Books I Read In April

 Fiction

'Fools and Mortals' by Bernard Cornwell

Having been disappointed by the Grail Quest (2000-03) books I read and finding 'The Fort' (2010) and the Starbuck (1993-96) tetralogy alright but not outstanding, I was eager to see Cornwell getting back to the kind of quality that is seen in his Sharpe series. This book, set in 1595-96 and seen through the eyes of William Shakespeare's brother, Richard, proved to be both engaging and refreshing. For Cornwell to be writing about a group of actors at the time when William Shakespeare was working on 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is a departure from the war stories he typically writes. There is intrigue and some fights, but the rehearsing and running of however, Cornwell puts his attention to historical detail - which can he never neglects - to really good use in this novel. It highlights the challenges of setting up and sustaining a theatre company; the challenges of being censored and negotiating with patrons. Richard is a performer of women's parts, as women were not permitted to act until 1660 but is ageing and is seeking ways to continue his career as he has to shift into male roles. All round, Cornwell balanced all these factors very deftly, while giving a real sense of jeopardy and at the same time richly conjuring up London of the late 16th Century. I think keeping it to quite a narrow focus allowed that richness to come out. I certainly feel that this was the best Bernard Cornwell book I have read in a long time and would certainly recommend it.

'Void Moon' by Michael Connelly

This is the last of the Connelly novels that I have been given. This one features Cassie Black a woman who with her lover, used to rob successful gamblers at Las Vegas casinos. On probation she has got a good job working for a Porsche dealership in Los Angeles. However, news about her daughter she was compelled to give up for adoption drives her to seek the 'one last job' to get funds. This job turns out to be much more complex than it first appears and soon involves two organised criminal bodies competing for the money. Connelly is very adept at representing the Nevada and California areas he clearly knows well. This novel is fast paced, alternating between Cassie's perspective and that of Jack Karch who is put on Cassie's trail by the owner of the casino that she robs from this time. It does manage to avoid slipping into many of the tropes we know around Las Vegas crimes, though there are perhaps one too many crashing through the glass roofs of casinos.

It is a stark, hard boiled environment. The details of Cassie breaking into the target room and overcoming all the security measures, is rightly praised by reviewers. The tone of that 'clinical' approach is repeatedly brought home as Karch tortures and kills without compunction as he hunts down Cassie. However, the US penal system is also an antagonist. Cassie is seen by her probation officer as being ambivalent in her responses, even though she is holding down a good job and this is sufficient for her to get an unannounced; armed visit from the probation officer. Cassie's partner on her last robbery was killed by being thrown from a hotel room window. While Cassie was far away from him at the time, under US law, because they were together on a criminal activity it is her who gets charged with his manslaughter. This sense that the justice system latches on to perpetrators and piles on whatever charges seem in even quite removed vicinity to the criminal and seeks to punish at all stages, rather than rehabilitate comes through very sharply in this novel. That harsh regime does provide motives but will jump out for UK readers as being alien.

Overall a crisp thriller that aside from a few points comes over as credible and engaging. It would make a great movie. While she is probably too old for the role now, but if Jennifer Lopez had played Cassie in line with her performance in 'Out of Sight' (1998), it would have been something worth watching.

'God Save the Queen' by Kate Locke [Kathryn Smith]

This is sort of a steampunk novel. It is set in the 2012 but in a world in which the Black Death mutated turning aristocratic people into vampires or werewolves. Queen Victoria, a vampire, is still on the throne of Britain. There are 'halvies', people born to concubines with traits of a vampire or a werewolf but also of humanity, like a 'daywalker' in the Blade series. There are also 'goblins' who combine werewolf and vampire traits but are confined to cannibalism in the sewers. The bulk of the population are humans who after a failed uprising in 1932, live very Victorian existences in a desultory world in which the aristocracy party. Technology has advanced but is different in style, so mobile phones are 'rotaries'. Clothing is still very Victorian or 1980s Gothic. 

The protagonist, Xandra Vardan is a member of the Royal Guard and her siblings work for the police and a private security firm. Children of a lord, they have a privileged existence, but in detective work and security are faced with the challenges of this society. Xandra is drawn into investigating the apparent murder of her sister, Dee, after being confined to the New Bedlam insane asylum. She is soon mixed up in an entanglement of conspiracies with some seeking to overthrow the regime and others experimenting on halfie children to try to produce better strains. Throughout she is uncertain both on who to trust and who she might betray herself. There are dramatic scenes as she tries to find the truth and hares through London to do it. There is also a nice romance between Xandra and the Scottish lord who is head of the werewolves, which in the hands of another author would have been handled differently, but Locke handles honestly, so providing a nice counterpoint to the entwined conspiracies.

Locke is Canadian and a professed Anglophile. She almost goes too far in levering in London slang and phrases. However, for non-British readers, I imagine this adds to the sense of this alien world. I spotted to elements that jar with this. In the UK 'French doors' are actually known as 'French windows' and no-one over here pours syrup on bacon! Aside from that, I found this novel growing on me as I went through it. At times it seemed a bit too much but steadily it comes together. The world building while drawing perhaps on some over-used tropes, is successful. However, Locke does not need to provide all the details, especially the complex genetic stuff at the end, to justify what she has portrayed. She needed to have more faith that the reader could come along with her without having a lesson. Locke is a prolific author, under a string of names, producing 39 novels, 2001-2022, mixing romance, modern fantasy and steampunk. If I come across any more of her books I would certainly buy them as, if nothing else, an old Goth cannot resist the styles in them!

'Nemesis' by Bill Napier

While Locke gave quite a bit of detail on genetics in an appendix, Napier piles in mathematical formulae in the body of his text. This is a weird mixture, being, if it was a movie, along the lines of  'Armageddon' (1998) meets 'Seven Days in May' (1964) and in part 'The Da Vinci Code' (2006 from 2003 novel) though that was produced after this book was published in 1998. It appears that the Russians, following a military coup in the 1990s, have altered the course of an asteroid so that it crashes into the centre of the USA. A team of Americans, along with a British astronomer Oliver Webb whose point of view we most see through, are brought together to identify the asteroid and work out how to divert it. There is a great deal of tension in the team, which is not handled subtly. 

There is a lot of science and mathematics in the early sections of the book as we are told about asteroids and meteorites; the damage such a collision would provide; what the impact on sea in terms of different levels of tsunami and climate would be and why you cannot simply blast an asteroid apart. There is not simply exposition, but there is also formulae as if we might want to work it all out for ourselves. As the book progresses, the thriller element increases. One of the team is murdered and we see Americans conspiring to use the incident to trigger a nuclear war anyway and then Webb goes to Italy to track down the manuscript of a Renaissance astronomer who may have identified the most likely candidate for the asteroid. He gets mixed up in brutal killings, with prostitutes, a cabaret and everything Napier can throw at it. 

There is perhaps a good idea somewhere in this book, but there is simply far too much going on and Napier does not seem to be entirely in control of it. I could almost imagine this book being written by a team each trying to get their bit in. Yes, we want to see that the disaster portrayed in the book is a credible one and that suggestions we might come up with would not work. However, we do not need mathematics and extensive sections about energy calculations in water and so on. The idea of it being revealed in a historic text works well, but Napier goes off on such an extreme situation that it morphs into yet another kind of book. We are not really sure of his age or his nature. At times he is bookish and geekish at others more of an action hero than Robert Langdon with a librarian throwing herself at him in messages who we do not ever see in person. There is probably enough in here for two or three different books. I have another thriller by Napier on my shelf and I wonder if it is handled any better than this one.

Non-Fiction

'Gestapo' by Rupert Butler

Published in 1981 this is one of those populist history books, often about aspects of the Second World War, that were numerous in the 1970s. While what it says is accurate, the style is far from academic. It is really a series of vignettes about the Gestapo and its activities across the life of the organisation. If it was a television programme then it would be a 'docu-drama' as Butler produces incidents and especially dialogue that we can guess occurred but of which there is no record. As the book progresses, the focus on the Gestapo itself becomes looser and we see things from the side of the Abwehr; the Resistance especially in France and Denmark and the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich as much as we see things from Gestapo perspective. Many of these incidents are well known anyway. Perhaps the most interesting elements are the less commonly aired ones. 

There is interesting material on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and on the struggle between various German agencies in the running of France; the coverage of the Venlo Incident and Operation Valkyrie are pretty well handled too. It might seem odd to say that a book about such a sinister organisation is easy to 'dip into', but because of this vignette approach, that is the case. This is a useful book if you were thinking of writing a story set during the Nazi regime and wanted to get up to speed about the secret police machinery without going into more detailed, academic sources. I guess books like this which used to be sold as more in Woolworths or newsagents than bookshops effectively have been replaced by Channel 5 and Netflix documentaries these days hence them not being published in the way they were 40 years ago.

Books I Read In February

 Fiction

'Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke

A huge (782-page) hardback copy of this book was given to me by a big fan of the novel. His tastes sum up the nature of the book. While he likes science fiction and fantasy novels and movies, he is also a fan of Anthony Trollope and Vikram Seth. This book is fantasy novel, set 1806-1817 but in a world where magic is real and for a large part of the Middle Ages, England was divided into two kingdoms with the northern one ruled from Newcastle by John Uskglass, the so-called Raven King, a man trained in magic while in Faerie as a child. The style of the novel is that of Austen (more 'Mansfield Park' than 'Pride and Prejudice'), Dickens and indeed Trollope, though without the humour. As the title of the book might suggest, like an early 19th Century novel it focuses on the relationship between the two eponymous men. There is action and some adventure, especially in the closing stages but a lot of the book is about how the two characters revive English Magic - other parts of the world remain devoid of it - and their increasingly different views on how it should be treated.

