The Books I Read In April

 Fiction

'A Long Night in Paris' by Dov Alfon

This is a contemporary thriller which is split between Israel and Paris. Given the range of perspectives of the various people involved included various members of the Israeli intelligence agencies, French police and assorted Chinese agents it is very choppy. Alfon seems particularly interested in the rivalries between different Israeli agencies, but in contrast to trying to track down the murderers of an Israeli IT specialist and then a former Israeli agent in Paris, lots of details of people posturing in meetings becomes tedious. In addition, the tension is further slackened by how long the processes go on. The killing of the IT specialist is proven to be a case of mistaken identity, but this takes time. There is a lot of posturing between the Israelis and the French too, which is not really engaging. Thus the book falls between two stools. It lacks the intrigue of a murder mystery and yet also lacks the pace of a contemporary political thriller, say something by James Patterson. 

Overall there are some good elements and the explanation for the defection of the agent ends up being feasible. However, too much is jammed in to the book leading to longueurs. In addition the internal inter-agency rivalry is not engaging and is too full of insufferable people. This is a weakness we see in thrillers, e.g. the Bourne novels. People who are interested in/have been involved with such agencies seem to think the average reader will find them fascinating. These days, though, most are familiar with how they work so these scenes just resemble meetings the average office worker attends. A shorter, much tauter book could have brought out the highlights without weighing them down with uninteresting extras.

'Murder in the Museum' by Simon Brett

This is the fourth book in the Fethering series of 'cosy crime' novels by Brett which have now reached 21 books. I read the first back in 2016: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-books-i-read-in-october.html Maybe my age and my relocation within the UK has made me more tolerant of the setting. The novel features two middle-aged women, Carole a former civil servant and her next door neighbour, Jude who is a new age health practitioner. A lot has happened in the two books I have not read. However, as amateurs they still get themselves mixed up in murders. In this case through Carole being a trustee of a local house where (fictional) author and poet Esmond Chadleigh lived and there is discussion about how to raise funds to develop a museum. A skeleton found in a walled garden and later the shooting of a former trustee link past and current deaths.

It is well realised. Brett is excellent at capturing a slice of Home Counties England and the people within it. At times he shades into stereotype, but occasionally surprises the reader. He seems better at showing the novel is genuinely set in the 2000s than was the case with the previous one I read. In addition, Jude's support of an old lover who is gravely ill leavens the cosiness effectively and makes what otherwise could be seen as too whimsical. It is a fine line to walk, but it is done reasonably well here. The conjuring up of fictional poetry and an imagined author's career is done credibly. While I would not rush out to buy more of this series, I enjoyed this one more than 'The Body on the Beach' (2000) when I read it seven years ago. However, I acknowledge that that may be due to changes in my own life rather than in Brett's books.

Non-Fiction

'Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991' by Eric Hobsbawm

While Hobsbawm comments himself on the challenges of producing a history book on times through which you have lived, (his life was 1917-2012) he does at times fall victim to that, seeing the groundwork to subsequent developments that he cannot help but identify even if it falls outside the scope of the particular book. Hobsbawm was a Marxist and while he does not laud the Soviet system and in fact identifies flaws in it from the outset that were to ultimately lead to its downfall, he does see the political situation of the 1980s ('the Landslide') with the move to New Right attitudes as a grave catastrophe in a way that probably many historians of the time would see differently. Until the end he does tend to play down the climate change challenges, but that is probably because he was more alert to the more immediate environmental harm caused by pollution. Ironically he ends on an optimistic note, which in fact in the period following has proven to be false and looking at the present news one can see behaviours and conflicts that are so reminiscent of the 1910s, 1930s and 1970s.

Hobsbawm brings a general perspective of realism, though perhaps over-estimates the room for manoeuvre for politicians in the democracies in the inter-war era. He is good on their fear of a repeat of the Great War, but tends to under-estimate how much the fear of the spread of Communism shaped so much of their responses especially to the rise of the Fascist regimes. Though he is better on the reason why the short-lived alliance between the West and the USSR could not be sustained.

Often taking an economic perspective, his writing on the Depression and then the 'Golden Age' of economic prosperity in the West, about 1948-73 is well handled and also why it unravelled. Though he picks up on the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution, these are more seen through the lens of the West and there is an absence of seeing things from those countries' perspectives which was a refreshing approach in earlier books in the series. His writing on cultural changes is less well focused and he seems despairing of post-1945 art as lacking the dynamism of the earlier decades.

