The Books I Read In May

Fiction

'Berlin Alexanderplatz' by Alfred Döblin

This is one of the books to add to my list of ones I regret reading. I was drawn to it because it is set in the Weimar period of German history. It focuses on ex-convict Franz Biberkopf who on release for prison for the manslaughter of his girlfriend tries to find work. He ends up various street hawking jobs and falls in with criminals. However, their distrust of him leads to them trying to kill him and him losing his right arm. He seeks revenge on them when they kill one of his girlfriends, he seems surprisingly adept at getting them despite poor prospects. It does have interesting elements about Berlin and its society at the time and goes off at weird tangents about the slaughtering of livestock. The main problem is that it is a stream of consciousness novel with any kind of plot only occasionally peeking through from the flow of text often not clearly punctuated. It feels as if a lot of good ideas are utterly lost in random 'banter' in pubs and on the street that reduce coherence and make it very difficult to engage with. You do really feel it represents a lost opportunity. Published in 1931, I accept Döblin was seeking to be experimental but to a modern reader it is simply tiresome. 

The only good thing was that reviews on the back of this novel likened it to John Dos Passos's trilogy collected as 'U.S.A.' (1930-36) which my father had a copy of and I was considering reading. However, once I saw it likened to this book, I disposed of it to a charity shop immediately. Overall I would recommend you do not waste your life reading either of these books.

'The Cheltenham Square Murder' by John Bude [Ernest Elmore]

This is the fourth of Bude's novels I have read and indeed was the fourth crime novel he published, coming in 1937. Like the previous two, this features Superintendent Meredith, this time away from his usual base of Lewes in Sussex, staying with his crime author Aldous Barnet in Cheltenham, a place where Bude had lived himself for part of his life. This naturally has an urban setting though as in the previous novels Meredith gets to travel back and forth in the surrounding countryside, including working out whether certain suspects could get back to the square for a particular time.

The residents of the square provide Bude with a set list of suspects in the way that a country house murder story might. There is an insight into middle class snobbery and how lower class people can become relatively rich and the middle classes fall on hard times. Some of it does feel rather contrived as the murder is committed using an arrow fired through an open window from elsewhere on the square. Many of the residents are members of the local archery club and some have the skill to kill the victim. However, as is typical with Bude's novels there are a lot of theories which are dismissed and replaced with others and it soon becomes clear that the caddish murder victim may not have been the intended target. Blackmail and an illegal gambling club also get involved, so it does have a real classic 'golden age' melodrama, which perhaps Bude, also a playwright, takes a little too far for us to totally believe in. However, for evocation of time and place and the mores of the era it is an interesting read, though a little less down-to-Earth than the preceding three.

I have one more of his novels to read, but this one is for 1952, so it will be interesting to see how Bude's style had evolved in the intervening 15 years.

'Fight them on the Beaches' ed. by Katherine Foy

I must declare a conflict of interest when reviewing this collection of 11 alternate history short stories and 1 article. The book is published by Sea Lion Press who currently publish 8 of my novels. The stories vary considerably. The basic premise is looking at a German invasion of Britain in 1940/41. However, different divergences mean this is interpreted in a wide range of ways.

'Totalen Krieg' by Paul Hynes, for example, sees a German invasion during the First World War and with London under occupation in 1920 when an assassin is sent against Herman Göring based there. This has no discussion of the feasibility of an invasion at that time and one could easily argue that the Royal Navy in the 1910s would have more easily have beaten off a German invasion fleet than in the 1940s. However, the story is atmospheric. 'The Big Bang' by Ryan Fleming follows a similar line of a female British Resistance assassin but in the 1940s.

'The Last Service' by Tom Black, the owner of Sea Lion Press, sees an even more substantial change with the Spartakist Uprising in Germany having been successful so that it is a Communist Germany rather than Nazi Germany which is going to invade, seeking to make use of the Channel Bridge, something I have not encountered in fiction since The History of the Runestaff tetralogy (1967-69).

Other stories are more what you would expect. 'Fight Them on the Beaches' by Nigel Waite is clever in that it takes the actual history and shows how in fact what we know of it, may have been intentional 'spin' in order to tempt Hitler into planning the abortive Operation Sea Lion. This is a very short but engaging story. 'Nothing Half as Melancholy' by Angelo Barthélmy sees the failure of a German invasion of Britain from the French perspective so opening up questions about how such a situation would have impinged on occupied Europe. 'Tee im Schwarzwald' [Tea in the Black Forest] written in English is traditional about the interviewing of one of the generals who led a failed invasion of Britain and managed to get the farthest in southern England before defeat.

A few of the stories look at the cultural legacy of the invasion. 'Bloom Once More' features a visit to a cemetery for those killed in the brief occupation of parts of Kent including Jews murdered during it.'The Collector's High' by Lena Worwood looks at someone seeking to secure a copy of a text produced by British collaborators during the short-lived German occupation. This provides an interesting angle and touches on the sense that as in other occupied countries, there would have been people willing, perhaps even happy to work with their invaders. I found this an engaging approach.

'Die Seelöwe-Kontroverse' [The Sea Lion Controversy] is also in English and features a Berlin museum which shows the history of the failed Operation Sea Lion. However, it spreads its scope much wider and asks question of prime relevance to today when people question what is the 'proper' history of various events and whether the populist version is close to what actually happened and how much of it is in effect propaganda. I found this story particularly interesting.

'The Most Competitive Sea Lion - in the World' by Andy Cooke is silly. It envisages that continental equivalents living in the 1940s of the three former presenters of 'Top Gear' (in episodes 2002-15) and 'The Grant Tour' (2016-24) are each assigned to find a way to invade Britain for Nazi Germany. It rather sounds like some weird speculation had in a pub and depends on knowing the characters of these three presenters something which will be less familiar to readers as time passes and indeed many would be ignorant of them anyway.