Neither man is a hero. Gilbert Norrell wants a personal monopoly on magic and works hard to buy up every book from the 'golden' and 'silver' ages of magic of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. He tries to clamp down on any practitioners, including his own servants. In contrast Strange wants to acknowledge past contact with Faerie; make use of routes between mirrors; widen access to magic and so seeks to publish books and establish schools of magic. Yet, his ambitions also lead him to be neglectful of his lovely wife who is abducted by a Faerie king who is never named but intervenes throughout the book for his own selfish, indeed wicked aims. Both magicians work for the government and some of the most interesting scenes are when Strange goes abroad (Norrell keeps very much to his house now in London) to work with the army in the Peninsular War and later many of the exceptional genuine incidents of the Battle of Waterloo are explained as being the result of Strange's magic.

Some of the minor characters are particularly interesting. Stephen Black is a black butler of Sir Walter Pole, the politician whose fiancée Norrell brings back to life as a way of becoming established in London society but at a huge cost in terms of the deal he has to make with the unnamed faerie king. Black becomes a protégée of this king who constantly drags him off to dreary festivities in his kingdom but because he cannot understand 19th Century society is convinced Stephen will become King of England. Both Lady Pole and Arabella Strange become ensnared by and suffer at the hands of this faerie king. The theme of women suffering both psychologically and physically due to the ambitions of their husbands is one that runs right through the novel. John Childermass, Norrell's valet who is developing his own magic skills and Vinculus a street magician are also interesting characters. I felt the novel strengthened when Black and Childermass becomes more of protagonists.

The strength of the novel is the world building that Clarke does, both portraying society of the time and the actual politicians with the mixing in of a magic world - reinforced by numerous lengthy footnotes to books and legends from this alternate world. If you are into mainstream fantasy rather than 19th Century society novels, then the pace will feel very slow. In addition, the focus on the tensions between the two magicians might seem unexciting unless you found 'Mansfield Park' engaging. The work that went into it and the deftness with story telling and skilful pastiche writing are to be admired, especially as this was Clarke's first book. I am interested to read 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories' (2006) set in the same universe but with a focus on women.

'The Wild Wood' by Charles de Lint

Given that he has published 28 novels since 1984 in addition to novellas and young adult fiction, I was really surprised that I had never seen a book by De Lint ever before. I can only put this down to him being Canadian and not read by people in the places I have lived. Picking up this book from a charity stand in a supermarket, I thought it was simply a contemporary novel. In part it is. It is set in an area of Canada which I thought was near the Ontario-Quebec border, but seems to be fictional. It is about a painter who has relocated to a remote forested area into a wooden house built by neighbours who she is relatively close to, though they are spread out over quite a geographical area of forest and lake, though within relatively easy drive of some urban centres. What I was unaware of is that De Lint is seen as the originator of urban fantasy and this book soon turns out to be a magic realist novel. There are gritty aspects of Eithnie's youth - notably a miscarriage - and especially that of her cousin, Sharleen, who becomes a support as things turn weird for Eithnie.

If you know that De Lint writes fantastical stories then you quickly understand that the stalker is not a human threat; this is not going to to turn into a horror-thriller with her trying to escape a murderer in remote woodlands. Instead spirits of the polluted forest and lakes are seeking to have humans who will support them going into the future. Eithnie is originally terrified by them but learns to get on with natural spirits on a visit to two artist friends in Arizona. Then the book goes off the deep end and really should carry some warning. As it does not, at least in the edition I have, I will alert you to the fact that eventually Eithnie is impregnated by a wooden man/tree spirit and ends up having its child. I do not know what the plant version of bestiality is, but this is what happens in this book. In line with stories around Faerie, which this explicitly becomes, the child will not remain in our world but go into the spirit world as a bridge.

There are some bits of the book which are pleasant. The portrayal of the Canadian wilderness is evocative. The characters and the interactions between them are believable. This could have been a decent contemporary novel about an artist refinding their inspiration and having a nice relationship with her mysterious but handsome and manly neighbour. However, it takes a turn into something quite different which is intentionally unsettling, even though packaged up (both in terms of the story and the cover) in a rather twee context. Maybe it was a good thing I had not come across De Lint's work before and I will certainly not be seeking it out. The one plus point about this book is that in my edition it is only 205 pages long. I often mourn that science fiction and fantasy books, unlike in the late 1960s/early 1970s are rarely tolerated as being that concise and I wish more were. Maybe De Lint was allowed to get away with it as on the surface this looks like literary fiction rather than fantasy. It maybe because it started out as part of a collection commissioned in 1994 by Brian Foud. This novel as a standalone book does caution me to read up on authors before I buy their books, even if from a charity stand.

'The Poet' by Michael Connelly

I had not realised that Connelly had published this book in 1996 while still producing the Harry Bosch series. There are references to the series of murders featured in this novel in other Connelly books. The main character is Jack McEvoy a crime feature journalist for a newspaper in Denver. When his twin brother, a murder detective, is found apparently having committed suicide, close to where their sister drowned, McEvoy begins to investigate. Soon her uncovers a whole series of apparent suicides by murder detectives leading on various cases featuring murders of children or people associated with the care of children. The book alternates between McEvoy traipsing across the USA, for the most part in the company of FBI agents and a paedophile and murderer named William Gladden who may be connected to the murders McEvoy is looking into but in what way, even when he becomes the prime suspect, we do not know. It is never pleasant reading from the perspective of a criminal in detective stories, but especially this one who is open about his abuse of children and remains with the corpse of an adult victim over a period of days. 

I can see why Connelly introduced the Gladden aspect as in general this is not a particularly exciting book. Yes we expect some police procedure but here we get police, FBI and journalistic procedure. There is a lot of McEvoy sitting around in hotel rooms connecting his computer's modem them disconnecting it so he can make lots of phonecalls. The faked suicide though intriguing seems very contrived. There are some moments of tension and action towards the end and a good twist. However, you have had to wade through a lot of stuff to get to these parts. The relationship between the protagonist and a ballsy female FBI agent feels very stereotypical; almost Connelly's default setting. The expanse of the case really weakens the gritty immediacy of Connelly's best stories; too much in this is down the end of a phoneline.

Non-Fiction

'The Nation State and National Self-Determination' by Alfred Cobban

In theory the edition I bought of this book was the 1969 revised edition of Cobban's 1945 book. However, aside from some scanty sections on self-determination in Asia and Africa in the 1940s-60s, throughout it was difficult to tell where at all it had been updated. Though the section on nations within the USSR was sound, Soviet suppression of nationalities in Eastern Europe was not developed. The strongest parts of the book are around the development of nationalism in the late 19th Century and especially in terms of the contradictory imposition of it through the Peace Treaties of 1919-20; 1923 and the Nazi abuse of the concept. The population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s and the ejection of Germans from Eastern European states in 1945, are not featured or insufficiently.

The book keeps coming back to the philosophical and intellectual roots of self-determination. As Cobban admits many of his arguments are circular yet he tends to go through them again and again, such as how pragmatic in terms of economy and borders peacemakers should be; seeing whether self-determination requires or drives on democracy; asking how 'far' self-determination can go, for example, in terms of nations such as the Welsh, Bretons and Catalans - though in the latter case utterly neglecting Franco's suppression of regionalism. In a very colonialist attitude, even in the largely post-colonial age by 1969, he portrays much African nationalism as tribal. He recognises that colonialism has lumped together various tribes and divided others but in contrast to his portrayal of Europe, sees this as something the new African countries have to deal with pragmatically not through self-determination. He makes no mention of the confederations attempted in Africa and the Middle East. He gets very confused by the Israel/Palestine situation and seems overly optimistic of a multi-nation solution. 

On US foreign/imperial policy Cobban presents a false picture of it having abandoned its interventionism of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, whereas in the name of the Cold War direct and indirect intervention across the Caribbean, Central and Southern America became even more active than before and indeed a kind of Monroe Doctrine was extended to the oil regions of the Middle East under the Eisenhower Doctrine.

I can understand why there was a need to update this book. However, the revisions were highly limited and even before getting on to post-1945 there are odd ellipses which simply multiply when Cobban is addressing the Cold War era as if while he could disentangle the complexities of the inter-war era he was at a loss in the post-1945 contexts. The philosophical element which could have endured through the decades is circular and consequently weak anyway. The value in this book is primarily around the different pressures on and from self-determination at the time of the post-First World War peace treaties.

Books I Read In January

 Fiction

'Blood Work' by Michael Connelly

This was the first non-Harry Bosch book I had read by Connelly. It has many of the same traits, being set in California and having a grittiness about it, that is reminiscent of 'hard boiled' crime novels of the mid-20th Century. However, he has tried to adopt a slightly different approach in having a former FBI investigator being asked by the sister of the dead woman who provided his heart transplant to investigate her murder. While the character Terry McCaleb lives on a boat, like Sonny Crockett in 'Miami Vice' (1984-90) though this one is rather a worn down one which belonged to his father, he has no legal standing and has to rely on favours especially from an old friend in the sheriff's office. As might be expected the killing during a hold-up proves to be more than it first appears and connected to a number of other killings.

The motivation for the killing does seem rather contorted and the signposts, retrospectively seem very blatant. However, the difficulty of trying to investigate without even the powers a US private investigator has and a man who is far from healthy, is an interesting approach; for much of the book he has to be driven around by his neighbour who keeps pushing his nose into the investigation. There are some interesting scenes when he is trying to get information illicitly and is running up against opposition from the police and those connected to the victims. It is pretty good on the impact of an apparently random killing on the people left behind. Overall, not a bad attempt. As I say, some of it seems rather far-fetched after the link between the crimes is revealed, but the story telling is otherwise reasonable.

