Books I Read In April

Fiction

‘Red Chrysanthemum’ by Laura Joh Rowland

I have been reading Rowland’s detective stories featuring Sano Ichiro and set in late 17^th century Japan for many years.  The stories are great for conjuring up the era and she has a range of interesting characters both allies and opponents of Sano in his role as official detective for the Shogun.  At times some seem overly cruel almost as if they have been written too large.  Some however, are amoral and political concerns entwine with many of the crimes featured.  This being the eighth book in the series, Sano has risen from being a detective to being chamberlain of Japan so even more prone to becoming entangled in political rivalries under the rule of an easily manipulated Shogun.  This story revolves around the castration and murder of Lord Mori apparently by Sano’s pregnant wife, Reiko.  This level of jeopardy for the couple counteracts the danger which often occurs when a fictional detective is successful and begins to rise through the ranks in that s/he becomes distant from the crimes and faces little risk in investigating them.

Rowland has used the approach of the movie ‘Rashomon’ (1950) with narrations of what occurred from different ‘witnesses’.  I worried that this was simply an affectation to give some greater energy to the Rowland’s writing which at times has seemed a little plodding despite the extremity of the crimes she features and the apparent risks her characters face.  However, she presents a range of unreliable narrators and this keeps us off balance.  If the publisher had not put the first chapter of the next novel in the back of this edition then you could believe that Sano might be executed himself, Japanese justice of the time tending to be all-encompassing.  I think the approach works well and I felt there was greater life in this novel than some of its predecessors in the series.  The development of other long-standing characters such as Hirata, who has risen to take over Sano’s previous role as chief investigator adds other dimensions though his martial arts tutor comes over as a stereotype.

Rowland never baulks from showing the harshness or injustice of the times she is portraying and as in previous stories we see characters at the pinnacle of society and in its depths.  The crimes are not skimped on and this leaves me wondering why I feel something is missing.  The politicisation of Sano and his wife to the end of the novel may give a clue and that is he still comes over as being too righteous and maybe we seek some of that amorality we see in other characters appearing in the central ones as well.  Maybe I am asking too much.  I will certainly continue to read Rowland’s Sano series and hope that with the political intrigues playing an ever larger part the next novel will have that final unidentifiable element that for me is missing and it will prove to be an outstanding rather than simply engaging historical crime novel. 

‘To Bring the Light’ by David Drake

This book was clearly inspired by ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ by L. Sprague De Camp which I reviewed recently.  It sees Flavia Herosilla a forthright patrician woman from the 4^th Century CE being thrown back 1000 years to the foundation of Rome.  She has to disentangle legend from actual history in order to assist Romulus and Remus in freeing the village that will become Rome from the overlordship of a neighbouring town, whilst facing chauvinism, sexual harassment and superstitious beliefs which to someone from her time seem irrational.  This is an enjoyable book but far too short and I wonder why Drake did not develop the idea at least as far as De Camp did in his novel.

Non-Fiction

‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdan

This is a rather ragged autobiography by a chef who has previously published fiction.  It goes erratically from culinary experiences of his childhood through a series of failing restaurants primarily in New York.  He gives the background on the chaos, drug abuse and simple abuse that go on in kitchens and also tells a bleak story of numerous restaurant failures.  At times he diverges into looking at things such as the hierarchy in a restaurant kitchen and the slang used.  Despite a brief trip to Japan it is very New York focused and a lot of what he says especially about ethnic groups would not really apply in much of the USA let alone elsewhere in the world.  However, he seems to assume that his readership will be familiar with that context which makes it off putting given that from this basis he is trying to show you a culture aside from mainstream America anyway.  His stupidity and his arrogance may seem to some readers as edgy and exciting but ultimately you come to loathe him and think he should be far more grateful that he is still alive than he shows in this book.  The arrogance becomes difficult to swallow pretty quickly and there is little point in reading an autobiography of someone whose view of the world you cannot respect.