'Article: Operation Sea Lion - the Unmentionable Sea Mammal' is by Andy Cooke drawing on an earlier online article by Alison Brooks and David Flin. Flin makes much of his interaction with the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and sees it as his mission wherever he can to utterly dismiss any attempts to discuss a German invasion of Britain, in a very smug way. Unsurprisingly Cooke picks up not just Flin's often repeated details, but adopts his tone as well. Yes, it is accurate in terms of the challenges of the invasion and the respective strength. However, coming at the end of a book of stories which see at least some such invasions, it makes the reader feel 'what was the point, then?' of the entire book. This is a challenge that alternate history writing whether analysis or fiction faces a lot of the time anyway and it is bitterly ironic that this book from the leading alternate history publisher should add fuel to that challenge. 

The aversion of Brooks, Cooke and Flin, is very focused on this one incident when it could be applied to many other popular 'what if?'s that feature in books. In addition, it misses the point that fiction authors need to engage readers and sell books and the two most popular alternate history scenarios in numerous books, a victory for Nazi Germany and a victory for the Confederacy, are two of the least likely outcomes to be envisaged. Consequently this article really felt inappropriate for this collection and hammering home a message that many readers would already be tired of hearing.

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' by John Le Carré [David Cornwell]

I have read and listened to a few books by Le Carré, but more his murder mysteries rather than his out-and-out spy novels. This one was published in 1963, as Le Carré's third novel and proved to be a global success, being turned into a movie starring Richard Burton, in 1965. I have seen two versions of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' (novel 1974, TV series 1979; movie 2011), so knew what to expect in downbeat, desultory atmosphere. The time and place is very important to the writing in part because of the political set-up that fostered the spying her features in his plots.

This one sees British agent Alec Leamas effectively retiring from working for MI6 following the capture or killing of his team operating in East Berlin. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 so creating what we see as the almost archetypal setting for such novels and movies. Characters still refer to East Germany as 'The Zone' as it had been formed from the Soviet zone of Germany and they did not recognise the state the Soviets constructed as legitimate. Another factor of the time is the character of Liz Gold, a young librarian who is active in her local branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. So devoted to her politics she is manipulated by the East German authorities and used against Leamas with whom she has had a sexual relationship - that is the least convincing element of the story. I suppose these days the closest equivalent would be a young woman being manipulated to work for Islamic State. 

The other characteristic of the time which really colours the novel, is how desultory everything is. Britain is better off than East Germany, but still both countries, 18 years after the end of the war, still have the wartime austerity and lack of hope, hanging over them. You can see this still in Le Carré's books of the 1970s. For people who lived in the UK in these periods, this seems much more authentic that the glamorous, bloated consumerism that is how the decades tend to be portrayed now, and might explain why the book was so popular at the time. Now it makes it feel like a genuine historical portrayal.

While some things do come over as stretching credibility a little, the central plot, delivered briskly and with focus, very much so when compared to contemporary spy novels, is really engaging. The reader is never certain who is tricking whom and how far Leamas's decline into alcoholism and treachery is real or engineered and the story twists and twists again. Le Carré's skill is taking you along and making these twists without you questioning them. In addition, the ending remains uncertain until you get to it. I can see why the book was acclaimed at the time and while publishers want thicker books these days (my edition was 253 pages of actual story), it is a good example to show writers how to work adeptly with your material. I have gathered in a number of old Le Carré books and now quite look forward to working through them.

Non-Fiction

'Warfare in the Age of Bonaparte' by Michael Glover

This book is split into two unequal sections, on land warfare and on sea warfare. It provides the background to the conflicts right from the French Revolution to Waterloo, but not comprehensively. There are reference to various aspects of weaponry, types of soldiers and vessels, but not in great detail. Rather most of what is discussed is done via looking at a handful of specific battles: Tourcoing, Castiglione, Marengo, Eylau, Salamanca and Waterloo on land then Algerciras at sea. It is well illustrated with contemporary and subsequent artwork and maps when needed. It is particularly strong on some areas overlooked by other books of this kind, such as logistics and the naval warfare scene after the Battle of Trafalgar. It is sound introductory book but there are times when you wanted Glover to give more examples and explore some of the topics in greater detail.

Books I Read In February

Fiction
'The Russia House' by John Le Carré

Inadvertently I seem to have been working backwards chronologically through the Le Carré books I was given.  This one was published in 1989, though the edition I have has afterwords written in 2001 and 2010.  I remember seeing the 1990 movie and finding it very boring.  The book is no different.  As I have noted before, it seems that Le Carré feels it is sufficient to create a middle-aged, upper middle class man with an reasonably interesting history and then let him potter around in the spy world.  Somehow, we are supposed to be intrigued by that.  This book features Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair who works for a fictitious publishing house of the kind which was probably extinct even by 1987 when the book is sent.  His company tries to sell to and buy from the USSR.  He comes into contact with a scientist who offers intelligence on failings in Soviet missile systems.  The book largely is about Blair being questioned about the information provided and being established as a pretty ineffectual go-between.  There is a lot of questioning and very little action.  Blair falls in love with a Russian woman who passes on the scientist's message and there is some reference to the loosening of the Soviet system in the light of perestroika.

When Le Carré wrote in the 1960s he kept his books short and tight.  However, certainly since the 1980s, perhaps prompted by publishers, they have become incredibly flabby.  My edition was 453 pages long and even with the lack of action, in 200 pages it could have been tense and engaging rather than a slog.  However, there are some problems with this book even when compared to the other three of his I have read recently.  It has a false start as rather than the information going to Blair when in Moscow it goes to another middle-aged publishing representative Nicholas Landau.  Landau passes it on to British intelligence after a couple of chapters then disappears from the book and it seems to start again with Blair.  I almost fell into the same situation with a novel I am currently writing and now see why it is a bad approach.  The second major flaw is that for some of the book the author narrates then sporadically another character, Horatio dePalfrey [sic], a legal advisor to British intelligence narrates.  Why Le Carré felt the need for this additional layer, a man who rambles on about his mistress irrelevantly, I have no idea.  He fades in and fades out suggesting more uncertainty on the author's part just about what was going on in this book.  It is very poor and an embarrassment in front of what he was writing twenty years earlier.