Overall, there are gems to be picked from this book as there was with the others in the series. I remember reading that the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts picked out Hobsbawm's series as the most over-rated one. I would not go as far as to condemn it in the way he does. I think Hobsbawm had a perspective which is often sorely lacking nowadays especially in era or general history books that is well worth recapturing. The prime challenge is that he seems to have struggled to disengage from those aspects which not simply interested him, but which to him seemed essential. When he touches on those things it distorts his writing and he is a better analyst when less attached to a topic. Consequently, this book like the preceding three are useful for reference. As a sum of the parts, the quality is lesser than individual chapters and analyses and as a result, viewpoints which stand out today and retain real value are liable to lost amongst the mass.

Books I Listened To/Read In August

Fiction
'The Canterbury Tales' by Geoffrey Chaucer; Translated by Nevill Coghill
The edition I read was the 1971 edition of this 1951 translation.  While Coghill translates the Middle English into Modern English he goes to great efforts to keep the whole text in appropriate rhymes.  This can be quite an exhausting read as you steam through the text buoyed along by the rhymes.  I had covered the Prologue and the Pardoner's Tale when at school and though I knew occasional references to the stories, most of them were new to me as were some of the reciters, e.g. the nun's priest and the canon's yeoman who in fact is not in the Prologue but catches the company when on the road.  As you will no doubt know, the story is about a group of pilgrims heading from London to Canterbury to see the tomb of Thomas à Beckett.  They are accompanied by the Host of the inn they assemble at and are charged each with telling stories on the way to and from Canterbury with the best winning a prize.  Chaucer puts himself among the party but is stopped from delivering the story he wants to give and instead gives a prose essay which is not contained in this volume, only summarised.  The Parson effectively delivers a surname which again is just summarised in this book and not given in detail.  Chaucer never finished the book.  The Cook's Tale is incomplete and the characters do not actually reach Canterbury before the book comes to an end.

Chaucer has brought together people from right across the social classes of the late 14th century, barring the nobility and serfs. He is very clever in using the stories to show us much more about the character of the teller.  For example the Knight is supposed to be telling a story of courtly romance but spends more time on the two knights fighting each other, their forces and the buildings that are constructed, than anything romantic.  He also works up tensions between various characters, notably the Miller and the Reeve.  Many of the stories are taken from ancient sources rather than being original to Chaucer, but that was the tendency of the day and this book was always going to be an anthology.  There are morality tales, such as that of the Pardoner and indeed warnings to readers such as that of the Canon's Yeoman, about the hazards of getting involved with alchemy.  However, the main topic of these stories, offering different perspectives, some humorous, but mainly serious, about relations between men and women especially in marriage and whether one spouse should obey the other.  This topic does not simply appear in the Wife of Bath's story and dialogue, where she shows herself a clear feminist, but in other stories too, for example in the Merchant's and the Squire's tales.  I suppose this was a universal topic which would have appealed to a range of audiences who might have not been keen on the heavily religious stories such as that of the Second Nun, though women do feature notably throughout.

The stories may seem rather simplistic nowadays.  They also seem bigoted: no Jew or Muslim has a good word said about them in any of the stories and, on occasion, the two religions are portrayed as deceptive and malicious, though Chaucer gives a range of Christians, including men of the church, who display such characteristics too.  The stories do show the concerns of people of the era and that I many ways their approach to society, let alone relations between men and women, were similar to those attitudes we could see nowadays.  The hostility to Jews and Muslims, can be found with the same sort of vigour in social media, six centuries on.  I guess this is why Chaucer's work has remained of interest.  While there are references which will be obscure, what is at the heart of the 23 stories are ideas and views that will be familiar to a modern reader, as well as informing you about the attitudes of people of the medieval period.

'Hide and Seek' by Ian Rankin
This book was published in 1991, four years after Rankin's first novel.  It is rather galling to read the introduction added in 2005 in which the author outlines how desultory had been his efforts in writing this second book and getting it published.  He also says he had not pinned down the main character of John Rebus and altered him subsequently.  These days I do not think any author could come close to getting any book published with such an ill-focused approach.

Anyway, this is another short detective book focusing on Rebus, promoted to Detective Inspector but as with 'Knots and Crosses' (1987) on a murder case which actually does not look like a case at all.  He investigates drug users living in a squat and the situation is confused by male prostitution, leading businessmen indulging in a range of crimes and tension between Rebus and colleagues.  I like the fact that it is not simply a murder mystery and you feel there are far more directions for the book to go in than would have been the case under another author.  Once more, Rankin paints a very rich portrait of many different corners of Edinburgh.  His detective is dysfunctional but not to the extreme that it becomes hackneyed.  However, given his confession in the introduction I am rather disconcerted that this is not really the 'true' Rebus yet.  However, overall it is a satisfying detective story with credibility and effective atmosphere.