I had not realised it was made into a movie in 2002, starring Clint Eastwood; I have never come across it.

'Dragonflight' by Anne McCaffrey

This is the first in a series of fantasy books that were very popular when I was a teenager. The edition I have, published in 1992 was the 19th reprint of the book first published in 1969. However, like 'The Lord of the Rings' (1954-55) trilogy and 'The Mists of Avalon' (1983), I felt it was too too much of a rather naff, overused fantasy trope. They say do not judge books by their covers, but with this one, from those covers I assumed the whole series was rather a wishy-washy fairy story sequence about princesses and dragons. I went off and read Michael Moorcock books instead. However, finding a slim copy in a charity shop - and you can tell the age because it is a fantasy novel coming in at 255 pages, rather than 855 - I thought I would give it a go. In fact it turned out as being far closer to anything by Moorcock than Tolkien or Zimmer Bradley.

For a start, it is effectively, science fiction as it is set on Pern, a world settled by humans, somewhere in the galaxy some millennia earlier. However, distant from Earth technology has reverted to being medieval. The dragons are very much those we know from Western mythology though they have to eat a rocky fuel in order to breathe flame. They have been trained to fly with human riders to intercept 'threads' which fall from another planet which is on an elliptical path and passes close to Pern every 200 years or so. The dragons can teleport and it subsequently proves, travel through time, too. However, seen the last passing, the dragon riders even the hatching of dragons, has declined and they are contested as being necessary for Pern's safety by the various local rulers.

Some of the elements of the novel follow classic fantasy tropes, so Lessa is a young noblewoman whose family were usurped from ruling a Hold, and she has to disguise herself and work in the kitchens until identified as a possible dragon rider and not only does she become one, but she is partnered with the current queen gold dragon. Much of the novel covers how the dragon riders, latterly led by F'lar the rider of the leading male bronze dragon, and Lessa work to restore the standing of the dragon riders in Pern society and ready for the imminent approach of the other planet. They face opposition to various steps from among the dragonriders and wider society, especially among leaders.

What is interesting about the book, is that on the surface this looks like a hundred other fantasy novels. However, undercut with a very strong feminist perspective McCaffrey dodges away from what you might expect. Lessa and F'lar have sex but they are not really lovers. They often have completely different opinions. The piecing together of the history of what happened, how the various Weyrs - strongholds of the dragon riders, have now fallen to just one, is interestingly done. Added to that it soon proves that some of the schemes go badly wrong. The use of apostrophed names probably did fit the trope and some are too alike to make it easy occasionally to decide who is being spoken about.

Overall though, I found the approach refreshing and meant I was uncertain what might happen next rather than going through the motions of a very similar story. I think this rather highlights what has been lost from fantasy writing which was apparent in the late 1960s/early 1970s when people were willing to experiment much more than they are these days. While there is greater representation in fantasy now, an author coming clearly along a feminist line seems less common.

I can see why these books were so popular, though knowing some of the people I know who read them, I do wonder how they got on with the more challenging aspects given the other books they read. Maybe they missed the feminism and simply looked to the dragons in action. Anyway, I do wonder who else like me, in contrast, was put off by the covers, so turned away from books that would have been of interest at the time.

'Eaters of the Dead' by Michael Crichton

This book probably deserves an award for the most misleading title. This book is not a zombie novel but the source of the movie 'The Thirteenth Warrior' (1999). It features a real man, Arab ambassador, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan (879-960 CE) who was sent in 922 CE from Baghdad to travel to Bulgaria but never got there and went off on other unrecorded adventures. The first three chapters are a translation of his actual account of travelling through the Middle East to southern Europe and are terribly simplistic and repetitive. Then Crichton brings in the fiction and has Ibn Fadlan travel through Russia to various parts of Scandinavia with a small band of Nordic warriors charged with ridding a particular region of the eponymous eaters of the dead. Most of the rest of the book is about the action against these people, who we are led to believe are Neanderthal survivors living on in remote parts of northern Europe. Crichton wrote the book in 1976 but the edition I have had was came out in 1992 and had a supplementary essay at the end about how his portrayal of different species of humans living on alongside Cro Magnon people has been reinforced. Of course, with the discovery of  Denisovans and Homo luzonensis, now among 20 species of humans identified, subsequently have strengthened his idea even further.

This is not a bad book, but while moderately diverting, it is not engaging. I think at the time Crichton expected us to be more excited by a story about Vikings and Neanderthals, but both are very well known in fiction now. He had no need to include the historical sections of the book and adopting the approaches seen in the movie would have worked much better. In general I would say, do not bother with the book, simply watch the movie, it is a much more satisfying experience especially for audiences today.

'Figure of Hate' by Bernard Knight

This is the ninth book in the novels about Sir John De Wolfe, coroner of southern Devon and as with the previous ones it follows on closely from the one before. The series has now reached October 1195 and there has been a bit of a re-set. The Bush tavern in which De Wolfe has an interest and is run by his mistress has been rebuilt and his brother-in-law has been removed from being Sheriff of Devon on grounds of corruption. Though compelled to retire to his estates he still makes trouble for De Wolfe in this novel. De Wolfe's clerk, Thomas de Peyne has been cleared of the charges against him and can re-enter the church and acquires an apprentice in his work for the coroner.

The novel opens with a fair imminent in Exeter. Perhaps because I have quite often worked as a market trader, I do enjoy stories set against the background of a medieval fair, such as 'Saint Peter's Fair' (1981) by Ellis Peters in the Cadfael series. However, this book does encompass a number of what appear to be distinct crimes, from the murder of a silversmith to the killing of a manor lord fifteen miles outside Exeter. Another element is the inclusion of jousts which were already developing as a kind of professional sporting circuit. The manor lord, Hugh Peverel and his his brother are leading lights in this field, though falling on harder times.

The novel is interesting for these aspects of medieval life. As noted before Knight liked to include different ones and their associated laws in each book. The bringing together of the different crimes is handled quite well, though there is a bit too much riding back and forth to the manor of Barton Peverell. Furthermore arrogant members of the gentry telling De Wolfe repeatedly that he has no jurisdiction and is wasting time is overdone and become very tedious. The level of poverty of serfs especially on a poorly run manor is, however, deftly highlighted. This then, is a solid entry in the series that could have been tauter with some editing of repeated encounters.

Non-Fiction

'American Scoundrel' by Thomas Keneally

Keneally is best known for 'Schindler's Ark' (1982). This book is less a novel than that book, but Keneally seems unable to keep it purely as a work of non-fiction. It focuses on US Congressman and diplomat Major General Daniel Sickles (1819-1914). He was a politician from New York city in the mid-19th Century. He was very involved in corrupt practices right from the start. He was highly disreputable, having a string of mistresses and taking a brothel madam as his companion to meet Queen Victoria when serving in the US diplomatic service in London. He made friends relatively easy and also created hangers-on via the corrupt allocation of posts at city and national level. He got to such a level that he was friendly with President James Buchanan, who when ambassador to Britain he served under and the wife of President Abraham Lincoln. Though supportive of the slave states' rights, he did a volte face at the outbreak of the civil war, infuriated by the secessionists' attacks on federal property. Raising army units in New York, he eventually rose to be a Major General in command of the Union's Third Corps and was at the Battle of Gettysburg where he lost a leg.

Though Keneally gives immense detail, at times very tedious about, Sickles, his main focus is on his acquittal for murdering Philip Key, the District Attorney for Washington D.C., close to the White House. He shot the man repeatedly with two pistols and there was no doubt he had murdered him. Key had been having an ill-concealed relationship with Sickles's wife, Teresa, eighteen years his junior. Sickles was acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity provoked by the flagrant affair that Key had had with his wife. This was the first time temporary insanity had been used as a defence in the USA. Teresa and his daughter were compelled to retire from public life in shame and were neglected by Sickles for the rest of his life; his daughter Laura died in poverty aged 38. Sickles repeated the same behaviour with his second wife, the Spaniard Carmina Creagh who he met while US ambassador to Spain and with whom he had two children.

One might comprehend that this book highlights the double standards of the day and indeed that have persist into modern times. A man can be corrupt, have a string of lovers and cheat on his wife repeatedly, but one affair by her is condemned so severely that it is seen as permissible for her to have her lover murdered with impunity and for her to be shunned by society as the guilty party. Keneally largely neglects this perspective. His attitude towards Sickles is highly ambivalent and you keep feeling that he cannot help himself admire the man. At times, especially when Teresa was almost a recluse in New York, he throws in these weird speculations about how there could have been a reconciliation to her by her husband and how she could have played roles like other politicians' and generals' wives. These bits are odd in a book which in theory is a history book, because they have no basis beyond Keneally's imagination. They also neglect Sickles's supreme arrogance that despite his sustained promiscuous behaviour and even after having murdered her lover, it seems with malice aforethought if not cold blood, he was so offended as never to forgive her.

There are interesting background elements about US society in the mid- to late 19th Century. It is no surprise to see that corruption and violent crime even by 'respectable' members of US society were as rife then as they are now. The carrying of guns in Washington and their use seems very contemporary to us. The prime problem is that Keneally cannot shake off his admiration for Daniel Sickles and so throughout you feel that he is complicit with the corruption, the double standards and the arrogance. As a reader of today, that is a slant that is very hard to swallow. There are further problems at least with the version of the book I was given, published by Vintage in 2002. The type is tiny and to make it worse the opening lines of each chapter are in pale grey rather than black.

Overall unless you are a really arrogant misogynist who wants to look for some kind of role model, I would completely avoid this book. For a modern audience, even more than 20 years ago, the author's ambivalence to inappropriate behaviour really sticks in your throat.

