Books I Read In December

Fiction
'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman
I saw that they were televising a series of this book so I thought it might be an idea to read it. Despite being a long book not much happens. The story involves Shadow, an ex-convict who is employed by Odin to aid him in rallying other gods brought to the USA by settlers down the millennia. For much of the time Shadow lives in a small village by a lake when not being employed by Odin and encounters a range of interesting people as well as being bothered by his late wife who he inadvertently raised from the dead and who kills people who threaten him. There is an interesting concept that places and activities are imbued with belief and Gaiman features local attractions which become filled with power because people come to them. The basic concept overlaps with 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul' (1988) by Douglas Adams which was published 13 years earlier but relocating to dreary backwater towns in the USA gives Gaiman a chance to add the new twist of old gods against new gods of technology and other facets of contemporary society. While the plot drifts for far too long, there is a decent twist and above all, Gaiman writes interesting characters and portrays unexciting US settings well. Thus, despite the fantastical element there is a real lack of urgency about this book and it is, ironically, best read as a 'slice of life' novel. I cannot imagine this would make exciting watching unless you are a fan of Mike Leigh movies, but I see they are on to the third season of the TV series so I can only imagine they have long ago diverged from the novel.

'Now is the Time' by Melvyn Bragg
I once read an interview with Bragg in which he wished his novels were just a little more successful. He seems to get long listed for awards but very rarely wins. Having read this novel I can understand why. The novel is around the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Bragg shows it from various perspectives on both sides of the conflict and certainly you can learn a lot about what went on and who was involved. I particularly found the descriptions of London at the time very interesting. However, it is all written in an unsophisticated way with lots of telling rather than showing and somehow detached from the characters. Even when Wat Tyler's daughter is raped by London criminals released during the revolt, you do not feel the way you should about this. In many ways the book reminded me of novels by Henry Treece (1911-66) who wrote numerous historical novels for children. Thus, though there are points of interest, there is a lack of genuine drama in the novel and at the end you feel like you have read a lesson rather than a novel. Bragg should look to the work of Bernard Cornwell in how to add that dramatic element to scrupulously researched fiction.

'Aqua Alta' by Donna Leon
In this fifth book in the Guido Brunetti series, Leon returns to two characters from the first novel, 'Death at La Fenice' (1992), opera singer Flavia Petrelli and her female partner, archaeologist Brett Lynch. When Lynch is beaten up, Brunetti involves himself in the case which soon turns into one involving murder and faked archaeological artefacts. It is set against the backdrop of both the 'aqua alta', the flooding of Venice caused by high tides and heavy rain and the sense that those in privileged positions continue to get away with their crimes. This applies to Lynch as much as the antique collector. As noted with the previous novel, Leon appears to have got into her stride with these novels and they rise far about the first couple. The book is brisk, provides interesting details about both Venice and archaeology in China as well as setting the story in the amoral context of contemporary Italy that appears so attractive for crime novelists even those writing in English. I have five more of these novels to read. Leon continues churning them out and the 29th comes out in 2020.

'Counting Up, Counting Down' by Harry Turtledove
Around the time this book came out in 2002, I had been thinking of writing a short story about a man who travels back in time to try to improve his own life. Then I heard of the two stories at the start and end of this book, which in fact are the same story seen from the older and younger versions of the same man, Justin Kloster travelling from 2018 to 1999. The ending of these stories turns out was far more positive than the one I planned which would have ended up rather like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) movie. It brought home to me that especially if writing in a particular genre it is easy for authors to come up with similar stories of their own accord. The two stories are reasonable if a little frustrating. One interesting things are what Turtledove (originally writing this as a magazine story in the 1990s) got wrong about 2018, i.e. The Rolling Stones are still touring, 'South Park' is still very well known even by teenagers and the fad for body piercing has not waned in the slightest, in fact it has increased.

The rest of the stories in this collection are quite a mixed bag.  Despite what I have been told about my alternate history short story anthologies, there is demand for such collections. Not all of the stories are alternate history, there is some science fiction and fantasy too. There is far more sex than I had expected from reading other books by Turtledove and with religion this is a key theme through the collection. 'Vermin' about a Christian community struggling as settlers on an alien planet is well done and highlights the grave consequences of seeking comfort just for yourself or your community. Other science fiction ones are oddities, 'The Deconstruction Gang' about philosophers discussing breaking up a road, 'The Green Buffalo' about cowboys slipping through a rift in time to kill a triceratops for food and 'The Maltese Elephant', a pastiche of 'The Maltese Falcon' (novel 1930; movie 1941) are alright but not hugely engaging.

'Ils Ne Passeront Pas' conjures up the Verdun front in 1916 very well, but then, for no clear reason, throws creatures from the Biblical apocalypse at French and German soldiers, ultimately without much changing. This like 'In This Season' a magical realist story about a small number of Jews escaping Poland following the German occupation in 1939 with the aid of a golem, again has religious elements that I probably miss out on. 'After the Last Elf is Dead' is more fantastical, but equally grim, seeing a world where the evil Dark Brother has been victorious and showing the challenges even for his loyal staff which reminded me of Stalin's regime and has a very unsettling conclusion which, though, does show the likely outcome if evil does win in a fantasy setting.