'Babylon Berlin' by Volker Kutscher
Having now written 17 novellas and a novel featuring a detective in 1920s Germany I was naturally attracted to reading this book.  It was published in German in 2007 but is now available in translation.  It was the first in the Gereon Rath series of detective novels, which have now reached six in number.  This book is known as 'Der Nasse Fisch' ['The Wet Fish'] in German which is police slang for an unsolved case, but this year a series is appearing on German television using the English title.

Kutscher is excellent at the period detail and really conjures up Berlin in 1929, with meticulous detail about various buildings coming and going and the brands in use at the time.  Perhaps as a result of this being the first book in the series, at times you feel he is taking his detective on a tour of the city.  It would really help to have a map of 1929 Berlin to ascertain precisely where everything is in relation to each other.  This factor does not help with the clarity of the novel.  I like a good twist in a detective story, but Kutscher piles twists on thick and fast.  He throws everything into the mix.  There are Communist riots, there are raids on night clubs of the more and less seedy variety, there are conspiracies not simply by the Stahlhelm, the S.A. and elements of the police, but also involving a spectrum of Russians from the Black Hundreds, through the Okhrana to a Leninist anti-Stalin group and perhaps the O.G.P.U., though people still refer to it as the Cheka.  There is even a drugs dealer with a Chinese assistant.  I appreciate Kutscher's effort and I wonder, even though he had published four crime novels before this one, that he worried that he would not get another chance with his Rath character.

A couple of other factors do not help with clarity.  One is that Rath jumps between different senior police officers of various branches, even getting to travel with the Berlin Commissioner of Police at one stage.  The various 'jurisdictions' are not clear.  I know he is supposed to be uncertain who to trust, but with so many 'players' in the game, it leaves you rather bewildered.  Some were real people like the famous cake-eating detective, Ernst Gennat, whereas others are fictional.  I wonder how this is going to be done on screen to ensure the viewers can follow what is happening.  Another issue, more an irritation than anything else is the translation by Niall Sellar.  It is translated partly into British English, i.e. with the police ranks and reference to a 'pub', but partially into American English, i.e. with a 'recess' in a school.  I would also argue that his rendering of the various Meldungen, by which the population of Germany have long been monitored, as 'passports' does not help with clarity.

There are elements of this novel that I enjoyed and I hope that the series gets to the UK.  However, overall I feel that Kutscher has tried too hard and as a result the novel is less than the sum of its parts.  It ends up reading like one of those 1970s airport thrillers about White Russian or Nazi gold rather than a decent detective novel.  Though I complain about Philip Kerr jumping around in time with his Bernie Gunther novels set in Germany in the same era, he has greater control over what is going on in his stories, though he too seems obsessed with shoehorning in real people.  I do not know if any of the subsequent Gereon Rath books will be translated, but if so, I will not rush to read them as getting through this one was a labour rather than a pleasure.

'The Wee Free Men' by Terry Pratchett
This is a children's book that was given to me some years ago by a girlfriend.  The protagonist as a nine-year old girl, Tiffany Aching who lives on a farm in chalk downs somewhere on Pratchett's Discworld; a very English-style setting, the kind of terrain I really love.  Her brother is abducted by a Queen of Fairyland and Tiffany, realising that she might be a putative witch sets off to rescue him.  She is aided by six-inch high Nac Mac Feegles, who are brownie-like creatures, immensely strong and fast, mostly male, heavily tattooed and for some reason, who speak in a kind of Scottish dialect; emphasised by the fact that they call themselves 'pictsies' so referencing pixies but also the Picts who occupied what is now Scotland in Roman times.  He does mine the kind of stereotypical Glaswegian hardman trope extensively, triggering off bizarre thoughts of a Pratchett version of 'Trainspotting'!

I have complained recently that I have found Pratchett books published in the 21st century to be laboured.  They make good points but go on too much, losing the wit and quickness of his 20th century.  They were light rather than seriously humorous.  This book was first published in 2003, but because it was aimed at a younger audience, it is far tighter and does not waste time in the way that was an increasing tendency for the 'standard' Discworld novels.  It was the first Pratchett book that I have laughed out loud to for a good number of years.  It is deftly done and there are jokes that only adults, and in some cases only middle-aged adults ('We willna' be fooled again' referencing a 1971 track) would get.  The book is brisk and rich in imagery.  Like the best fairy tales, it does have shocking scenes.  It both subverts the genre it is founded in, but also takes a shot at our own society, especially how it supports/demonises the elderly and 'others', but does this deftly in a way Pratchett seemed to lose when driven to write lengthier novels.  Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt it represented what is best in Pratchett's writing.  It is the first in a series of five books published 2003-15; I have the next two and will not set them aside given how much I enjoyed this one.

'Rebel' by Bernard Cornwell
I have read all of Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series about an English rifleman set during the Napoleonic Wars and aftermath.  Thus, I was pleased when I was given the four books in his Starbuck series, featuring the American Civil War.  The books are centred on Nathaniel Starbuck, the son of an ardent preacher from Massachusetts who seems to constantly fall into troubles pursuing women he is attracted to.  He abandons study in a seminary and follows one woman into Virginia where he happens to be when the American Civil War breaks out in 1861.  Massachusetts was part of the Union side and eastern Virginia was in the Confederacy.  He ends up in a regiment commanded by the father of one of his Virginian friends and entangled in the rivalries between the various officers and men and their families.  The book ends with Starbuck being involved in the 1st Battle of Bull Run in July 1861.