'The Secret History of Vampires' ed. by Darrell Schweitzer
I have produced a number of collections of short stories, but they usually are received poorly as people complain that 'they do not go anywhere'.  I accept that despite enjoying doing them, I might be bad at writing short stories, it is a very different skill to writing novels.  However, I keep finding such collections for sale and feel that the reviews dismissing the legitimacy of them is misplaced.  This collection of 13 short stories by leading authors like Harry Turtledove, Brian Stableford and Tanith Lee, I really think re-emphasises the value of such work.  The premise of this book is that vampires feature in interaction with historical characters or, in fact, more often, the historical characters are revealed to be vampires.  While Lenin, Greta Garbo and Cleopatra appear as vampires, Catherine of Aragon, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Napoleon Bonaparte are shown as vampire hunters.

The stories vary considerably.  I did not like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Ian Watson, involving astronomer Tycho Brahe in 16th century Prague, the anachronistic Chinese takeaway seemed a very poor joke and undermined the whole story.  'A Princess of Spain' by Carrie Vaughn, featuring Catherine of Aragon battling vampires alongside Prince Henry Tudor; 'Garbo Quits' by Ron Goulart set in early 1940s Hollywood and featuring a vampire gang among the movie business, plus 'Sepulchres of the Undead' by Keith Taylor about a group seeking to purge vampirism from Egypt in 2566 BCE, are really engaging and you want to read more about them.  In contrast, Harry Turtledove's 'Under St. Peter's' does what a short story should do best, it is a bold, stunning glimpse into something greater but well rounded of itself.  Despite the lurid cover, this book turned out to be better than I might have expected and reminded me what good fantasy short story writing can be.

'The Ends of the Earth' by Robert Goddard
This book published in 2015 is the third book in the surprisingly successful 'The Wide World' trilogy.  It is set in 1919 and is basically a Bulldog Drummond book but featuring James 'Max' Maxted, a British fighter pilot whose father was murdered at the Paris Peace Conference.  In this book he assembles a team, including stock characters such as Sam, his mechanic from the war, to go Japan to track down the Japanese count he believes ordered his father's death.  There is also a German spy involved, seeking employment with the Japanese government and he has more stock characters, a suave but ultimately cowardly Frenchman and a ruthless female Russian spy.  You could almost forgive Goddard falling back on such tropes, and there are more that I have not listed including the athletic son at the Swiss school, the bombastic British agent, the practical Japanese detective, the Japanese man now a monk and so on and on and put it down as a pastiche.  However, Goddard's modern day sensibilities mean it is also burdened by a lot of despair.  Constantly all the plans of the 'heroes' are wiped out. The opponents appear preternaturally omniscient and able to defy almost every step taken even before the characters we are following have decided upon it.  As a result, the reverses that come - that have to come otherwise the book would be at an end within fifty pages - are highly random, abrupt and rely greatly on coincidence and good luck rather than any skill.  People like this type of story because they feel that in the modern world they show them a time when individuals had agency and through wits and courage could alter what was happening.  As a result, I found this a highly irritating, and at times, ridiculous book.  I am glad I only came in at the end of the trilogy.

Fiction - Audio Books
'Blue Labyrinth' by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child; read by René Auberjonois
This is the eighth standalone book featuring FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast though he features in a number of other books which had been written by Preston and Child since 1995.  It is clear from the start that they were aiming for a modern day American equivalent of Sherlock Holmes.  His brother is even named Diogenes and Mycroft Holmes generally inhabited the Diogenes Club in Conan Doyle's novels.  Pendergast is rather superhuman, being ex-special forces, a crack shot with an old pistol and having studied with various esoteric tutors so is skilled at mimicking people, even envisaging events he has not witnessed as if he saw them and a skilled martial artist.  He is very wealthy and has a coterie of friends who aid him.  Two women: his ward and a scientist who is a friend, carry out sustained action and quite vicious violence across many of the latter chapters of the book.  He also has friends and enemies in the New York police force.  Though he is employed by the FBI he does not actually seem to do any work for them, at least in this book, and due to his wealth they only pay him $1 per year.