Books I Read In October

 Fiction

'Fear in the Forest' by Bernard Knight

This is the seventh Crowner John novel and like the fifth, 'The Tinner's Corpse' (2001), Knight takes the opportunity to look at another specific aspect of English law in the late 12th Century. In this novel it is how the 'forests' were regulated. While the legal forests did contain woodland they also encompassed heathland and other landscapes. As the novel shows there was stringent but sometimes unrelated regulation of the forests which were deemed to belong to the King. Taking wood, let alone killing wildlife in them could lead to stringent penalties. This novel is really one about corruption by those who policed the forests and them working with criminals to enforce protection rackets and promote their businesses, e.g. in brewing or woodworking over those of locals. Coroner Sir John De Wolfe's antagonist through the novels, the Sheriff of Devon, his brother-in-law, also seems involved. De Wolfe's mistress, Nesta the landlady is pregnant and his wife goes off to a nunnery.

Overall, because there are a series of crimes, including murder, but also extortion and corruption, this is quite a messy novel. Even De Wolfe's relationship with the two women in his life seems scrappy. I guess clear motives should not be expected from people in such a situation, especially for women without societal agency to do all that they might want to. However, the novel does highlight the complexity of the legal situation that Knight wished to highlight and shows very well the difficulties even for nobles of navigating around laws which largely were about making money for the monarch rather than providing a rational legal system for day-to-day life. There are points of action and these come to a climax of violent action, a little as in some of the previous novels, notably 'Crowner's Quest' (1999) and 'The Awful Secret' (2000), melodramatically. However, I guess that it brings it to conclusion after all the various strands he has sent up during the novel and the inability of De Wolfe to challenge corruption in the church, which reminds me of books by Michael Dibdin and Leonardo Sciascia set in contemporary Italy.

'Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City' by K.J. Parker [Tom Holt]

A novel focused on the siege of a city seems a refreshing way to go in a fantasy context. The location is a Roman/Byzantine city and at times the almost explicit references to Roman culture jar in this fantasy context, even though the main race of the city are blue-skinned. The arena, the colours for different factions in the city, the names, the bronze chain at the harbour, even the use of engineering units, that the protagonist Orhan commands, seem to be lifted without much modification from the Roman setting. Parker does seem obsessed with engineers in his fantasy writing. I guess it makes a change from knights or sorcerers especially in this set-up of him defending a city, 'The City' from foreign invaders who have proven to be very clever strategically and well equipped.

It is an interesting book, as much about dealing with various types of people in society as about the technical issues of feed and arming people; of operation siege weapons, etc. The greatest problem I had was the 'cheeky chappy' style of the language for much of the book. It is written in the first person and quickly the kind of 'Cockney barrow boy' language becomes tiring. The book improves towards the end as this declines. The characters, aside from Orhan, are quite believable. The coincidences, especially who is leading the opponents are a further weakness. The ending is very poor, a complete anti-climax and it seems as if after all the hard work Parker put into the different developments and characters he simply ran out of steam and had no idea how to bring it properly to an end. Consequently the rushed conclusion undermines what had gone before. It is not a bad book and as I said at the start it has some refreshing elements. It certainly would have benefited from a map of the world it features as so much is dependent on people marching through particular terrain or not being able to get through a certain straits; a map of the city would also have helped as Orhan hares around different parts and where he and his helpers are and when is important for the story, but never really being clear about them makes it harder to enjoy.

'Burning Bright' by Tracy Chevalier

This is a 'slice of life' novel. It is set in 1792 and is about the family of a chair maker from an area of Dorset I know reasonably well relocating to south London. The family become connected to a circus located in Lambeth. The children in particular also interact with the neighbours, one of whom includes William Blake, the poet, songwriter, painter, engraver and printer. The family become embroiled in scandals at the circus and the attacks on Blake as a result of his support for the French Revolution. The novel simply documents what they see and do in London and the travails of the family. Women getting pregnant, which happens to three of the characters, one of them a major one, seems to be an important focus for Chevalier. You do wonder at the behaviour of some characters, though I think one point is that motherhood, despite its high risks, was seen as a path that many young women could not avoid and might even welcome. At the end of the novel, the family return to their village in Dorset and that is it. Nothing astounding happens, but I guess that is Chevalier's way.

One does have to admire the research Chevalier did and to get the location and the ordinary people of Georgian London so well observed. Much of the pleasure of the book is simply seeing it through the eyes of her protagonists. Even then, it is not perfect. She refers to 'Queen Elizabeth I', at a time when she would only have been 'Queen Elizabeth' the way that Queen Victoria and Queen Anne remain to us today. Given the suffix 'the First' would suggest the characters could see into the future and know that a second would come. The other thing is she refers to mauve some 65 years before it was famously invented as a colour; 'violet' would have done perfectly well instead.

'Angels Flight' by Michael Connelly

This is the sixth book in the Harry Bosch series by Connelly and is set a year after the previous one, 'Trunk Music' (1997). Bosch's precipitate marriage to Eleanor Wish at the end of that novel has already unravelled. Themes about racial tension in Los Angeles which have come in around the edges throughout the series are ramped up in this novel. It sees the murder of a leading black lawyer who has specialised in prosecuting police misconduct cases, on the Angels Flight funicular railway. This again allows Connelly to bring in the tensions he clearly felt writing at the time and to include more parts of the city in his writing. 

As is common with the Bosch novels, the first possible solutions turn out to not necessarily be false but certainly flawed. Working against the context of rioting adds to the dynamism of the story. We are also very much in that time. Cell phones have appeared as the novels have progressed and in this one we see the internet featuring, including, already, a paedophile dark website.

The story combines a nicely twisty case which highlights how people are judged differently both in terms of race but also wealth and influence. On that basis it works well as a mystery. What works less well is how Bosch relates to female characters, especially those closest to him. The best are those at a distance such as the public lawyer set to make sure when the police are investigating there are no conflicts of interest, but as the characters are closer to Bosch, his commanding lieutenant and a member of his team, they are handled less well. 

Eleanor Wish herself feels very much like a device that is dropped in and pulled out in now three of the novels, without really developing her as a full character. His previous 'love interests', Sylvia Moore and Jasmine Corian in 'The Black Ice' (1993), 'The Concrete Blonde' (1994) and 'The Last Coyote' (1995) were similarly under-developed and similarly whisked out of the story. 

I know Connelly was trying to produce a modern version of the 'hard-boiled' crime novel, but as his engagement with racial and technological issues shows, he has been compelled to recognise the changed times and yet the women close to Bosch are portrayed/treated in a way which may have been acceptable to readers in the 1940s but jarred even in the 1990s, let alone now. Eleanor Wish functioned very well as a de-facto femme fatale in 'The Black Echo' (1992) but when cast into a different role, Connelly seems to be at a loss with what to do with her.

This is the last of the Harry Bosch books I own. However, I have a couple more books from two of Connelly's other two series to read.

Non-Fiction

'War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450-1620' by J.R. Hale

Perhaps reflecting its theme, this book lacks the sprightly tone of Hale's 'Renaissance Europe 1480-1520' that I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/09/books-i-read-in-september.html  It also takes a different chronological view of the Renaissance and as Hale makes clear is in fact concerned with the period between the end of the Hundred Years' War in 1453 and the start of the Thirty Years' War in 1618, both conflicts which really defined the nature of warfare, at least in Western Europe. It is important to note that there is this geographical limit and despite some passing references to the Balkans, the focus is no farther East than 'Germany' and 'Italy' as they existed at the time.

Hale is keen as with the other book, however, to adopt a different approach to viewing the history than the ones which were prevalent when the book was published in 1985. He shows how accounts of various campaigns or focused on arms and armour effectively lift warfare out of the context in which it sat. There might be passing references to the politics that provoked, prolonged or ended the wars, but minimal in such histories about the connection to the societies either supplying the soldiers or suffering the consequences of the war, certainly in the pre-20th Century eras. Thus, Hale makes effective use of various examples across the period rather than progressing chronologically. It allows him to view who became soldiers of different kinds and why. It looks at the society of soldiers as being separate but also inter-connected with civilian society. He also looks at the economic and social impact not just of the war but the industries associated with war, especially as gunpowder and artillery played an increasing role through the period the book covers.

While it does lack the particularly engaging tone of the previous book of Hale's I read, it was no less interesting. It is analytical without being dry. The thematic sections are sensible and while covering the same period throughout, avoid repetition. I feel that this book is a very useful one to have alongside any you might read on campaigns and wars of the period to give them depth. It is also, as the other book was, a great resource for authors wanting to set stories in this period. There is a lot of detail here and even stories of different experiences of soldiers and civilians that people can draw from easily if seeking to write something set during the period, even if not explicitly focused on war.

Books I Listened To/Read In June

 Fiction

'Wastelands. Stories of the Apocalypse' edited by John Joseph Adams

This is an anthology of short stories written by US science fiction authors, 1973-2008 covering post-apocalyptic settings, it seems just set in the current borders of the USA. The quality varies considerably. 'Salvage' by Orson Scott Card is a dull piece of Mormon propaganda. Better ones include 'The End of the Whole Mess' by Stephen King, one of a number of stories which looks at ways to reduce violence by humans but that go wrong triggering an apocalypse. In contrast, 'Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers' by John Langan is better than the title suggests and is far more action-filled than King's story. Others with that kind of drive include  'How We Got into Town and Out Again' by Jonathan Lethem which is a well realised post-apocalyptic setting of the standard kind but with a nice cyberpunk element added. Neal Barrett Jr.'s 'Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus' has a similar vibe, but works well and shows how when so many characters are focused on the big themes of apocalypse, personal revenge remains. Among stories which seek to have that effect, 'The Last of the O Forms' by James Van Pelt is actually chilling, because the apocalypse is biological rather than say, a nuclear war. It also hooks back into traditional US behaviour in seeing a freak show of mutants travelling around the country and unlike a number of the short stories in this collection, rather than peter out, it has a sensible conclusion.