Cornwell is excellent as always in terms of historical detail such as the climate, what people wear, their weapons, what they eat (though at times the variety of food features seems massive), even their behaviour and language.  I would challenge his portrayal of the obsession with slavery at the start of the war, given that it was not until 1863 that President Lincoln declared slaves to be free (and was ambivalent about that step) and some slave states fought on the Union side.  At the early stage it was more about a federal versus confederal system in the U.S.A.  The major problem with this book is that almost every character is highly unsympathetic.  Violence, one might expect.  However, everyone is self-deluded, self-righteous pompous and arrogant; self-seeking and corrupt.  The women are mean and self-obsessed.  Though quite a lot of characters feature you very often simply want them out of the story to spare you from having to read about them.  When the 'hero' guns down another character on the say-so of a horribly manipulative woman, you are grateful that at least one nasty character has gone.

I wonder how the book was received in the southern U.S.A. as no southern character has any redeeming features.  Many of the northerners are shown to be unpleasant but not as irredeemable as the confederates shown, even the women.  This makes the book very hard going.  At least in the Sharpe books you had Richard Sharpe and the men around him, that you could root for throughout the books, even if they make mistakes.  In this book, Starbuck (and I have a major problem with that name) is self-flagellating for imagined evils which makes him tiresome and yet, then, he feels free to carry out murder to the sake of this nasty woman.  I do not know if Cornwell was seeking to counteract books that lionise the Confederacy but overall he has written a novel, which despite its attention to detail, is very difficult to engage with because so much of the cast are not people you would ever want to spend time with.

Non-Fiction

'The English Village' by Dennis R. Mills

This seems to be another of these 1960s history books I picked up with charming line drawings in it.  The tone is enthusiastic rather than earnest.  It guides readers, especially children, on how to analyse English villages.  There is a real emphasis on 'English'.  The term is used to refer to the Anglo-Saxons and the author seems to feel that there is nothing much of importance that happened in villages before then, though the Romans and the 'British' left some elements that could be encompassed in an 'English' village.  The Scots only get a mention as raiders and even when featuring a Cornish village, the Celts receive no mention at all.  While nowadays someone would use a computer to do the illustrations, much of the analysis and even many of the sources cited, would still be applicable today.  The book's points are well illustrated with real examples and even draws on Mills's family background and field work.  The enthusiasm extends right to the end of the book where Mills seems to forget this is a book about historical analysis and encourages readers to engage with a village and get involved in local politics to improve it.  Both an interesting and relaxing read, which betrays assumptions of the time (especially jobs being created and done by men) but provides a pleasant slice from a time which, even if in turmoil, still could aspire to both tranquility and progress.

The Books I Read In December

Fiction
'The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories' ed. by Ian Watson and Ian Whates
This is a collection of 25 alternate history short stories from the last thirty years or so.  A few I have read and reviewed before - 'Catch That Zeppelin' by Fritz Leiber, 'The Lucky Strike' by Kim Stanley Robinson and 'The Sleeping Serpent' by Pamela Sargent all appeared in 'The Way It Wasn't: Great Science Fiction Stories of Alternate History' ed. by Martin Greenberg which I read back in 2011: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/books-i-read-in-2011.html

I have also read 'Tales from the Venia Woods' by Robert Silverberg but do not seem to have reviewed it here.  It is one of three stories in this collection about the Roman Empire continuing beyond the 5th Century CE and conquering the world.  It features two children living in what in our world is Austria, finding an old man in a house in the woods who is the last member of the final imperial family of Rome now that the Republic has been restored.  It is a wistful story but shows how by focusing on a tiny corner of an alternate world you can show the changes very effectively.  It is certainly better than 'Manassas Again' by Gregory Benford, which more straight forward science fiction than specifically counter-factual.  It envisages a world where the Romans persisted and consequently robot technology has developed to the extent that there is now a war between robots and humans.  It is more like a spin-off from the 'Terminator' or 'Transformers' universes than a developed counter-factual.  'Waiting for the Olympians' by Frederik Pohl is similar, though as it features an author of 'science-romance' stories, does consider how alternatives to a world where the Roman Empire dominates the world and has gone into space earlier, could be written about.  In large part, however it is straight forward science fiction about waiting for aliens to arrive.

Another story which has a science fiction edge is 'Sidewinders' by Ken Macleod which focuses on people able to slip between different versions of Scotland whether to conserve or alter them.  A woman is brought from a version when evolution has never been developed as a theory and society is Victorian to one in which there is an authoritarian Communist style regime.  Some similar themes are touched on in 'The Darwin Anathema' by Stephen Baxter in which the French Revolution never occurred and Britain was invaded by the Royalist commander, Napoleon in 1807.  The Catholic Church has grown powerful and proscribed many scientific developments using the Inquisition.  Scotland is under Presbyterians and rather more enlightened.  A descendant of Charles Darwin, whose skeleton is on trial for heresy, is put at risk.  This is a nicely developed setting and it would be interesting to see more of it, though I find Baxter's work sometimes patchy.

Another sub-set is stories about a different outcome for America; 'The Sleeping Serpent' envisaging Mongol control of North America is one of these.  'Ink from the New Moon' by A.A. Attanasio instead envisages Chinese Buddhists settling the Americas to be followed by Imperial Chinese control, so that explorers from Europe arrive in an autonomous outpost of the Chinese Empire.  It is told in a series of letters from an official to his late wife.  I wrote a story like this the other way around, with Conquistadors encountering a Chinese society running the Aztec regions.  This is not a bad story, but is rather languid.  I have also written a story in which Moors ejected from southern Spain in 1492 find a refuge in America; there was also 'A Ship Full of Jews' by Barry N. Malzberg in  'In the Stone House' and other collections in which Jews are deported from Spain to America by Columbus.  In this book in 'Such a Deal' Esther Friesner envisages a Jewish businessman from southern Spain paying for Columbus's voyage and another captain bringing back Aztec warriors who hope repel the Spanish attempt to overrun the final Moorish state in southern Spain in 1492.  This was interesting though a little fantastical that such a force would turn up and at just the right time. 