Seemingly more light-hearted than those grim stories is 'Honeymouth', a fantasy story about a disreputable rider of a unicorn and while sex features in the other stories it is right at the front in this fantasy one as the title might suggest. 'Miss Manner's Guide to Greek Missology #1: Andromeda and Perseus' is interesting in reversing the roles in the stories, but I always find attempts at humour in these situations is laboured and dates poorly. 'Goddess for a Day' despite sounding like a story title set to primary school children is the best of the fantasy stories, showing the challenges of a woman employed to act as Athena, in an actual event which occurred in the 6th Century CE.

Two reasonable stories focused on religion are set in Turtledove's Videssos fantasy setting, similar to the Byzantine Empire on which he was a scholar. The first, 'The Decoy Duck' about a missionary to a nordic style land will remind readers of a very similar sub-plot in the TV series, 'Vikings' (2013-20) and given it was written long before that may have been an inspiration for it. The second, 'The Seventh Chapter' is unexciting, largely a procedural that primarily tells us more about the world Turtledove has created and religion within it.

Of the alternate histories, 'Must and Shall' set in 1942 but one in which the Union was far harsher on the Confederate States following the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, is well done as detectives seek the German weapons being sent to southern states to trigger an uprising. 'Ready for the Fatherland' is set in 1979 in Croatia in a world where Field Marshal Manstein assassinated Hitler in 1943, held back the Soviet counter-attacks and crushed the Anglo-American landing in France so a stalemate developed across Europe with the Germans and their puppet states persisting. There is a nice reference to a scene from 'The Guns of Navarone' (1961) movie and a passing one to 'Force 10 from Navarone' (1978). 'The Phantom Tolbutkin' features another similar scenario but with Ukrainian resistance fighters in the occupied USSR and turns a good twist.

Non-Fiction
'Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War' by Nigel West [Rupert Allason]

This book is probably unnecessary now, but when it came out in 1984 it proved a good corrective to the numerous books that had been appearing in the 1970s and early 1980s about spying during the Second World War. It showed me that 'Bodyguard of Lies' (1975) which I have on my shelf is riddled with errors. It also shows how without care historians can perpetuate mistakes through successive books. West looks at a number of claims in books of the time, among others, that a German spy in Orkney Islands allowed the sinking of HMS 'Royal Oak' when berthed there, that Admiral Canaris, head of German military intelligence provided material to the Allies but had also met Mata Hari, who was behind the Soviet spy ring in Switzerland during the war and whether Churchill had foreknowledge of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Most of the cases prove to be less dramatic than historians have made out and often came down to a combination of human, signals and codebreaking intelligence. As time had passed since the war, more identities of spies came out, also allowing corrections of misapprehensions. 

This is another book which would have been better for me to have read when I bought it 30+ years ago. M.R.D. Foot, the historian of S.O.E. (who I met once) was rather sniffy about this book, in part I think because West highlights some mistakes Foot made. Thus, you rather feel this book is a bit of revenge by West against authors who have too easily accepted certain stories without doing the necessary cross-checking. Allason himself is now 68 and Foot died in 2012 at the age of 92, so that element is largely irrelevant now. What I would suggest is that this short book (166 pages) should be given to people starting History degrees to alert them to how easily it is not simply to make errors, especially when based on assumptions, but to perpetuate them. If like me you are working your way through old books on the Second World War, it is also useful to have this as an accompanying corrective especially to the more exciting claims made in those books.

Are Authors Vampires of Others' Lives?

A couple of months back in 'The Guardian' newspaper and elsewhere there was commentary on how authors take revenge on people.  The latest in a long list (and foolishly I have lost the articles which have named historic examples), is Jonathan Franzen who in 'Freedom' passes a harsh comment on fellow author Ian McEwan's novel 'Atonement'.  I have found an article from 'The Independent' listing some others: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/poison-pens-the-art-of-literary-revenge-2107142.html  These include Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century ridiculing a love-rival and more recently novelist Jilly Cooper featuring a goat named after a critic of hers from twenty years earlier in her recent novel 'Jump' (2010).  Melvyn Bragg included a caricature of interviewer Lynn Barber in his 1992 novel 'Crystal Rooms' following an awkward interview between them two years earlier; Sebastian Faulks apparently caricatured reviewer D.J Taylor in his novel 'A Week in December' (2009) and Taylor did the same in return in his 'At the Chime of the City Clock' published this year.  There has been commentary that now rather than be subtle in doing it, especially to reviewers, authors simply send a harsh tweet such as Alison Flood and Alain de Botton last year.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am often frustrated that people are able to do bad things to me, especially to impugn me with impunity.  Though it is a painless form of revenge, I have got some recompense from treating versions of these people in bad ways in my writing, though I have kept those stories off this blog.  It can be unhealthy to focus your stories in this way if you let the revenge taking dominate, but it other ways it is useful.  The behaviour of these people is never unique to them and you can be sure that many of your readers will have met people who behave in the same foolish or nasty ways.  It also allows you to have a believable element to your 'villains' and for personal experience I know it can be very satisfying to feel that at least in one context, you have some revenge. 