'Artie's Angels' by Catherine Wells, has a dieselpunk feel to it, though emphasises the use of bicycles. It works well as a story of how people could work post-apocalypse without entirely descending into a neo-feudal society. 'A Song Before Sunset' by David Grigg is a traditional one of someone seeking to sustain or revive culture when society has crumbled. It does not really say anything new, but back in 1976 when it was published it was probably fresh enough.

'Killers' by Carol Emshwiller could almost be contemporary rather than post-apocalyptic. It sees US fighting in the Middle East having an impact in terms of terrorism, but also returning veterans, and could have been about a man returning from Vietnam as much as from any future war. For all that, though, it works reasonably well. 'Inertia' by Nancy Kress is less disrupted society, focused on a ghetto for people with a particular disfiguring disease, though it is the violent society outside which seems to face the greater challenge. This is well handled. Similar is 'Speech Sounds' by Octavia E. Butler, about the loss of various human abilities such as speech, as a result of some biological catastrophe and people picking their way through while concealing the abilities they have retained as these are no longer the norm. It reminds me of a short story, I think by Ursula Le Guin in which most people are deaf and they see a boy who can hear as having unnatural abilities that need to be ceased. 

'Also-rans' include 'Never Despair' by Jack McDevitt which goes nowhere and seems to expect us to be excited by the appearance of a hologram of Winston Churchill. Maybe that excites US readers more than British ones. 'When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth' by Cory Doctorow is as thrilling as the title suggests. Americans seem to love stories of clerical staff somehow battling tirelessly to prop up the capitalist status quo and this one reminded me very much of accounts of those men dealing with the Wall Street Crash with about the same level of success. 'Mute' by Gene Wolfe and 'Bread and Bombs' by M. Rickert, are almost like fables and have a mid-20th Century feel that could be associated with the Second World War rather than the future.

I was disappointed that in 'The People of Sand and Slag', Paolo Bacigalupi did not range further in his location, but at least he got off mainland USA; his is a more standard science fiction story. 'Dark, Dark were the Tunnels' by George R.R. Martin now better known for fantasy is also in this kind of category and reminded me of  'When the New Zealander Comes' (2011). Another more straight science fiction story, though with typical American obsession with the spiritual is 'Judgment [sic] Passed' by Jerry Oliton in which people returning from a space mission find everyone else on Earth has been taken off to the afterlife. Fortunately it deals more with how these remainers cope in the deserted world.

'And the Deep Blue Sea' by Elizabeth Bear starts off as a decent story of a courier in a post-apocalyptic California/Nevada, but is spoilt when it introduces the Devil who can teleport the protagonist to a range of times and places. I get the idea that there have been a lot of local apocalypses, but it wrecks the dynamic of the story about dealing with a specific one and whether the heroine can actually win through. 'The End of the World as We Know It' is a rather weak satire on the whole post-apocalyptic genre. It is interesting enough but would have been better as an essay than attempting to be a story.

Overall I came away from this book feeling rather riled given the inability of some many of the authors to look beyond very narrow assumptions. Some I expected better from. I know to steer clear of Card's work. However, a number of the authors who produced good stuff, despite its restrictions, are ones I would now pick up if I see them, which I would not have done if I had not read this collection. I do think Americans would find this collection far more palatable than English-language readers from other countries.

'Let the Old Dreams Die' by John Ajvide Lindqvist

I often see people asking on social media whether anyone buys short stories these days. Then ironically I find that in a single month I am reading two short story collections simply edited/written by men named 'John', so I do think that short stories have a place and are doing pretty well in these times. While I had seen the Swedish version of 'Låt den rätte komma in' (2008; from the 2004 novel of the same name) ['Let the Right One In'] though not the 2010 English language remake, I had not realised Lindqvist was primarily about horror, so had come to this collection as I might to one by Julian Barnes, expecting a range of quirky, contemporary-set stories. 

There is some Swedish normality in the stories, such a urban blocks of flats and summer holiday homes by the water, and they are magic realism rather than full-on 'horror'.  Various creatures turn up, that are not really traditional ones. The type of vampires seen in  'Låt den rätte komma in' reappear, but there is tentacled monster penetrating the sewers; another that lures people to their death by showing them what they desire; an irate zombie; otherworldly people who sort of fill in the gaps in our world; the embodiment of death by drowning and the creatures of the movie 'Gräns' (2018) ['Border'] which features in the short story of the same name in this collection. The longest story, 'The Final Processing' about a young couple dealing with people who have been re-lifed could easily be a movie.

What is interesting though is the responses of the characters to their unnatural threats is down-to-Earth, almost mundane rather than high-powered action. There is a quietness in them that I guess helps the reader feel a greater affinity with them than they might with action heroes. In addition, the approach works well in making you think what you or people you know would do in such a situation. Even if you do not live in a Swedish context, there is sufficient overlap with other examples of Western society to allow such consideration without difficulty. Not all of the characters are able to cope and some end up with horrendous fates, so this affinity means those outcomes hit home harder. While this was certainly not the book I had expected when I bought it, I would not say I enjoyed it, but I certainly felt interested by it and engaged with it.

'The Last Coyote' by Michael Connelly

This is the fourth book in the Harry Bosch sequence and for the entirety of it, Bosch is suspended from the police for assaulting his boss. He decides to investigate the murder of his mother, a prostitute, in 1961, some 34 years before the novel is set. The novel reminded me very much of the movie 'Slam Dance' (1987) not simply for the Hollywood setting but because of the bisection between 'call girls' and influential people, and though I did not realise it to the end, genuine affection creeping into sexual transactions. Bosch's hard boiled manner at times can get tiring, but genuinely this flows along pretty well, with the protagonist compelled to scam his way into getting the information he needs and struggling to oppose men who while old remain powerful. There is a lot of introspection not simply because of Bosch's personal connection to the case and his reassessment of his mother's life and motives but because of the counselling he is receiving for his violence towards his superior. However, when Bosch's actions result in the death of people, I did not feel convinced by his guilt over his actions. Perhaps his world weariness sustained across the novels, makes that hard to now sell to the readers. Overall, this works well as a standalone novel. The gathering together of the various elements of evidence not just in Los Angeles but also Florida and Nevada works well. The twist at the end might now seem almost a hackneyed one but works in the context and probably when this was written 26 years ago seemed fresher. However, the abrupt departure of Bosch's girlfriend of the previous two books before this one begins and the appearance so quickly of a replacement, though she is very important to the plot, do feel like that, i.e. plot devices, rather than genuine developments.

Non-Fiction

'Chronicles of Dissent' by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

This is a collection of interviews of US linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky conducted by David Barsamian, 1984-91. He speaks a lot about US politics and especially foreign policy. His commentary on control of the media and how atrocities committed by the USA's friends are passed over while nationalist behaviour by those deemed as 'other' are portrayed as horrific. He shows how attitudes, e.g. to the Hussein regime in Iraq and the Noriega regime in Panama can change in a matter of days and countries that were receiving military aid are abruptly attacked. Much of his commentary on these things feels as if it could have been written during the Trump administration, especially in terms of US use of Israel and the portrayal of existential threats, rather than 30 years earlier, which highlights how little things have changed in the USA. While Chomsky nails these aspects he keeps on saying the same things again and again. Presented this way with the transcripts of interviews, you soon get tired. Yes, he highlights important things such as how the USA effectively primarily attacked the people of South Vietnam in US-Vietnam War and the lack of attention that has been paid to massacres in East Timor by Indonesia. However, when you read these things for the third or fourth time, you begin to get riled.

Chomsky is very US focused. He says nothing about China and little about Russia. His views of Europe are scant, Britain and France only get touched on at the time of the First Gulf War. He also seems to subscribe to the view that all terrorism is state-directed. He gives good examples of this, but he is dismissive of 'retail' terrorism which the USA had not experienced at the time, so neglects the terrorism of the IRA, ETA, RAF, Red Brigades, etc. as if it never existed. It does seem common even among US commentators who are that bit more alert to developments in the world to think terrorism was not really 'discovered' until the September 2001 attacks in the USA and unfortunately Chomsky falls into this trap.

Overall Chomsky says interesting things about US behaviour in the world and the problems it causes. His views remain relevant today as the methods he outlines have been applied again and again and reached a height during the Trump years. However, the nature of this book makes it really repetitive and once you have read the first few interviews, you have largely got his message and those that follow just say it again and again.

Audio Books - Fiction

'Dissolution' by C.J. Sansom; radio play

I was so annoyed by Sansom's novel, Dominion (2012): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-books-i-read-in-september.html that I had stayed away from all of his books until I came across both audio books and radio plays on CD of his Shardlake books, detective stories set in the reign of King Henry VIII. These are much better than his alternate history. This is the first in the series, though the character Matthew Shardlake, a commissioner for Thomas Cromwell and his assistant come fully formed with back stories which are revealed as the tale continues. Most of the story takes place at the fictional Scarnsea Abbey on the southern coast of England which is on the verge of being dissolved along with all monasteries across the country, when a King's commissioner is murdered there. Shardlake is sent to investigate. There are more than a few parallels to 'The Name of the Rose' (1980) not least with the range of eccentric monks and their various moral failings. However, it is well handled and provides good details on the developments in the country at the time without providing a series of history lectures. He really communicates how Henrician rule at this time was like being under a one-party state of the 20th Century.  Some readers complain about the absence of female characters, but it is a monastery and Sansom actually works to bring more women in to the story than some might have done. There are some unexpected twists most notably with the fate of Shardlake's assistant.