Thus, we have a very interesting character but it is very over-the-top and some readers will find, like me, that they are drowning in the immense detail.  Preston and Child go to town on numerous topics from the formation of turquoise, the Salton Sea resort, various chemical reactions, the nature of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, 19th century quack medicine, various North American plants, super acids, a museum, and so on.  Some will enjoy this attention to detail but for others it will appear a slog.  There are lots of twists and turns and it is good to see that the whole of Pendergast's team gets involved rather than it all depending on him.  The research is to be admired and the twists are well done.  The final battles are both gruesome and protracted.  You feel this would have been a better novel for being much tighter.  The Sherlock Holmes stories were nearly all short and you feel at times that the authors are adding in elements simply to show what they can do rather to genuinely add to the story.

René Auberjonois does very well with a challenging job.  Pendergast puts on different accents as part of his investigation.  One character speaks with English, we are told, with an accent both influenced by Brazilian Portuguese and Swiss German!  His women, always a challenge for male readers, come off convincingly sounding appropriate to their ages and not seeming girlish when we know they are very knowledgeable.  I suppose this book at 14 hours on CD is good value and you learn a lot from it, but you will need stamina to get through it no matter what format you access it in.


'A Series of Murders' by Simon Brett; radio play with narration by Bill Nighy
This is the 13th story in Brett's Charles Paris stories and was published in 1989, so four years before 'A Reconstructed Corpse' I listened to and enjoyed a couple of months back.  Bill Nighy both narrates and performs in this story.  It follows a similar formula with Paris having an on-off relationship with his wife.  In this story he has an ongoing job as a police sergeant in a television adaptation of an elderly female authors' series of novels, what these days would be called 'cosy crime' stories.  A number of the cast are killed both in London and then on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset.  Paris works out the situation and prompts the resolution.  Nighy is well cast for the role of Paris both in narration and acting the part.  The stories are brisk but believable and for radio seem to have been brought up to date, e.g. in terms of celebrity culture.  The only thing I would have liked more of with this one was the old pop music which was such as feature of  'A Reconstructed Corpse', but maybe the of the rights to use the songs is increasingly prohibitive.  There a number of these plays out on CD and I will look out for those at a good price.


'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Brontë; read by Harriet Walter
Opening with the story of an orphaned girl being bullied by her relatives, I did worry this was going to be another depressing book along the lines of Dickens or Hardy's work that I have read recently.  Fortunately the horrendous school Jane Eyre is sent to, is quickly improved and the action jumps to her adulthood and her work as a governess.  The mad wife locked in the big house has almost become a trope of gothic horror stories these days, but listening to one of the original ones, it is handled pretty well and with genuine intrigue.  The heartbreak which follows the attempt at bigamy and then Jane facing absolute poverty are done effectively.  Her pitching up by chance with long-lost relatives does seem rather contrived.  The advantage of this story over some of the others I have listened to recently, let alone 'Wuthering Heights' by Charlotte's sister, that I avoided, is that it does not drag on.  The developments are much more effective for not being lost amongst extended text about dreary activities which simply plump out the book.  While I would hardly say I was a fan of this book, I did find it far more tolerable than some of the 'classics' I have listened to recently.

Harriet Walter handles this better than 'Middlemarch'.  Perhaps the briskness and smaller range of characters, with less hysteria helps in this regard.  She does well in bringing the characters to life in a convincing way, even the young girl speaking French.


'Overture to Death' by Ngaio Marsh; read by Anton Lesser
I think Anton Lesser is becoming my favourite audio book reader.  With this book he has rendered the female characters so well that I had to check that there was not a female reader employed as well to provide them.  This is an uber-cosy crime novel, set in the village of Winton St. Giles, close to uplands wonderfully know as Cloudyfold.  Winton is a part of Bournemouth and Clouds Hill near Bovington, where T.E. Lawrence was living four years before the book was published are both in Dorset, though Winton would have been in Hampshire at the time.  It revolves around an amateur dramatics event to raise funds for the local youth group at which a local elderly spinster is shot dead.

This is the eighth book of thirty-two to feature Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, clearly a member of the British gentry; younger brother of a baronet.  This manner allows him to command respect among the mainly middle class suspects.  He often has an austere manner, though warmer than the way Patrick Malahide has tended to portray him in televised episodes.  With a number of scandals that these days seem very old fashioned, about people in their twenties marrying against the will of their parents, two spinsters competing for the affections of the rector and a doctor with a disabled wife considering an affair with a patient, provide the background for the killing, which though pretty contrived is just about believable.  The solution effectively comes down to carefully working out who went where and when, so it is explicitly like a puzzle.  The book is fine if you enjoy English village murders, but being the first Marsh novel I have come across, I do not feel she is as adept as Agatha Christie, at least at her best.