Some counter-factual stories find it hard to shake off what they insist is the 'right' history, most famously this happens in 'The Man in the High Castle'  (1963) by Philip K. Dick.  This is very much the case with 'His Powder'd Wig, His Crown of Thornes' by Marc Laidlaw which sees Benedict Arnold having betrayed West Point and then George Washington being captured in 1780 and tortured, though in reality the British did not do that to opponents in the American War of Independence.  Laidlaw shows British-run North America as a depressed rundown place with indigenous tribes so regretful of their aid to the British that they now worship Washington as a martyr.  These assertions that a British America would have been an utter failure; that British forces were only one step away from being brutal and that the Amerindians would worship anyone of European stock, let alone a slave-owner like Washington, seems to be a kind of Trump-truth that many American authors and readers now insist on from the 'what if?' stories available.  Very disappointing.

Better in looking at alternatives for the USA include the unsettling 'Hush My Mouth' by Suzette Haden Elgin.  This envisages a longer American Civil War in which blacks were barred from fighting on either side and as a result when an epidemic sweeps through the USA, a black country is established in the South from which whites are ejected.  The new government cannot agree on which African language to use and will not use English, so some kind of holy men/women take a vow of silence until a decision is made; something some of them find incredibly hard. 'Dispatches from the Revolution' by Pat Cadigan, is that, a collection of letter and diaries about a decay in US society following harsh repression of anti-Vietnam War protests especially by California Governor Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson standing for re-election and Robert Kennedy not being assassinated.  It leads to a bomb at the 1968 Democrat Convention and years of repressive government to follow.  This is a credible, quite gritty story. 

Even more unsettling than these two is 'Weinachtsabend' by Keith Roberts.  The date is not given but it seems to be set around 1972 when it was published or slightly earlier; television is shown as in use.  The Führer is now a man called Ziegler, but his deputy is still Rudolf Hess.  Britain is now part of the 'Two Empires' with Nazi Germany and German is habitually used in Britain.  The lead character, an aide to a British official spends Christmas at a large house in the country where he starts a sexual relationship with his secretary who then disappears.  Very effectively, Roberts shows how that even in the apparently most British of settings, the assumptions of the Nazis have permeated, making an environment which appears evil to us.  This is very well done.

Two stories focus very much on individuals.  'The Imitation Game' by Rudy Rucker provides an alternative explanation for the death of Alan Turing, which is interesting but leads to no change for the wider world, whereas 'Lenin in Odessa' sees Lenin shot by Sydney Reilly and a counter-revolution triggered in Russia in 1918, leading to an earlier rise of Stalin, though we do not see whether he is successful overall.  Both are brisk thriller-like stories which show how you can have an adventure set against the backdrop of an alternate history without it having to lay it all out blow-by-blow.  This kind of counter-factual differs from those that work through the differences of the world envisaged.  However, it can irritate readers who like to see the mechanics of the differences rather than simply see them reflected in the lives of characters whether real people or fictional.

There are a number of stories in the book which feature Christianity not catching on across the world.  One is 'The Wandering Christian' by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman who I admire; I had brief correspondence with Byrne about counter-factuals.  The first part seems to be a typical Christian story and you might give up on it before reaching the counter-factual in which Charlemagne marries a Jew and converts.  He effectively restores the Roman Empire as a Jewish state and recaptures Jerusalem bringing him into conflict with Persia.  Christianity withers to being a tiny, fragmented religion; the narrator is a Christian fated to constant rebirth until Jesus returns.  It is alright after the rather dull beginning.  'Roncesvalles' by Judith Tarr sees Charlemagne convert to Islam after the death of Roland, following the Emperor's intervention in northern Spain, but as we are at the point of the divergence we do not see the consequences.  The niggling between Charlemagne's knights is irritating rather than engaging. A similar story is 'Letter from the Pope' by Harry Harrison and Tom Shippey in which King Alfred of Wessex breaks with the Roman Catholic Church and permits the continuation of Paganism.  This is an alright story, but as with Tarr's it seems to lack credibility that a few incidents could overturn a ruler's perspective to such an extent.

'Islands in the Sea' by Harry Turtledove envisages Constantinople falling to Muslim forces in the 8th Century CE rather than the 15th Century.  Western Europe is still Christian.  The story featuring the Bulgar leader deciding between Islam and Christianity resembles the decision of Vladimir the Great, Grand Price of Kiev who in 987 decided between Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, opting for the last of these, still the religion of Russia.  Christianity is not as contracted as in the other stories, but is seen as dominant in Eastern Europe, though not too different from when the Ottoman Empire was at its fullest extent in the Balkans anyway.

Perhaps the most imaginative story is 'The English Mutiny' by Ian R. MacLeod which turns the British rule of India on its head and imagines the Mughal Empire conquering the British Isles and some years later British troops mutinying in a reflection of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58.  The portrayal of Indianised London is interesting.  On the other end of the scale is 'A Very British History' by Paul J.  McAuley in which the British use captured German technology to get ahead in the space race and push out into the solar system even further than the Americans or Soviets did.  It is not bad and feels a little like a 'Dan Dare' story, though does remind readers that in the 1930s and 1940s Britain was a leader in technology with systems such as Radar and jet engines, plus input into developing the atomic bomb.  'The Raft of the Titanic' by James Morrow starts well, but becomes fantastical.  It envisages a large proportion of the passengers of the 'Titanic' escaping to safety on a huge raft they build.  However, their voyage goes on for years and they end up in the Pacific having developed a floating society very much organised along British social class lines but encompassing cannibalism.  There is little reflection on how such an escape would have affected the world which believes all the people dead anyway.  It seems a wasted opportunity with counter-factual traded for whimsy.

'Absolute Friends' by John Le Carré
I found this a dreary book and a real slog to get through.  It was published in 2004, and even more than 'Our Game' (1995) which I read in October, Le Carré seems to be uncertain where to go with the story.  In both books he conjures up very detailed characters of men of his generation and seems to feel that their interaction is sufficient to fill a novel.  This one features Edward Mundy, an orphan born at the end of the empire in India who becomes drawn into radical politics in 1960s Britain and West Germany.  In particular he makes friends with Sasha, the disabled son of an East German pastor who escaped to the West but may have also worked for the Stasi.  Much of the book simply outlines Mundy's life at various stages and nothing much happens.  Then abruptly, Sasha draws him into being a double agent working for MI6 while supposedly working for the Stasi.  Later there is another abrupt shift.  With the Cold War over, Le Carré seems uncertain what to do with these two strong characters so gets them mixed up with a foundation run by a kind of left-wing libertarian though it may simply be a set-up by big business to provide the threat which will justify the 'war on terror' and the vast expenditure on it at the time.

