collection is now so old, it still has a lot to say to many of the issues we are facing today as all the best science fiction does. I certainly am more likely to pick up an Isaac Asimov book if I come across one in the future, especially if it has short stories rather than a full novel.
'My Legendary Girlfriend' by Mike Gayle
This book published in 1998 was billed as a male version of 'Bridget Jones's Diary' (1996), There are similarities. One is that it is broken up in chronological chunks, though unlike Helen Fielding's book covering months, Gayle's does it over a matter hours stretching from a Friday afternoon through a weekend to a Monday morning. This is part of the problem with the book and makes it unattractive. It is horribly claustrophobic. The lead character, Will Kelly spends a lot of his time in a shabby flat which he takes no care of, with brief journeys to convenience stores and a pub in the Archway area of London and to Highgate Cemetery with unpleasant or desultory interactions with almost everyone.
A lot of the book, as the title suggests is about relationships. He has lengthy telephone conversations with a range of people, not many of whom are sympathetic characters. The lack of other social media dates the book. Kelly obsesses over the girlfriend who dumped him three years earlier, after three years together; the anniversary of the relationship is on his birthday, the Sunday of the weekend. Though it is a short book (215 pages in the edition I had which has very small type), it drags terribly. You become angry with Will Kelly for being such a slob and being so lazy with his life. Unlike with Bridget Jones, there is very little humour in the situation. Perhaps, Gayle, being a former agony uncle felt unable to raise humour from problems facing many young people in London, notably appalling accommodation at expensive rents and the loneliness especially in Britain in which people are so busy 'networking' that they have no time to be with their 'friends'.
The ending is rushed and has a resolution which seems incongruous given how gloomy the rest of the book has been. You may say I would have enjoyed it more if I had read it when in my 20s, but I think it would have been impossible then to face up to this story which echoed so much of the problems of my own life and without the happy ending that Kelly gets.
'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban' by J.K. Rowling
By the third book in the Harry Potter series you feel that Rowling has really got into her stride in writing novels and this is very polished, especially if set alongside the first book. For those, like me, who know the Potter stories best from the movies, this one diverges even more than the previous two. The broad outline of events are the same, but many of the details are very different. In some ways I think the movie line is less jerky and makes better use of the time travel aspect. The climax with Harry, Ron and Hermione finding out who is lying is much messier in the book and leaves you rather confused; it is clearer in the movie. The Divination teacher, Sybil Trelawney, gets a far bigger role in the book than the movie and she predicts many things accurately, to some degree putting Hermione in a dimmer light than she otherwise has. Her classroom is also very otherworldly in the books.
Overall, the flavour of this book is darker than the movie version. This gets you ready for the aspects which become increasingly apparent as the book persists. The complexity of adult relationships, notably friendships, is not skirted over. The dark flavour is added to by the fact that the humour of the movie is rather overshadowed in the book and as before, Harry's treatment by the Dursleys, however much light is made of it, still grates as abuse. I suppose this is somewhat of a plot device to make Harry happy to spend more time at his boarding school, even during the holidays. As before in the books, the working of the school seems to be Rowling's central focus, much more than is apparent in the movies. In particular in this story where the climax is a revelation rather than battling a monster, what is the focus on action on screen, is only a small piece of the book and indeed the aftermath continues well after this climax is concluded. I enjoyed the book but am increasingly conscious that I am reading what is primarily a school novel rather than a fantasy novel.
Non-Fiction
'The Knight and the Merchant' by Grant Uden
In my childhood in the 1970s school libraries often had many books written in the 1950s and 1960s which featured great people and great events of history. Some would have a fictional story involving children encountering these people or being present at the events. With an eagerness for history I was often directed to read such books. I remember 'The Grey Apple Tree' by Vera Cumberlege (1965) about the Battle of Hastings and the work of Geoffrey Trease, unsurprising given that he published 113 books in a career stretching from 1934-97. Also numerous were books which lacked the fictional element and were a biography of some famous person's life. However, even in these, the language was often very descriptive and at sometimes bombastic and even a little jingoistic, in a way referencing the sense of 'New Elizabethan' Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, proud of its history but looking to the future too.