'Roseanna' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
This is the first of the ten books written by the couple Sjöwall and Warlöö between 1964-1975.  As left-wingers they felt there was much at fault with social democratic Sweden at the time, because, despite its welfare state, it still suffered crime.  Though, as they show in this book, their view of criminals is not that they are evil, but maladjusted.  They have received renewed attention in the light of the Scandi-noir fad in the UK of the 2010s.  I have long wanted to read the books, but then found the BBC had done a series of plays of the books in 2012.  As with the Charles Paris CDs, there is acting but also narration.  The difference with these books is Sharp and Gleaves effectively play the two authors who intervene directly throughout the books to explain their perspective.  The other parts are acted by a range of people, though the returning roles are kept by the same actors throughout.

This is a brisk crime story about the eponymous American woman who turns up dead in a canal in 1964 and the protracted investigation to find out who she was and then entrap her killer.  Some of the story is on the different attitudes to sex in Sweden and the USA and the challenge to people of 1964 with a woman who enjoys sex with a series of partners.  It is played against the backdrop of the decay in the marriage of the lead detective, Inspector Martin Beck.  The acting is good and the sound effects evocative of both the places and the times.

While writing an engaging crime novel, even with its period setting now, Sjöwall and Warlöö go overboard in trying to make life in mid-1960s Sweden appear terrible.  They emphasise the wet and cold weather and how dreary everything is after the Christmas period.  To British readers knowing that era, the fact that everyone seems to have a television and no-one seems to return to work until 7th January, already makes it appear a lot better than the UK at the time, so this forced disapproval seems just that, forced.  In contrast to Leonardo Sciscia with post-war Sicily or Josef Škvorecký with Czechoslovakia, there is no subtle revelation of what is 'wrong' with the society being featured.  Yes, it has criminals, but which society does not and the quality of life for many people shown in the novel is better than for many contemporaries in other countries then and today.  I do not get to spend the summer on an island with a small boat or even go as a 'deck passenger' on a river cruise.

Thus, I do feel the authors protest too much.  Still this does not distract from a well thought out, tense crime novel and I enjoyed this far more than 'Overture to Death' (1939).  Thus, I intend to collect the other radio plays which seem readily available still.

'The Man who Went up in Smoke' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
This is the second book in Sjöwall and Warlöö's Martin Beck series and takes the action forward to 1966.  Once more Beck has his holiday interrupted, this time to work on behalf of the Swedish Foreign Office in locating a Swedish journalist who has disappeared while in Hungary.  The Foreign Office is effectively being blackmailed by the journalist's magazine into doing something or facing a critical article.  Again, despite Sjöwall and Warlöö's assertions of what they see as serious flaws in Swedish society, the fact that a government department could in effect be held to account this way seems quite surprising to a modern reader.

Beck travels to Budapest, in what was Communist Hungary at the time and only ten years after the Hungarian Uprising had been suppressed by Soviet troops.  To some degree the authors play on this as when Beck is followed, we simply assume it is by the secret police, though by that time Hungary was rare in not having a formal force beyond the Ministry of the Interior; though Soviet operatives worked in the country.  Sjöwall and Warlöö seem to have affection for Hungary and describe it in very positive terms in contrast to Sweden.  The food is good, the views wonderful and trips on the river, delightful.  Beck gains aid from the Hungarian authorities and the case takes him back to Sweden.  It is well written with good twists, though we may have foreseen some of the smuggling aspects.  Unfortunately the title of the book, a direct translation of the Swedish one, undermines the closing phase of the book, some other title like 'The Missing Journalist' would have maintained the final mystery longer.  Overall, despite the authors' assertions about places, I found this an engaging thriller and am looking forward to the rest.

The acting is handled very well, especially as a lot of scenes involve actors speaking with their mouths full of food.  However, I do find it difficult to accept Neil Pearson playing Lennart Kollberg, Beck's deputy because of his role in 'Between the Lines' (1992-94) as Superintendent Tony Clark.  I would have cast him as Beck and the man who actually plays him, Steven Mackintosh, as Kollberg. That, however, is simply how I see the nature of the two actors.  They both do their roles well.