With the very busy Jason Watkins as Shardlake in the lead and a string of familiar voices, this production is of the high quality you would expect from a BBC radio drama with all the various sound effects to give a real feel to the time and place. I thoroughly enjoyed it and have another lined up to listen to.

'Octopussy and The Living Daylights (and Other Stories)' by Ian Fleming; read by Tom Hiddleston and Lucy Fleming

This is the final James Bond book by Ian Fleming, well, in fact an anthology of various short stories. In many ways as seen with 'For Your Eyes Only' (1960), Fleming is better at short stories than sometimes the longer novels. This collection holds four. 'Octopussy' is seen from the perspective of a retired British army major who looted Nazi gold bars at the end of the Second World War and is now living in Jamaica. It allows Fleming to indulge in his knowledge of Jamaica, sea life and central Europe during and just after the Second World War. Bond only appears as the man sent to arrest the protagonist and carry out personal revenge. 'The Living Daylights' is also well handled. It is set at a very precise time and place, i.e. Berlin in 1960 before the Berlin Wall went up the following year. A British agent has to get from the Soviet Zone of the city into the British Zone and Bond is sent to take out the assassin who has been assigned to kill the escaping man. Again, though a very different setting, Fleming is great at the context not just of this frontier area but West Berlin at the time and the people in it. 'Property of a Lady' is a simple short story about using auctioning of a Faberge egg to trace a KGB operative, but it is interesting to see the workings of an auction house in the early 1960s. The final story, read by Lucy Fleming, Ian Fleming's niece, '007 in New York' only references the actual story at the end. Instead it is a usual list of complaints about all the failings in the USA at the time, a country Fleming clearly disapproved of in so many ways.

Hiddleston and Fleming both do the voices pretty well for the various characters and communicate the intensity which can be found in what are generally straight forward stories. Aside from '007 in New York' they show Ian Fleming's writing at its best. Given the cultural impact of the James Bond stories, even today, I am glad I have now listened to them all, and aside perhaps from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963) which the movie kept very close to, to see how much more jaded and at times bitter the writing is. Bond is often far from being a superhero and his decay across the novels makes them somehow more human and closer to the spy novels of Len Deighton than is popularly recognised. It is also clear that the movies thoroughly reduced the roles of important female characters from the novels, probably most, Gala Brand from 'Moonraker' (1955) to accessories for so long. Bond might be a man of his time in terms of misogyny but Fleming seems to diverge from that character in how he portrays the women.

Books I Listened To/Read In April

Non-Fiction

'The Awful Secret' by Bernard Knight

This is the fourth book in the Crowner John series set a few months after the melodramatic trial by tournament that ended 'Crowner's Quest' (1999). Sir John De Wolfe has largely recovered from the broken leg he received at the tournament and is back investigating. There are two main stories, one about the murder of a man washed up on the northern shore of Devon and then him being pressured to help a former Templar he knew in Palestine, who himself is murdered. One might expect that whenever Templars are mentioned these days there will also be something about the Holy Grail and the descendants of Jesus Christ. 

Though this book was published in 2000, ahead of 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003) it shows people holding the same views on Jesus's bloodline as in that book. However, unlike in most books of this kind, De Wolfe being a good Catholic of the late 12th Century sees the entire idea as blasphemous. This brings in interesting tensions as to how far a man will go to aid old army comrades, ones he did not know particularly well. While he assists the first former templar, even concealing him at his family's home, he feels obliged to aid the second, despite ultimately despising the line that he preaches. In many ways, De Wolfe is tricked and this makes him seem that much more human than all the laboured philandering which fill so much of these books. There is tension as he tries to help the second templar get away from Dorset.

There is an additional sub-plot with an invasion of the island of Lundy held by pirates though promised to the Templars and in subduing another village on the mainland coast indulging in piracy. These provide action scenes that Knight seems to have felt were necessary now in each of these books. Some modern commentators feel the secret is 'dull' though I think that is because some twenty years on these speculations about Jesus are very well known and not as surprising as was the case even back in 2000. I feel, though, that despite some flaws, this is a good book. De Wolfe does blunder and holds to attitudes which are appropriate for his time and background, rather than being a sudden convert to some radical new belief. I still have quite a few of these books to read. I hope Knight kept to the more realistic approach rather than making his protagonist an action hero and also toning down the unnecessarily high number of sexual encounters.

'City of Glass' by Cassandra Clare

While there are further two books after this one in Clare's Mortal Instruments series, this one does feel like the closing of a trilogy. It comes to a big climax with the antagonist, Valentine and a lot seems to resolved. Starting in New York like the previous two books, this one soon moves to the fantastical world of Idris (capital Alicante, but not the Alicante of our world) which has a kind of Victorian bucolic setting as if envisaged by William Morris. All the main characters from the previous books end up there. Given this context it does feel, even more than the previous two books, as a branching-off from the Harry Potter series. The various debates among the shadowhunters of Idris are reminiscent of the conflicting  views around dealing with Lord Voldemort. Again it is teenagers who settle the situation and also work to bring an alliance between the shadowhunters and the 'downworlders', i.e. vampires, werewolves and fairies. There is the same kind of mixture of political debates and teenage relationship crises.

I have commented how unsettling the underage sex (the main character is 14, rather than 18 as shown in the television series) and the incestuous thoughts between a brother and sister, which though, fortunately, is revealed to untrue. I do not know why Clare felt a need to include these elements. The incest in this book is part of a very well done subterfuge by one character, but it was unnecessary and I wonder why the publishers accepted it for a book aimed at the 'young adult' audience. There is some decent writing in this book and aspects which stand above the rather derivative ones. However, it is not a book I can like due to what I feel are inappropriate foci for it. Ironically I feel curious to see where Clare went with the remaining two books since she killed the incest and effectively had the prime antagonist vanquished.

'The Concrete Blonde' by Michael Connelly

This book was published in 1994 and is the third in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. I think it is the best of those that I have read so far which seems to confirm what for me seems to be increasingly true: that you need to give a crime novelist at least 3 books for them to get into their stride with a character. The book with video cassettes, pagers and US Vietnam veterans in early middle age, feels very of its time. What is galling, though, is the highlighting of black suspects being choked to death and unarmed suspects being shot dead by police feels like elements taken from the current US news, even 27 years later. Some things never seem to change in the USA.

Unlike the previous book, 'The Black Ice' (1993), this one is very taut. In part this is because much of the action takes place in the courtroom. Harry Bosch is facing a civil case brought by the widow of an unarmed serial killer known as The Dollmaker that he shot and killed four years earlier when the man was reaching for a toupee rather than a gun. This means Bosch is kept on quite a leash at times having to rush back to court. To confuse matters it comes to light that either he killed the wrong man or there is a copycat killer who has been active at the same time. The jeopardy that Bosch faces in investigating whether he did make a mistake with his suspicions or not adds another layer to the story. There are some decent twists and it is good to see the detective as being as flawed as anyone else. There is also the extra elements of his antagonisms with both the prosecuting attorney and his own rather ineffectual lawyer. We also see the complexities that his position makes in terms of his developing relationship with Sylvia Moore, the widow of a colleague whose murder he investigated in the previous book.

Overall, the novel manages to balance having twists and various layers without losing the reader. It gives what feels like a decent picture of Los Angeles, both the upmarket and seedy sides of it and in showing how dangerous it is for citizens at risk for their lives both from criminals and the police. Unfortunately in almost three decades, that situation has not changed. However, it does mean that Connelly's book has a currency rather than beginning to feel entirely like a historical crime novel.

Non-Fiction

'My Favourite People and Me, 1978-1988' by Alan Davies

I saw the documentary programme, 'Alan Davies' Teenage Rebellion' (2010) in which Davies went back to where he grew up in Essex and met with people he had known in his youth as well as celebrities he had followed, notably Paul Weller. I imagine a lot of that is based on this book published the previous year. It is a kind of free-flowing autobiography in sections concerning a single year in this period, but with chapters using people that Davies was interested in as the hook. Often, though, he does not really come to the individual until the end of the relevant chapter. 

Davies is less than two years older than me. He went to a private school, his mother died when he was young, he was abused by his father (the focus of his most recent biography but there are shadows of that in this book) who remarried a neighbour and they were much richer than my family, e.g. having fly-drive 3-week holidays in the USA; he was bought both a motor scooter and a car as soon as he could have them; I did not have a car until I was in my mid-30s. Davies was far more successful with women than me and far more into sport, especially football, but also tennis and motorbike racing, so those celebrities mean little to me. However, pop stars, the people in the news and what he thought about them, campaigns of the time, such as around nuclear weapons and animal rights, are things I know about. He tells his involvement in these things and what he thought about these people I can understand them. Though we were poorer than his family, we still felt ourselves in the middle class milieu and I knew people like him.

As you would expect from his TV performances, Davies recounts the topics he focuses on with wry humour than made me laugh out loud occasionally.  If you are interested in him as a person this is a good read and is very accessible. It would particularly appeal if you remember the era yourself or if you are interested in how (relatively well off) young people survived in an era before smart phones and social media and what issues concerned many of them, some of which now seem pretty forgotten. It would be nice to see more autobiographies using this approach which I find very refreshing and engaging.

'The Spanish Civil War' by Hugh Thomas

I was advised that as the years progressed from the first publication of this book in 1961, that Thomas revised it to move increasingly towards sympathy to the Nationalist side in the civil war. The edition I read was published in 1965 and though he had corrected some errors from the previous two, it did seem that his sympathies while supportive of the Republican government side are actually pretty balanced. He does not hold back from criticism of the Republicans' multifarious divisions that so weakened them and the vacillating attitude of the Moscow-backing Communists. 