As a result, this book of these three sections, the book if fragmented and is not certain what it is trying to be.  The early parts about Mundy are really just an author's background on a character and do not constitute a story; so much is unresolved from this section that it is almost as if Mundy is drifting from scenario to scenario which Le Carré finds interesting.  He is never unemployed and appears to find jobs that please him wherever he looks which in the era covered by the book sounds fantastical.  The spy bit in the middle is too rushed and lacking in detail, despite us hearing Mundy has gone on fifty missions and then like the Cold War it simply tapers out.  The closing third where these apparent new threats are appearing again seems very rushed and flows too smoothly against Mundy just as everything once flowed too smoothly for him.  Overall you are left with a book of lumps of stuff, often lacking a plot and far too disconnected and too 'pat' far too often to provide a satisfying read.  This is the third of the four Le Carré books I was given to read and I am not optimistic about the final one which I will probably reach in February.

'Not Dead Enough' by Peter James
This is the third in the Roy Grace series of police stories set in Sussex and the last one of the series that I possess.  It follows on closely from 'Looking Good Dead' though not as tightly as that one did from the first in the series.  Many of the characteristics of this series are present, i.e. a very specific reference to technology, behaviour and even television programmes of the mid-2000s.  This means that even now just a decade on, you are conscious of reading something set in a particular time.  The BlackBerry and in this story, MySpace pages, stand out in that regard.  As I have noted before, these novels feel to be chunks of a much larger work.  It is as if you are watching a television series like 'The Bill' (1984-2010).  There are reappearing characters and James is good at developing not simply Grace but a whole host of other police officers and technicians and it is nice to follow the team.

One trouble is, but this third book, much has been seen before.  Once again the murder involves people successful in business in Sussex and again people from the lower levels of society.  I suppose the noveau riche provide more opportunity in terms of greed and having new technology, but I did feel that the three books have been working their way through a particular echelon of largely Brighton society.  Another thing is the way Grace can tell if someone is lying by the way they look when answering questions.  The responses add to the confusion in this case, but you begin to wonder if Grace has anything else.  At least in this story he did not consult a medium which he did in quick succession in the previous two.

The story is satisfyingly twisting but the reader can work out what is going on ahead of the detectives.  James showing us through the eyes of the killer and other suspects adds to this somewhat.  However, he generally keeps all the balls in the air.  If the novel had been 50-75 pages shorter (my edition was 610 pages long) then he could have pulled off a good twist. The climax of a fight with the killer and his pursuit, is very well done.  Also Grace's ambivalence about trying to seek his missing wife in Munich now that he has a new relationship going can be seen as a distraction but turns out to develop his character and his new partner well as people.  The strength of the books, even when they reuse elements, is the briskness of the writing which really carries you along and makes these easy books to read.  I may return to the series in the future because reading three almost back-to-back does emphasise the episodic nature of the books.

'The Truth' by Terry Pratchett
Given that this Pratchett book was published in 2000, I am surprised I missed it first time round.  It is another set in Ankh-Morpork and features numerous characters from the other stories set there, such as the Watch, Mr. King and the Patrician.  It is about a newspaper being started in the city by William De Worde and the problems in his battle to tell quality news in the face of tabloid journalism, especially at a time when there is an attempted coup d'etat against the Patrician and the only witness is a dog.  The story seemed quite appropriate for the times we are living in now when the 'truth' is generally what people can shout loudest rather than being based on any objective judgement and actually what is happening can be dismissed as unfeasible.

The story is rather fragmented with us seeing through the eyes of two assassins trying to tidy up the mess they have made as well as seeing William trying to get and sustain the business.  There is a romance denied, that Pratchett seems to be building towards throughout the book and yet turns away from.  Again the book was too long (444 pages in my edition).  It had too much going on but not a strong enough narrative to keep it going forward.  In the middle it drifts for too long.  In some ways, I felt this was almost a dry run for 'Going Postal' (2004) with a less likable character at the core trying to pull off something new in the city and with a realised romance even if a rocky one.

The best part of the book is in the conclusion.  The confrontation between William and his father in which he takes apart the Establishment belief that they believe in is the truth and everyone needs to comply with their wishes is well done, as is the scene in which William and Sacharissa find themselves unable to report an interesting incident are well done.  It is a shame that, as far as I know, they never reappear in Pratchett's books, though I think Otto Chriek, the vampire photographer does turn up elsewhere.  The book marks the transition phase in Pratchett's work when he moved from quick, very funny novels to those over-burdened with make the points on the issues that concerned him.  Those books like 'Monstrous Regiment' (2003) and 'Thud!' (2005) are worthy and interesting but the worthiness weighs down the humour.  I guess I have to count myself a fan primarily of Pratchett's 20th century work rather than of the 21st century.

Non-Fiction
'The Other Britain' ed. by Paul Barker
This is another of these books that I have no idea where I got it from.  It is a collection of essays/articles written 1973-81 drawn from 'New Society' (1968-88) magazine and written by staff journalists on the magazine or freelancers.  They look at less reported facets of British society at the time.  Many are incredibly bleak, reflecting the high inflation and then high unemployment of the time and the lack of opportunity for millions of people.  Interestingly many of the problems, such as immigrant communities (Paul Barker; Paul Harrison), low pay (David White; Jeremy Seabrook), erratic benefits (Paul Harrison), a struggling NHS (David Selbourne), prostitution to supplement women's incomes (Paul Harrison; Sheila Yeger), the decline of village life (Jeremy Seabrook; Angela Carter) and logical local policies being over-ruled by greedy planners (Norman Dennis) could be written today in exactly the same way.  Perhaps the most chilling articles are by Ian Walker and Eileen Fairweather about Northern Ireland.  It reminds you that despite the desire of tabloid newspapers to exempt anyone in the British armed forces for charges for war crime offences, there are also a lot of prison officers who should be investigated for brutality during the Troubles too.  There is a chapter on coal miners (Tom Forrester) that seems very much from the past and one on night-shift workers at a 'Dunkin Donuts' (Helen Chappell) that could be written today.