 

The Books I Read In February

Non-Fiction
‘Hugh Gaitskell’ by Brian Brivati
I read this as a complementary book to ‘Clem Attlee’ by Francis Beckett that I read back in July 2012. Like Beckett, I met Brivati in the mid-1990s at the time when there were lots of historical events around the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Despite recognising the changes to the Labour Party that Tony Blair had brought, when the book was published in 1997, unlike Beckett, Brivati manages to avoid making constant links between the past and current developments. One of the key difficulties, however, is that Gaitskell lacked experience in government. He only delivered one budget and was out of power from 1951 until his death in 1963, aged 56. Thus, in contrast to Beckett’s book, a lot of the details are about small-scale internal Labour Party business, often at a painfully local level.

Brivati tends to avoid wandering off his subject in the way that Beckett did, though Brivati’s weakest sections are when he steps away from the narrative to try to assess Gaitskell’s ideological steps. In general Brivati remains objective and it is difficult to tell if he is a partisan of Gaitskell or not. This is better in a political biography than when the author is clearly writing about one of their heroes. Brivati’s objectivity only slips when he begins to discuss things closer to his own life, for example, the view that CND was funded by the KGB. The key problem with this book, as with many biographies, is how fragmented it is. This is not helped by Brivati breaking it into chapters covering just one or two years. I certainly cannot understand why the book received such acclaim when published and can only think it was because it fitted in with the mood of the times of the late 1990s.

It is clear that many of the reviewers whose comments on the back, have not read the book or if they have, it was unable to shake them from their misguided beliefs about Gaitskell. What Brivati adds to the debate are the oddities, things such as Gaitskell’s love of dancing and jazz; the fact that he may have been bisexual and that he had a long-running affair with the wife of Ian Fleming. These are more like details from a celebrity biography and do not really round out the political picture of Gaitskell.

The one thing that is very apparent from Brivati’s book and strongly opposes the views expressed by some of the quoted reviewers is how destructive Gaitskell was. It is very clear that he was arrogant and self-centred. Despite his protestations of being a Socialist there appears to be little that Brivati details which fit that pattern. Rather, as the publishers note, he was more like an American Democrat. He was often opposed to the bulk of the party he sought to represent and used divisive, conspiratorial methods to get his own way. ‘Own way’ is the key element that comes out. Whilst Gaitskell adhered to and created factions, these were generally simply to serve his own interests and he felt no compunction and betraying his own partisans, notably over the relationship with Europe.
Gaitskell was both out-of-date in his adherence to the Commonwealth and the view of Britain’s role in the world. The fact that this was not greatly apparent was simply because the Conservative Party of the 1950s was a generation even further out-of-date on such issues. Owing to his dated views and his personal obsessions which constantly triggered active divisions in the 1950s and early 1960s, Gaitskell rendered the Labour Party incapable of adopting policies that were distinct from the Conservatives and yet ready for the era. Brivati’s book makes it clear that Gaitskell has a fair part to take of the blame for the ‘thirteen wasted years’ of Conservative governments 1951-64 due to him driving it to cope with one of his obsessions after another rather than evolving to cope with the context it found itself in.

While I would never wish to welcome anyone’s premature death, it is clear that without Gaitskell being removed from the leadership of the Labour Party in 1963 he would have utterly destroyed the party. Some argue that he was a precursor of Tony Blair in his Atlanticist attitude and turning his back on the history of the party. Certainly Gaitskell sought to shape the party into being a Gaitskellite Party rather than the Labour Party but if he had succeeded then there would have even been nothing for Blair to pick up and finish mutating into that British replica of the Democrats. You may wonder how such a vane and damaging man could have risen so high in a party when so opposed to what it stood for. One thing Brivati does show is the success Gaitskell had in the ‘dirty’ tactics that managed to manoeuvre him to this level much to the detriment of Britain but especially of the Labour Party.