Thomas really benefited from the fact that he was writing when many of those who had been involved in the war from both sides, let alone eye-witnesses, were still alive. He is very good at balancing up the different perspectives, especially when it is difficult to know the truth and giving the reader a fair impression of what happened.

This is a comprehensive book, my edition was 911 pages long. Thomas gives background going back into the 19th Century and making it clear that the violence of the 1930s was part of a long history of such occurrences in Spanish history. He also shows how the fact that Spain had not been involved in the First World War had left many in the country ill-informed of the nature of war. Coming at the end of the 1930s, it was to experience all the horrors of the latest military technology, especially in terms of the aerial bombing of civilians. Before discussing the war itself, Thomas goes through the different political groupings. While the divisions on the Republican side are well known, he shows those among the Nationalists too, given the range of groups which joined what had been primarily a military uprising.

The book is good on the social and economic aspects of the war, yet also provides detailed accounts of the various battles, aided by dome simple but informative line-drawn maps. It makes clear that those who somehow pretend that General Franco, progressed slowly to avoid damaging so much of Spain are mistaken. He stated this but it is clear that even with massive support from Italy and Germany, his soldiers were often struggling to make advances but when they entered towns they carried out massacres which Spain had long become accustomed to. I had not realised how close the Nationalists came to grinding to a halt. Even in 1938 if the supply of German war materiel had dried up then, the war most likely would have come to a stalemate.

Thomas is good on all the various individuals who were involved and highlights things such as Irishmen fighting on both sides and the black American soldiers and commanders who fought in the Republican International Brigades, fighting alongside white comrades when the US Army was still segregated. Someone needs to make a movie about ex-Corporal Oliver Law, the black commander of the Washington Battalion. The age of the book is shown up by how Thomas feels to seem physical details such as how fat someone was or whether they had a lot of sex, are important for ascertaining their character.

The British come out of the story very poorly. I know some wanted the Nationalists to win, on the basis that while democracy was fine for Britain other countries were better under dictators. However, a lot of the British policy, blocking the elected government from buying arms and yet introducing a non-intervention policy so poor that tens of thousands of Italian troops fought for the Nationalists, just seems to be incompetence. It is only in the light of Neville Chamberlain's utter failings as prime minister that his predecessor Stanley Baldwin could seem even mildly competent. In many ways Britain's actions ensured that the Nationalists won, especially in the context of how close the fight was throughout, contrary to what now tends to be the popular view of it.

Overall, despite its age, this is a very good book if you want to really get into seeing what happened in the Spanish Civil War in detail. It remains a good counter-balance to rather lazy assumptions about the war which have slipped into popular history portrayals. It certainly shows that there are many more stories to the story of the war than is commonly recognised. Americans in particular seem to be missing out on the role which their nationals played in the conflict, at a time when, in other historical aspects, the role played by black people is being highlighted.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown; read by Jeff Harding

It is ironic that I ended up listening to this at some of the same time as I was reading 'The Awful Secret' (2000) as they feature the same theory about Jesus Christ being married and having children. When this novel came out in 2003, I was irritated at the efforts that people went to prove how 'wrong' Brown was, down to minute details about where a particular stone is in a corridor at the Louvre gallery in Paris as this somehow 'proved' he was something - lazy, misguided, trying to trick people - I am not sure. They seemed to forget that he had written a work of fiction and if they had dug into the details in a Jack Reacher novel, let alone a James Bond one, they would have found much the same. Listening to the book - having seen the 2006 movie years ago, in part, I realised why they felt compelled to set up such 'uncovering' of the book.

While there is chasing around Paris, London and parts of Scotland, the book is less an adventure and more a lecture. There are huge sections of exposition by one or more of the main characters to others. Fortunately, at least it is not all mansplaining as Sophie Neveu, police cryptoanalyst, is knowledgeable in her field and about Paris. However, what tends to happen is the characters go to a location, decipher what they find there and then talk at length about how the story of Jesus's wife, Mary Magdalene was suppressed, especially after the Council of Nicea which decided that Jesus had been a son of God and not entirely mortal. Added to that, down the centuries, the Christian churches, in this case primarily the Catholic Church saw benefit in underplaying or even dismissing the role of women in early Christianity so ensuring an entirely male Christian priesthood until recent changes in some Protestant churches.

There are some reasonable set pieces of action, escaping from the authorities. The role of Opus Dei looms large with a monk-assassin, Silas, aided in hunting down the protagonists and an Opus Dei member, Captain Fache, leading the French police investigation and granted great powers in doing it. There are a couple of twists with people not being who they seem which are fine. However, I would not say that the book gripped me. The exposition is interesting enough but in the years since the book was published, it has become common knowledge so it probably a lot less surprising than it might have been back then. I had always thought it a surprise that Jesus, as a 34-year old Jewish workman of the 1st Century CE, had not married. I did wonder if he was a widower, so the fact that he had a wife at some stage or another was never really a surprise to me. The fact that he was supposed to have come from a Jewish royal family as Brown states, seems more surprising as, surely, then he would not have spent his life working as a Nazarene carpenter. Anyway, overall the book is not bad, it is more that it is an adventure story used as a basis for delivering a series of lectures.

Jeff Harding is an American and has that rather breathless narration that seems so common with US audio book readers. His French accents do rather sound as if they are from the comedy series, ''Allo, 'Allo', but maybe that is what a lot of listeners expect. He does the female voices surprisingly well.

Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction

'Life of Pi' by Yann Martell

I do not really know why I bought this book. I realised, however, that I had been misled by the images associated with it and the movie based on it, showing a boy and a tiger in a small, otherwise empty lifeboat. In fact they are aboard a lifeboat with room to hold 32 people and with sufficient supplies to feed them for months and equipment to, for example, purify sea water and catch fish. While the book does play around with what is fact and what is fiction, in reality, the set-up that dominates the book is less fantastical than the images make it appear. Much of the narrative is about practical steps that the protagonist takes not only to survive months at sea but also to control the tiger on the large boat with him.

The book focuses on Piscine Molitor 'Pi' Patel born in the early 1960s to a zoo owner and his wife in Pondicherry in India. The first part of the book seems very detached from the bulk of the novel and details Pi's childhood and how he ended up following Christianity, Islam and Hinduism simultaneously. Though the book tells the reader it is about God, aside from some mention of prayers, this element is forgotten as the book moves into its main part. More important are the lessons in animal psychology that Pi gains from his father.

The main part of the story begins when Pi is 16 and is emigrating with his family from Pondicherry to Canada, in response to the regime of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Pi's father owned a zoo in Pondicherry and with them are many of the animals which have been sold to zoos in North America. The ship sinks and Pi is the only human survivor ending up in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and the tiger which eats them all. The main part of the book is how Pi stays alive and it is very much a 'Robinson Crusoe' style narrative with him learning by trial and error how to get water and food, while working out how to deal with the tiger. His body suffers and he becomes blind at one stage, meeting another castaway. He arrives on an island built of algae. These latter phases the book becomes less credible, in contrast to the more gripping and sharply practical elements earlier. However, they add to the sense that Pi's ordeal has scrambled his thoughts or has led to hallucinations.

I can accept the slippage of chronology, but I think after the battle for survival the more fantastical elements towards the end made me feel a little betrayed. I guess Martell was aiming to sow doubt in our minds and undermine what was a reasonably credible story. Even then the Japanese officials who interview Pi disbelieve the whole thing and he makes up a completely different account for them. Thus, we see that Martell's intention was not really a survival story at all, but rather seeing how far he could push something with us still feeling it might be true. Though I guess I would have welcomed a more straightforward survival story and this toying with the reader is irritating, fortunately, I accepted the book more than if it had been the highly philosophical, metaphysical text I had expected from all the images.

'The Black Ice' by Michael Connelly

This is the second book in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. It is set some months after the first one, 'The Black Echo' (1992): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-i-read-in-january.html so some of the same characters in the police force feature. It is a bit more deft than the previous book and Bosch does not seem obliged to sleep with every professional woman he comes across. Mexican women seem out of bounds to him, but that is not really a surprise in the context of this book. Much of the action happens in or on the border with Mexico. The country is portrayed incredibly negatively with almost everyone in the police corrupt, the towns shabby and stinking and the people, at best, disingenuous if not outright hostile. At times it feels very much like a stereotype portrayal which might have been tolerable in 1993, but will rile readers these days.

The story starts with an apparent suicide of a narcotics officer who has left a case for Bosch, though as before he struggles to get assigned not just to that but to any case. Another officer involved seeks quickly to leave the police and there seems to be a connection to a dead Mexican labourer who it appears has been brought from the border. The black ice of the title is a McGuffin, a mix of heroin, cocaine and PCP and initially, especially with references to Hawaii, is a bit of a distraction. The plot is complex enough with the mixing up of drug smugglers, a company producing sterile mayflies and a number of police officers who may be corrupt or just scared.

The action is handled reasonably well. As before, it is clear that Connelly was aiming for a modern version of the hard-boiled detective novels of the mid-20th Century, there is even an explicit reference to 'The Long Goodbye' (1953) by Raymond Chandler. There are various set-piece scenes, though at times Connelly goes too far. The involvement of bull fighting at various stages, seems part of his stereotype of Mexico and then seems levered in, especially when the champion bull attacks the helicopter Bosch is in. I guess Connelly felt he knew his immediate market, but at times it seems he is trying to be Chandler and Ernest Hemingway all wrapped into one, rather than Michael Connelly. As a result he ends up with what is now cliched when he does show that he can do better when subtler. There are interesting ideas with questions of identity and the fact that US Caucasians see Hispanics as a different race, even if they are US citizens, let alone of they come from Latin America, but Connelly while engaging with these a little, does not seem willing to press these issues.