Aside from these social issues there is also an exploration of sub-cultures including football hooligans (Ian Walker; Paul Harrison), skinheads (Ian Walker) punk (Peter Marsh), genuine anarchists (Ian Walker), bikers not wearing crash helmets (Paul Willis) and joyriders (Howard Parker) that appear very much of the time, late 1970s and early 1980s than now.  Mods get quite a lot of references too, though without their own chapter.  It is fun to read about UB40, The Damned, The Clash, Madness (Suggs, the lead singer, is wrongly named as 'Doug'; his real names is Graham) and The Jam (portrayed as a punk band) that were seen on the level with many other bands long forgotten but who went on to much greater things.  Indeed the perception of the lyrics of The Clash are even picked up at this stage.  Other sub-cultures featured have endured such as stock car racers (Peter Woods), bingo (Paul Harrison), self-righteous vegetarians (Angela Carter) and women attending male stripper shows (Stuart Weir).  Finally there are 'walks' especially by Lincoln Allison but also Jeremy Seabrook through places like Bradford, Aberdeen and South Wales valleys, as much about the terrain as about the people.

This is an interesting if unsettling book.  The authors liken themselves to the Mass Observation writers of the 1930s and this is a parallel I agree with; the walk chapters date back even further to the writings of William Cobbett.  The writers are generally University educated, often have been academics, many attended Oxford or Cambridge, so in their attempts to probe the less reported aspects of Britain they can seem pretty patronising and make judgements at times without evidence just based on supposition.  However, it shines a light on parts of Britain at the time.  What unsettles you is how many of the problems it highlights are still plaguing people in Britain more than thirty years later, with no sense that anything can be done.

Britain's Cultural Perception of Cold War Spying

You will probably not be surprised when I say this posting has been prompted by me seeing the recently released movie of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' based on the novel of the same title (1974) by British author John Le Carré.  I am slightly too young to remember the BBC television series of the novel which was broadcast in 1979 (when I was 12 and very into spying) though as a strangely avid viewer of feedback programmes about television, notably 'Points of View' I remember the complaints about the complexity of the story and the call for subtitles not to translate foreign dialogue but to inform the viewers about what was happening in the plot.  I also remember well the spoofs of the series especially in sketches by the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' series (1979-82).  The success of the series revived interest in non-glamorous spy stories in the way which had not been seen since the trilogy of Harry Palmer movies, based on novels by Len Deighton and featuring Michael Caine, released 1965-7.

This latest version of Le Carré's novel has received very good reviews and so I went to the cinema for the first time in ages.  Even on a Wednesday night there was a good turnout, though I did notice that some people found the lack of dramatic action tedious and either left or started sending messages on their mobile phones.  This demand for violent action on a regular basis, whilst admittedly enjoyable does seem to push out movies which may be on cognate topics but adopt a more cerebral approach.  I think of the criticisms of 'Glorious 39' (2009) a thriller set in Britain in 1939 featuring a heroine who is utterly out of her depth and struggles to uncover the conspiracy.  Rather than seeing that as an interesting approach, complaints came that it was leaden and frustrating.  This is interesting as in the past thriller readers have enjoyed out-thinking the detective or spy, nowadays we are far more passive consumers and insist the hero/ine works harder, faster and more effectively than we are willing to do ourselves. 

In this way 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is both old fashioned and yet possibly part of a small clutch of more thoughtful thrillers to sit alongside and complement more action-focused movies, notably the Bourne trilogy (2002-7; a fourth movie is promised).   The complexity of Le Carre's story and the dramatisations is exaggerated. If you can follow an television version of an Agatha Christie story then you will have not trouble with this movie.  In many ways, like quite a few of Le Carre's stories, it is as much a 'whodunnit', a detective story which happens to be set among the world of spies, as it is a spy story per se.  There are five suspects including the 'detective' himself, George Smiley (played wonderfully by Gary Oldman; he does not even speak for the first twenty minutes and yet imposes the character on to us) and in classic detective story style he gathers information and sets a trap to tease out the true guilty one from among the suspects.  Oldman resembles Alec Guinness in his portrayal of Smiley without trying to replicate it.  It is interesting the focus on the feature of a rather dull, late middle aged man, though interesting one quite happy to swim in rivers and wield a pistol.  The fact that at times we are looking right into the face of Smiley with his rather bland, aged features seems symptomatic of the style of the movie.

Whilst the movie has an excellent ensemble cast, the real 'star' is the evocation of London, Paris, Budapest and Istanbul in 1973.  This is a movie where you slip into a different time and you certainly feel that the past is another country.  The attention to detail down to clothing, hairstyles, cars, street furniture, office equipment, food, crockery, leaflets and advertisements, even the lighting is wonderful and really encompassing.  The behaviour is spot on and it is fascinating to see a 1972 works Christmas party so lovingly reproduced.  I think I only spotted two errors.  Too many of the male characters wear wedding rings, something which was uncommon for men, certainly those who were not Catholic, in 1973.  It is a fashion which has only caught on in the UK in the past twenty years.  In addition, there seems to be an error with the Trebor mints that Smiley eats near the end.  They are clearly extra-strong mints but wrapped in a Trebor mint wrapper making it far larger in diameter than Trebor mints of the time which were far smaller, shinier discs of mint.