Fiction
‘Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes’ by H.R.F. Keating
This is the third book in the Inspector Ghote series of novels that Keating has been publishing since 1964. The latest of the twenty-five books was published in 2009; Keating died in 2011. The edition I had was an anthology of the first three books, the other two I read last year. I can certainly say that I have no intention in reading any more of them. I often enjoy crime novels set outside the UK and have read a great deal of crime fiction written Georges Simenon, Josef Skvorecky and Leonardo Sciscia. Maybe it is because Keating is not Indian that the tone of the books for me jars badly. I constantly feel that he does not take his detective seriously enough. This may be due to the date of publication of the particular novels I have read, i.e. 1964-7, when British audiences perhaps expected a patronising attitude to Indian characters. However, not having been impressed with these stories I have no desire to risk wasting time on later ones. Of the three books in the series that I have read this one is probably the best.

The story focuses on Ghote investigating the assassination of an American scientist who is an anti-nuclear campaigner. He does this with the aid of the American’s brother, Professor Gregory Strongbow and a member of the local tourist board, Shakuntala Brown. The action takes place in Mumbai and Pune and the surrounding countryside in western India. More than in the previous two novels which focused primarily on Mumbai, Keating does give a good feel for the region in which the action takes place. There are not the unco-operative witnesses that plagued Ghote in the previous two books and come to infuriate the reader. Strongbow is awkward for Ghote to handle but the relationship between them as Ghote seeks to protect the American from being assassinated by the India First terrorist group. Ghote is taken from serving the Mumbai police to working for a shady national body. His key role is to find out what Strongbow learnt from his brother about India’s nuclear weapons programme and who is working for India First.

Much of the book is filled with Ghote battling with incidents of attack on Strongbow. The action is described well but after a while you become tired of Ghote running around after the foolish American. Ghote having to move frantically to aid a Westerner is a recurring theme of the three books and by this stage I had had enough of it. The mix of a light tone which is not humour and police procedure that becomes tiresome is why I will not be reading another Inspector Ghote book. I do like the title, however.

‘Lest Darkness Fall’ by L. Sprague De Camp
Over the years I have been ambivalent to De Camp’s work. I try not to let the author’s political views contaminate my reading of their books, but for some reason have found that harder with De Camp than other US authors of his generation. The first book of De Camp’s I read was probably his best, ‘The Goblin Tower’ (1968). It is a very good traditional fantasy story and probably one of the only books I would consider reading again. ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ (1939) is a very different novel, but of the same high quality. This book was De Camp’s first published one and is very impressive for a debut novel. It features US archaeologist Martin Padway who visiting Rome in 1939, at the time in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, is struck by lightning and is sent back to Rome in 535. His grasp of Latin and knowledge of the final decline of the Western Roman Empire means he has some advantages. However, like most time travellers he struggles to make a living and not be imprisoned or executed as a sorcerer. He also aims to prevent the destruction of the Western Roman Empire which at the time is being run by the Goths as he sees this as triggering the Dark Ages for the bulk of Europe. Consequently he begins to introduce anachronistic technology including printing, semaphore, various military tactics, the working of copper and then iron and ideas including Arabic numerals and zero, emancipation of slaves, double entry book-keeping, the concept of gravity and solarcentric astronomy in an attempt to keep the Gothic state intact and to advance society. He is steadily drawn into politics and warfare.

The skills De Camp shows in this book is in quickly creating a range of interesting characters. Sometimes these are a little too ‘light’ and the money lender looking to God all the time is almost a caricature. The women that Padway encounters and generally has unsatisfactory relationships with are interesting and well drawn for a book of the time. Having read a lot of 1940s science fiction a few years ago, I am not as surprised as I once would have been about the maturity and modernity of the writing. If you did not know you could possibly think it had been written in 1979 if not 2009. De Camp shows the challenges of trying to change a society in decline and the impact on Padway’s morality as he has to deal with distracted and violent monarchs, generals and nobles. He also shows the challenges of working in a context in which a wide range of Christianities are jostling for supremacy and Pagan views are still very much current as well. It is an enjoyable, engaging story which romps along. It is interesting to see someone intentionally creating an alternate history and the reader is left to speculate how the world will turn out differently to the one we knew. This is one of the best and most enjoyable books I have read in a long time.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 2: Large continents and deserts

Now, aside from Middle Earth and Narnia most imaginary places have far less mapping. I have been unable to find a single map of Ruritania (though you can find a print font called Ruritania, very ornate) featured in Anthony Hope's 'A Prisoner of Zenda' (1894) and 'Rupert of Hentzau' (1898).