My copy of 'The Knight and the Merchant' (1965) certainly fits the latter pattern. I see that it comes from a library and has been cancelled. Where I got it from, I have no idea, perhaps from a jumble sale at a school. The book narrates in rich terms, the lives of Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers (1440-83) and William Caxton (1421-91). Woodville was very much involved in the Wars of the Roses and became brother-in-law to King Edward IV (1442-83; ruled 1461-70 and 1471-83). Both men had very interesting careers which is presumably why they were selected. The Woodville family rose from being poor knights to serving the king directly. Anthony was involved in battles of the Wars of the Roses, but was also a keen jouster and later a vigorous pilgrim. Caxton was a successful cloth merchant who lived in Bruges for much of his adult life and became the leading representative of British merchants in the Low Countries. He attracted the attention of the court of the Duke of Burgundy and through this of Anthony Woodville. Caxton changed career at the age of 50, setting himself up as a printer in London and some of his early work was commissioned through Woodville.
Various incidents from the lives of the two men, especially when their paths crossed. Through it we learn a lot about the Wars of the Roses and life among the merchant and noble classes of 15th century England and the near Continent. It does not pull its punches in terms of death and execution. However, it is written in a style that really carries you along. It is reinforced through quotations taken from texts of the time. As a popular history book, despite its age, it works well and very effectively highlighted some facets of late medieval history that I was not overly familiar with. I certainly feel I have a better grasp of the Wars of the Roses and indeed of early printing in England and I guess that was the point of the book.
'The Fire and the Rose' by Arthur Bryant
This is a digest of chapters from a number of history books written by Bryant in the 1960s. This edition published in 1972 was offered as part of a promotion by Shell petrol stations, March-May 1972. It may have come from my grandfather who enjoyed popular history books and getting deals from petrol stations; I still use plates he got through petrol station promotions in the 1980s. Bryant like Uden is part of that mid-20th century tendency to try to interest the general public in history through presenting it as dramatic narrative. Bryant takes less of a patriotic approach than the Shell packaging and seems influenced at least to some extent by the 'everyday history' approach which reached its zenith in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Despite all the chapters being written by the same man, they vary considerably in quality and interest. The chapter on the escape from Dunkirk by the British and French forces in 1940 is the weakest, saying very little about what happened or why, just going on about the psychological impact which Bryant sees as the basis of the Allied victory. The chapter on the Battle of Crécy and the one on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 are both good in concisely giving the background, in the first in military developments in the second in terms of socio-economic ones, that allow a good understanding of why the outcome was as it turned out. The narrative carries you along without being melodramatic. The same can be said for the chapter on the 1842 northern uprising a less well known element of British history, but here giving the context of deprivation in factory towns it is comprehensible and the changes Bryant shows it initiated might be unexpected.
The chapter on the escape of King Charles II could have been engaging but really becomes a list of locales he visited. It is interesting to see how far he ranged. The blind obedience to him by Royalists and his minimal concern about the fate they might have faced for aiding him is galling for a modern reader. The fact that he let them kiss his hand as a supposedly fine reward, sums it up. The chapter on the Great Fire of London from Samuel Pepys perspective is alright, though really tells us more about Pepys the philanderer than the course of the fire, though it shows the impact clearly. The Retreat to Corunna chapter is the longest. It raised the perception of the commander Sir John Moore in my eyes. It is highly disparaging of the Spanish and Portuguese being overly obsessed on martial spirit. It portrays the very bleak circumstances of the country and the retreat but detached from how people behaved as a result. The chapter on the Battle of Waterloo is reasonable and brings out how close the British, if not the Prussians, came to losing.
Overall a curious book that would not be produced nowadays and certainly would not be promoted by petrol stations, whether patriotic or not. There is some good historical writing here but on occasion too many of Bryant's hang-ups intrude and weaken significantly chapters that could have been far better.
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