I think the concept of Karma and of 'vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord' come about because most of us get no chance to get any come-back against those who treat us badly so our only compensation is that sometime in the future, probably when we are not around to witness those who do us bad will have to pay.  In fact, they probably never will, but that is hard for us to accept.  This world, especially UK society today is unfair.  We live in the time that the rich and privileged benefit at the expense of the rest of us.  The bad are winning out with little chance for the good people to regain anything; just look how badly nurses and the elderly who have given their all, suffer. These days so many people are self-centred, and even worse, self-righteous with it, meaning that not only can they not see the perspective of anyone else they also feel that you are wrong not to totally accept their personal viewpoint of how the world should be.  In particular they love you to 'recant' outlining in detail and length how wrong you have been.  In such circumstances, to retain any self-respect, we either need faith in divine or natural justice or to find a safe way to take revenge.

Taking revenge in the fiction you write is an explicit way of drawing real people into your writing, often the one that people look out for.  However, it is not that uncommon a process, it happens constantly in all fiction.  Whilst we may conjure up exotic and alien characters, the bulk of how we portray them is based on the accumulation of what the author has seen of real people or read about them in others' books whether fiction or non-fiction or seen in other media, notably these days, movies.  All of these sources give us a sense of how people behave.  A friend of mine, himself a non-fiction writer, accused me of stealing people's lives to use in my writing.  His accusation was that he was more honest in his use of the lives of others often for legal reasons, compelled to gain his subjects' approval before writing about them.  He felt I was exploitative and devious in using people, often many more than he did, without seeking their approval first.

Given that I am not a prolific author, nor a successful one, I seem to get more than my fair share of people telling me how I should write and criticising me for now doing it the way they feel is not only advisable but necessary.  Back in 2008 I commented on the other friend who complained if I wrote about anything I had not directly experienced and certainly from the perspective of any character who was of a different age, gender or ethnicity than myself.  See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/06/authors-writing-and-internet.html  I know there were critiques in the 1970s of writing the history of a culture that was not your own leading to the development of what came to be known as 'subaltern history', i.e. the history of peoples ruled over by others written by descendants just of those people.  Personally I welcome histories from every perspective.  I would also be careful in drawing such lines and saying that particular perspectives are somehow 'better'.  I am a descendant of my grandfather, one among many, but who is to say that I understand his life or could write his history any better than say an anthropologist from India who had made a particular study of white, skilled working class men living in North London in the mid-20th century?  I see legitimacy not only in anyone's story but in anyone's telling of anyone else's story.  This may be controversial, but I fear that unless we have a broad view on what is 'permissible' in writing and other media, we will choke off so much good (and bad) art.  Should Ang Lee have been barred from directing 'Sense and Sensibility' (1995), David Cronenberg from directing 'Eastern Promises' (2007); should Sebastian Faulks have been blocked from writing many of his novels, because he is not French; should Nicole Jordan be barred from writing historical romance because she lives in the 21st century not the 18th; should Anne Rice be blocked from writing about vampires because she is not one?  We certainly would have no 'Watership Down' (1972) until a rabbit could operate a wordprocessor and 'Star Wars' could never had been legitimately produced in this galaxy under such regulations.

Authors draw on everything that interests them, everything they see, hear, touch, taste and smell.  They draw on other writers' stories, but above all they draw on human life.  Authors are human, they are flawed.  They fill their books with assumptions and prejudices as everyone else does.  Of course, we would spurn those fuelling hatred in what they write, but it is important to understand why they write it not simply say everything should be censored.  Humans are constant story tellers, diarists even lie to their diaries, but everything that is written, in particular for novels, draws on an author's take on the world and the people they meet in it.  There is exploitation, but fiction authors do not somehow drain away the souls of the people they feature in their stories.  As it is, most often, even when historical or contemporary characters appear under their own names, they are presented as the author sees them, not as they or their loved ones might see them.  However, saying that, how different do people appear in different biographies of them?  Even those trying to adhere to non-fiction, cannot but help putting elements of themselves and their perspectives into their books, if simply by choosing what to include.

Perhaps I have been more challenged about the intellectual basis of my fiction writing than the average amateur author is.  I imagine that the many tens of thousands of people writing fiction in their homes possibly at their very moment have to justify how they go about conjuring up the tens, the hundreds of fictional characters they create in the way that I have done.  Perhaps I have been apologetic for too long and should be more assertive that like every other author, I will take fragments, some large, some small from dozens of people I meet and will then blend them together into my characters.  Sometimes, yes, like the authors seeking revenge, I will bring almost an entire person into my writing, but I trust that my humanity means I only do it in retribution and my use of them will be minor compared to the distress they have inflicted on me.  In particular, I am no bestseller, no Booker prize winner, so my revenges (and there have been very few) will have a very limited audience.  However, even if the audience is simply me, it helps my state of mind to get a little bit back from being treated unjustly.  Perhaps authors are vampires, but like vampires, in most cases we only tend to take a little from each person and it is what sustains us in what we do.