In terms of the nature of the worlds drawn, probably the most similar to that of Tolkien and Lewis is in the Conan the Cimmerian (aka Conan the Barbarian) stories (Conan was the name of four of the Dukes of Brittany in the Middle Ages) initially by Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). They are robust epic adventures of a barbarian warrior. There are over 50 novels and other stories written by a number of authors (including L. Sprague de Camp), so search the internet if you are interested. Anyway, these stories are set on the world of Hyboria (or Hyborea). It has large continents for lots of riding across. One fascination as you can see, has been by fans to map this world over our own. Many of the names of places in the world come from our own history such as Stygia (Hercules was supposed to have cleaned the Stygian stables), Aquilonia (is reminiscient of Aquitaine, a region of South-West France), Kush (as in the Hindu Kush), Asgard (which is where the gods lived in Norse myths), the Pictish Wilderness (the Picts occupied Scotland at the time of the Romans), Corinthia (Corinth was a leading city of Ancient Greece), Argos (was the name of Jason and the Argonauts ship and is now a retail store in the UK too), Shem (is a piece of text that powers golems in Jewish legends), Ophir (is a wealthy country mentioned in the Old Testament), Iranistan is pretty self-obvious, Vendhya (like the Vindhya Mountains in west-central India; Vindhya Pradesh was a state of India 1948-56), Khitai is like the name the Byzantines gave to China and so on.

These maps of Hyboria transpose our world and our Europe onto the main imaginary continent:

A more recent world is the one created for the online gaming environment World of Warcraft which started in 2001. It has three large continents: Kalimdor in the West, Northrend, not surprisingly in the North and the Eastern Kingdoms (Lordaeron, Khaz Modan and Azeroth) in the East, with an huge maelstrom apparently between them. There are no apparent archiepelagos but lots of large islands. The Eastern Kingdoms seem particularly well endowed with no less than three inland seas with islands in them. I imagine these locations allow 'zoning' of particularly tough creatures or missions in the game. This is the world that millions of people directly or indirectly are involved in, making it have as much impact, probably, as Middle Earth and Narnia.

This seems to be the 'Underground' map of the World of Warcraft showing its transport links. From what I gather there is a steampunk element and that continents are connected by both traditional sailing ships but also airships named Zeppelins (presumably in this world Zeppelin was a gnome technician or something) and people can also fly on large bats and manticores between certain towns.

Another a large single 'continent' is a place called the Isle of Lodoss. This started as records of role-playing games in Japan from 1986 onwards but under Ryo Mizuno has evolved into manga comics and fantasy novels by various authors under the sort of umbrella designation of 'Record of Lodoss War'. Given its background in 'Dungeons & Dragons' it is probably unsurprising that it has a similar outline to Hyboria. It is difficult to judge scale and given the title 'Isle' or 'Island' maybe this would be more accurate placed in the islands and archipelagos posting, but I will leave it here for now:

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950; the author of 'Tarzan') envisioned civilizations on planets in our solar system, notably Barsoom which was their version of Mars. Here are a couple of maps of what he envisoned its geography to be, the latter with an overlay of actual places on our Mars with their names in red compared to the Barsoomian blue ones. The books were serialised in comics shown by the first sate but then turned into novels which are the second dates I give for them: 'A Princess of Mars' (1912/1917), 'The Gods of Mars' (1913/1918), 'The Warlord of Mars' (1913-14/1919), 'Thuvia, Maid of Mars' (1916/1920), 'The Chessmen of Mars' (1922/1922), 'The Master Mind of Mars' (1927/1928), 'A Fighting Man of Mars' (1930/1931), 'Swords of Mars' (1934-5/1936), 'Synthetic Men of Mars' (1939/1940), 'Llana of Gathol' (1940/1948). Then John Coleman Burroughs took over: 'John Carter and the Giant of Mars' (1941/1964) and 'Skeleton Men of Jupiter' (1943 - no novel). Burroughs also produced a series set on Venus and there have been seven novels set in his Pellucidar, a land at beneath the Earth's crust, in line with the hollow Earth theories of the first half of the 20th century, including even a crossover with Tarzan going there. Burroughs also produced 'The Land that Time Forgot' (1918) and 'The People that Time Forgot' (also 1918) turned into movies in 1975 and 1977 respectively about an island inhabited by dinosaurs and cavepeople (very much like Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World' (1912) and more recently 'Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time' by James Gurney (1992) and 19 sequels and other books set there by him and other authors that have followed).