This movie could certainly not have been relocated to the USA even if it was still set in 1973.  I imagine, having seen the acclaimed Danish crime drama 'Forbrydelsen' (2007) that it could have been set in northern Europe, anywhere from France through Germany and Scandinavia, into the former Eastern bloc countries.  However, I wondered why I could not envisage a US version and I realised that it stemmed from the different genuine history that Britain experienced during the Cold War.  It is not an issue of style, Britain certainly being painfully bleak in the 1970s despite the occasional garish colours; in sharp contrast to the excess of US culture at the time, it is more about what the British experienced in terms of spying. 

For the Americans, their greatest spying scandal was the sharing of atomic secrets in the 1950s by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; David Greenglass - Ethel's brother, Harry Gold, Morton Sobell and Klaus Fuchs.  Their arrest, the execution of the Rosenbergs and imprisonment of other conspirators, certainly fuelled the US hysteria about the Communist threat in the 1950s and the era of McCarthyism which affected so many people on a scale massively out of step with Soviet spying operations.  However, the bulk of these spies were seen anyway was 'outsiders'.  The Rosenbergs and Gold were Jewish and unashamedly Communist; Fuchs has been born a German and held British citizenship.  These were the type of spies that the Americans had always expected, associated with the dictatorships of Germany and Russia (even if they had fled them) and not Christian.   For the Americans counter-espionage is about identifying someone who 'does not fit' not only in the views they espouse but in other characteristics.  This approach persists to today which explains why the Americans are far happier seeking to tackle Islamist terrorism associated with people with a Middle Eastern or South-Central Asian connection than terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who, to many 'mainstream' Americans resembles them too much for them really to believe that his actions were evil.

For the British the situation is utterly the reverse.  The key spy scandal in the UK was associated with the so-called 'Cambridge Spies' due to the university they studied at.  These were Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess who fled to the USSR in 1951; 'Kim' Philby who  followed them in 1963; Anthony Blunt, revealed as part of the circle in 1979 (though this had been uncovered as early as 1963 but kept secret) and John Cairncross, who was confirmed as a member of this set of Soviet agents in 1990.  What was distinctive about these spies is that they were everything that the US atomic spies were not.  Both sets were intelligent, but the Cambridge spies were certainly not outsiders, they were very much insiders.  Whilst Cairncross came from a lower-middle class background, he still attended Cambridge University at a time when only a tiny elite did and he rose rapidly to high levels within the civil service.  Burgess was the son of a naval officer, Maclean was the son of a knighted MP, Philby was son of a civil servant in the British colonial service and Blunt was highest status of all, related to the present queen's mother.  Thus, for the British rather than seeing danger coming from outside the danger even before the Cold War started was more from within.  The fears of Nazi sympathisers among the British elites in the 1930s mutated into evidence of Communist sympathisers among the British elites in the 1950s-90s.  Of course, unlike in the USA where the good upstanding, usually white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant was set to hunt down the Soviet agents, in Britain it has been others of the same class and background as the traitors who is set to find them out.

I suppose in some ways, British spy novels have always reflected the British class system in which the bulk of the population is really seen as the 'outsider' to the elite whose attitudes drive how Britain progresses.  Deighton's Harry Palmer (not named in the novels) is a working class character who emphasises his outside nature and yet penetrates the deceptions of those who see him as his superiors.  He is hampered by the machinations of those above him not only because of their official status but because of social capital they can put into use against him.  In Le Carré's stories, with the traitors and their hunters on the same social level, it comes down to wits and cunning in order to catch them or escape from the hunt.  For those of us not among the elites, it is also nice to see those abusing Britain caught and brought down a peg supposedly in the broader interests of the country.  Of course, the elite protects their own and even once the Cambridge spies were known they were allowed to escape or their dirty secrets kept secret with official collusion.  I believe the exasperation of this is why in the movie the traitor is assassinated to give the audience some sense of retribution when the traitor is on the verge of being traded, as so often happened with Cold War spies.

Commentary on 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' has noted that these days it would seem peculiar for anyone to betray their country on the grounds that they believed it was pursuing the wrong ideology.  It is interesting that in the movie, the traitor's explanation for their treachery is that the West has become so 'ugly', such a sentiment is believable when you see London in 1973, though as one reviewer noted, Moscow, even these days, is no better.  The explanation is much the same as that given by the traitor in 'The Whistle Blower' (1986 - based on the novel by John Hale).  One wonders why they are given such world-weary explanations rather than the one which the Cambridge spies did.  They all believed that Communism was the correct ideology, particularly at the time when it seemed like the only system that was not willing to compromise with Nazism (bar of course 1939-41) in the way that Britain seemed more than eager to do.  They also believed, despite their elite positions, that Communism was the correct ideology for the world as a whole and anything which advanced the standing of the USSR as the leading proponent of Communism was to be for the global good.

Whilst even Communist states such as China seem to have lost such faith in the ideology, it does not mean that world-perspective ideologies could not be the basis of a motivation to betray one's country.  Ideology such as anti-capitalism or environmentalism have no 'host' nation to which the traitor could turn, so the approach would be something simply like Wikileaks.  However, since the rise of fundamentalism in Iran in 1979 and the spread of such views to a number of countries, one could certainly envisage someone turning over British secrets to another states on the grounds of an Islamist perspective.  Interestingly, Kim Philby's father was a convert to Islam.  In time, other world view ideologies and countries associated with them may rise to provide the kind of context that permitted the kind of developments seen with spies in the Cold War.

Whilst a Cold War conspiracy movie might seem to be based on a dated concept, it does not mean it cannot be engaging, just as a story set at the court of King Henry VIII can engage us, even though the tensions between Catholics and Protestants at the time might seem inscrutable nowadays.  What is interesting for me, is that British history impinges on the fiction and means that a story carries a 'baggage' brought by the audience that allows us to engage with the 'game' of the story on this basis, whereas if we had had a history like the USA or many other countries, we would not see it as feasible.  Anyway, I will add my voice to the recommendations of the movie.  However, do not expect a British version of 'The Bourne Ultimatum', see something instead, that is a puzzle presented incredibly well in terms of portrayals both by the actors and the settings they appear in.