Overall it is a reasonable thriller with some nice twists. However, you get a sense that somewhere in there is a better author who is being weighed down by feeling obliged to pay tribute to his heroes and to comply very much with US readers' expectations of how Mexico and Mexicans should, in their eyes, be portrayed. Added to these, especially in the early stages there are too many dead ends, which burden the book without adding genuine mystery. At times a better Connelly flashes out from beneath all this accretion and I can only hope that this version of him wins out in the subsequent books of his that I have been given.

Non-Fiction

'Bodyguard of Lies' by Anthony Cave Brown

This book at 947 pages long is the reason why I have read few other books this month. The book is supposed to be about the various deception techniques used by the British and Americans to aid them in fighting in Europe and North Africa. There are good sections on these issues, whether decoy activities such as Operation Mincemeat or tricks played with wireless signals or physical ones such as inflatable tanks and parachutist dolls to mislead enemy reconnaissance. There is good analysis of the 'weather war' aiming to keep the Germans ignorant of developing conditions and Operation Starkey the 1943 deception plan to keep the Germans thinking an invasion was imminent but which costs many lives among the French Resistance.

These elements are lost, however, in large swathes of text which is at best tangential to the story and often is irrelevant and covered better in other books with a different focus. Yes, the breaking of Enigma was important for showing the governments whether their deception schemes were working, but he gives far too much general information on the decrypting. The same goes for the German resistance to Hitler. He sees a single thread of groups among the German commanders and especially Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr. However, again, though the information they fed to the Allies confirmed whether the deceptions had worked, there was no need for the immense detail on these groups or their plots to arrest or kill Hitler, all covered better in other books. The same goes for the information about Field Marshal Rommel throughout and then the Normandy landings. Yes, deception played a big role in misleading Rommel and in aiding the landings, but we do not need to then read immense detail about Rommel's life, the landings and the advance into Normandy. By shovelling in all this general information on the war, Brown very much weakens the points he is trying to make.

I was rather cautious about it having read 'Unreliable Witnesses' by Nigel West back in December 2019: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html which critiqued some of the claims that Brown makes in this book. In the end though, given how much Brown covers, those flaws were minor. Brown does write in a very populist style with sweeping, almost tabloid text at times. He also does nothing to hide his prejudices. He is very anti-French and says little good about any French leader and very few of the French resistance. He sees as 'crazed', Georg Elser the man who only failed to assassinate Adolf Hitler in November 1939 because due to bad weather, the dictator left the building a matter of minutes early; the explosion killed 3 'old fighters' of the Nazi Party. No-one else came this close to killing Hitler until July 1944 and Elser was only caught on the Swiss border.

The book is written very much for an American audience, so in contrast American commanders get a sympathetic hearing. There is sloppiness at points. Paul von Hindenburg did not become President of Germany until 1925 and never governed from Weimar. Part of his problem is that he started the book in 1965 and published in 1976. As he details in a chapter at the end, when he begun the book almost everything about his topic was still secret. It was not until 1974 that anything was said publicly about the breaking of Enigma or Bletchley Park, let alone many of the deception schemes, in part because there was worry that this would weaken the position in regards to the USSR during the Cold War. It seems that Brown already had one very generalised book ready and then in the mid-1970s when some details on his actual topic came to light, he rushed that into the book.

Given the timing of the publication, gaps in Brown's knowledge remain. He is oblivious to the difficulties Bletchley Park had in breaking the Shark variant of Enigma in 1943 and in fact portrays the Battle of the Atlantic in that phase contrary to what happened. He seems oblivious to Alan Turing's conviction for indecency in 1952, due to a homosexual relationship, at the time something illegal. Consequently he does not know about the medication Turing was compelled to then take which began shifting the traits of his gender. As a result, Turing's suicide by poisoning is a mystery to Brown which he simply puts down to the wartime stress the man faced.

For all these flaws, this could have been a good book if it had been reduced to 400 pages or so and Brown had focused on his supposed actual topic. There are aspects in here which are interesting and still do not turn up elsewhere. His questioning of how far Allied agents and resistance fighters were sacrificed to give credence to the deception plans is good. How the manipulation of wireless traffic and the use of double agents are also strong points. He does show how deception, especially Fortitude South which long convinced the Germans, even after D-Day, that there would be an Allied landing in the Pas-de-Calais reduced the German response to the Normandy invasion and so spared Allied lives. However, these are points you have to sift through all the general stuff, which while interesting, simply detracts from what should have been much more clearly the focus of this book.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest' by Stieg Larsson; read by Martin Wenner

This is the final book in Larsson's immensely popular Millennium trilogy which it has taken me over a year to get through, largely because the books provide diminishing returns. See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/05/books-i-listened-toread-in-may.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html for my reviews of the audio books of the previous two. While 'The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo' (2005) was an old fashioned murder mystery with sexual violence layered on top and 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' (2006) a clearer action-adventure, this third book is really a legal story. I would not say 'thriller' because though there is some conspiracy - a sub-section of the Swedish secret police trying to keep secrets around a Soviet defector - and some violence, most of the book is stodgy legal wrangling. Lisbeth Salander, the protagonist spends much of the novel in a hospital bed just two doors from her abusive father who had her sectioned and she tried to kill in the previous book. The proximity of the two seems ridiculous.

Apparently Larsson planned ten books in the series, before his death. However, it is apparent he had used everything up before this book. What we get is long stretches of people being very smug, whether the aged secret police, detectives who oppose or support Salander and the journalists who are working to have her sectioning reversed. That latter element perhaps now has some greater currency in the light of the Britney Spears wrangling, but it hardly makes an exciting or even engaging story. Larsson also comes across as rather pathetic in two regards. One is him constantly saying what piece of technology or software everyone is using, many of which must have been out-of-date even before the books were published. His attempts to give it some edgy currency become very irritating. The second is the character of journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Blomkvist is clearly an avatar of Larsson, a journalist aged 60 at the time of his death in 2004. Blomkvist is a philanderer, who despite not really attractive traits is able to get a whole string of women, some twenty years his junior to sleep with him and not to get fussed when he moves on to another. This is somehow seen as an asset rather than a flaw in the character and is rather galling as Larsson seems to miss the fact that Blomkvist is on the same spectrum as the men who abuse Salander. Instead, even independent, courageous Salander somehow cannot resist him.

This book lumbers on even in audio form, to the extent that by the time you reach the epilogue which wraps up one character, you have actually forgotten entirely about him. While the first book could be criticised as being over-rated, this third book certainly can have that charge levelled against it. The whole thing is really simply an over-stretched epilogue to 'The Girl Who Played with Fire'. How tedious the subsequent novels would have been one can only speculate. I imagine if Larsson had lived, the publishers may have even looked at this third book with askance and have sought heavy revisions.

Wenner does reasonably well in trying to bring life to this novel. There are so many characters of both genders and various ages, that he has to engage a whole range of voices. Consequently, while some are given a Swedish accent, many end up sounding like they come from regions of the UK. As before, Salander sounds very much like a woman from a London housing estate.

'Past Secrets' by Cathy Kelly: read by Niamh Cusack

When buying bundles of audio books in the way I used to, sometimes you get unexpected books in the mix. This was one of those which I guess a few years ago would have been termed 'chick lit'. It is focused on three female neighbours and one of their daughters, living or coming to live on a street in the Republic of Ireland. As the title suggests they each have a secret from their past, an illegitimate child, an affair and self-harm. Challenging circumstances lead them to reassess them keeping these things secret. Kelly attracts very opposite opinions, with some loving her work, it does sell well, and others condemning it for being too twee and unrealistic. The fact that Amber, the daughter of Faye, one of the three gets her art work bought up by a wealthy American and that Maggie, cheated on by her lecturer partner, finds a lovely local mechanic who she almost immediately has sexual relations with are seen as unrealistic. In addition, there is scepticism that people would hold to such secrets for so long and that, for example, the husband of the third woman, Christie gets so angry about an affair she had with a Polish artist 25 years earlier that he leave her.

I guess there is a challenge with these books. Kelly presumably wanted challenges for her characters but also did not want this to be a story of misery. She could have had it go that way with failures for all of the 4 protagonists, but I guess not many people would buy that. One point that does seem to anger many readers is that she has four stories running in parallel with minimal connection between them. As I know from my own writing there is a real hostility these days, no matter the genre, to authors having parallel stories rather than sticking to one, with, at most, sub-plots. I am not really sure why there is so much hostility to the parallel story approach, but it is certainly fuelled by online commentary which is very indignant if authors, even those as well established as Kelly, 'break the rules' which readers insist upon.

For what it is, the book is fine. It may not be a genre I would normally turn to, but I was not offended by it. I found it believable based on people and their behaviour I have seen in real life. The pacing was fine. There are happy endings, but that stopped the book being a tale of misery and to some degree any book with romance in has to stretch credibility as it is incredibly rare that any relationship starts or persists the way they are shown in novels. I am always interested to see what tropes go with different genres and one thing that was striking about this one is the level of detail of description. Paintings are clearly important to Kelly and you could paint her characters from the way she describes them and indeed all the houses in the street. I think some readers would find this unnecessary or even overwhelming, but it seems to fit reasonably well with the book.

Niamh Cusack is ideally cast to read this book, with accents that sound southern Irish but not sufficiently that they are impenetrable to listeners from other parts of the English-speaking world. Her American ones are reasonable too. She is good at getting the emotions across when this is called for.