The science ficiton and fantasy author Michael Moorcock has said he was very influenced by Burroughs and once edited a Tarzan magazine. However, as we will see, Moorcock's world of the Young Kingdoms is in sharp contrast to the desert Barsoom. More in that category is the world of Arrakis, created by Frank Herbert (1920-1986) in the 'Dune' series. In his books (and as with other successful science fiction authors others have taken up his world after his death), 'Dune' (1986), 'Dune Messiah (1969), 'Children of Dune' (1976), 'God Emperor of Dune' (1981), 'Heretics of Dune' (1984) and 'Chapterhouse: Dune' (1985) he featured this desert world and much of the culture draws on Arabic and Islamic culture with words like Padishah (similar to the Turkish and Egyptian leaders called Pashas and the Persian/Iranian Shahs though it is portrayed as a dynastic name), Fedaykin (from the word Fedayeen for an elite guerilla fighter, which is coming back into use in current affairs, outside Herbert's worlds because of its use by Islamist fighters) and Sardaukar coming from Arabic language (though searching the internet these days you would have thought Herbert invented them himself), Zensunni (which combines Zen Buddhism with Sunni Islam).

It is quite refreshing to have a world not so shaped by North European-North American outlooks. There are a few other influences such as in the Landsraad (reminiscent of the German Landsrat parliament) and the rival Houses are rather like those of Renaissance Italy. Though there are masses of websites devoted to the Dune setting, few seem to run to maps, I suppose a huge desert does not open up many opportunities for the kind of rivers and mountains fantasy mapmakers love. This then is a map of the Arrakis, central to the Dune cycle; followed by the one from the board game produced by Avalon Hill in 1979 which is much more colourful:

In terms of availability (and you can tell when you have lots of fans because they will map your worlds for you), probably tied next with Howard et al and Hyboria, is Anne McCaffrey with Pern - her world of dragonriders which features in a whole series of novels by her and her son Todd: Dragonflight (1968), 'Dragonquest' (1970), 'Dragonsong' (1976), 'Dragonsinger' (1977), 'The White Dragon' (1978), 'Dragondrums' (1979), 'Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern' (1983), 'Nerillka's Story' (1986), 'Dragonsdawn' (1988), 'The Renegades of Pern' (1989), 'All the Weyrs of Pern' (1991), 'The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall' (1993), 'The Dolphins of Pern' (1994), 'Red Star Rising' (also known as 'Dragonseye', 1997), 'The Masterharper of Pern' (1998), 'The Skies of Pern' (2001), 'Dragon's Kin' (2003), 'Dragonsblood' (2005), 'Dragon Harper' (2007), 'After the Fall' (2008). There have been short stories and some of these books are anthologies. The stories mix science fiction of arrivals on a planet with fantasy elements of dragon riding. As you can see, McCaffrey's world has large continents but also sea and that moves us into the next category of world's which I will look at in the following posting.

The final one which seemed to me pretty much like Pern is Glorantha. This was the setting of the game 'Runequest' a fantasy role-playing game which was the second most popular after 'Dungeons & Dragons' and aimed to have a more distinctive culture from the reliance on elves, dwarfs, trolls and dragons. Note that Pern has its 'Passes' as eras and you can read about Middle Earth in its Third Age, well Glorantha was set in its Second Age, possibly to reflect that it was modelled on Bronze Age rather than Medieval culture, (which I guess could be seen as a continuation of the Iron Age in terms of metallurgy so the third age after the Stone and Bronze Ages) used in so many fantasy worlds. Like Pern there is a central sea and large continents North and South, but like the worlds seen in my next post it also has islands. The third map is a political one of the northern continent, Genertela.