'A Question of Blood' by Ian Rankin; read by Tom Cotcher
This book was published in 2003, so 12 years after 'Hide and Seek' discussed above.  While Inspector John Rebus is the hero of the book, things have moved on a great deal around him.  Inspector Gill Templer of the earlier book is now a Chief Superintendent, three ranks higher.  This book gives almost equal time to Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke who acts as his aide a lot of time, especially after he has scalded his hands.  As with many of the Rebus stories, a murder is not clear in the usual sense, even when in this one a gunman has gone on the rampage in a private school.  As in the other books, there are parallel stories, notably about a petty criminal who has threatened DS Clarke and after sharing a drink with Rebus is found burnt alive.  Rankin keeps the different threads going well and brings in a range of aspects, including an Army investigation and Edinburgh's enduring Gothic community.  Though these aspects are as sharp as ever, and especially given that we do not know if Clarke is going to survive, there are good points of tension.  However, I found it, unlike the earlier Rebus stories I have read, not to be as tight.  There is too much driving backwards and forwards between parts of Edinburgh and the environs, out to Jura and other locations.  It has some good twists and the usual elements of Rebus who is suspended for much of the novel.  However, I felt it could have been handled with a greater terseness to keep the mystery and the tension taut throughout.

Cotcher is great with a range of Scottish accents and like the best readers you feel that you are listening to the main character.  He does struggle much more with the non-Scottish accents, especially the Liverpudlian army investigator and an Australian police officer.
 

Non-Fiction
'Discovering Castles' by Walter Earnshaw
This is another of those rather twee non-fiction books from the mid-1960s that I picked up during my life and feel me with a great sense of nostalgia, though some of their views would now seem unacceptable.  In this one, aside from the mention of one envisaged girl, the book seems primarily aimed at boys, indeed largely at boys' schools.  It is a brisk survey of  English castles and castles built by the English in Wales from the Norman Conquest to the 16th century.  Drawing on lots of examples from across England and Wales, it outlines how castles evolved and why, showing the clear phases.  It also outlines the ways in which they were attacked, again drawing on historical examples.  There are an array of drawings of castles and plans of them.  Two things jarred.  One was the extended urgings for boys to do activities associated with castles (the girl could apparently look at the clothing of people who lived in them) and the incongruous appendix about torture devices.  Some of these I had never heard of, but found the descriptions chilling even as an adult.  It certainly punctured my nostalgia and so I would not see this book in the way I have other similar ones I have read over the last couple of years.  I came away from it seeing Earnshaw as a rather unsettling obsessive for all of the pleasant wrappings.

The Books I Listened To/Read In June

Fiction
'A Dance with Dragons 2: After the Feast' by George R.R. Martin
This is the second part of the fifth, and, so far, final book in Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series.  It was published in 2011 and, while Martin has promised a sixth book, he has gone off to other projects instead.  This part is slightly better than the first part, but as with that and the previous book, the series has entirely lost momentum.  It is easy to understand why the writers of the television series based on the books, 'A Game of Thrones' have increasingly diverged from the novels, leaving out entire characters, but also introducing a great deal more action.  I would really love to read a novelisation of the series rather than these books.

Opportunities for excitement are avoided.  In the series Stannis Baratheon marches against Winterfell and has to sacrifice his daughter in the hope he will win.  He is defeated in a major battle and is ultimately killed by Brienne of Tarth who has been hunting him to exact vengeance for his magical murder of his brother.  In the book, his siege train simply gets stuck in the snow and dies very slowly without even reaching Winterfell.  Similarly Daenerys Targaryen sits in Mereen for a long time thinking, gets married, and flies off on her dragon.  There is lots of worrying but very little action.  Tyrion Lannister spends his time as an entertainment slave and has very little role in developments. We hear no more of Sansa Stark, in contrast to the series; we hear no more of Brandon Stark or Sam Tarly or happenings in Dorne and so on. 

The writers of the series drive the story on whereas, very frustratingly, Martin just wallows in the vast structure he has created, with no clear sense of where it is going.  You have to admire the world he has crafted but instead of enjoying this book, I laboured through it and am looking to prequels and other output which remembers that an epic story is no story if nothing much happens.

'Conquest' by Stewart Binns
This was a disappointing book.  It focuses on the life of Hereward of Bourne, popularly known as Hereward the Wake, who led a guerrilla war against the Norman occupation of England following the Battle of Hastings in October 1066.  The book follows him from his youth, through the Battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings - he is at both - to his exile from England following subsequent defeat by King William I at Ely.  The King is portrayed very much as a brutal dictator in this novel.  This was Binns's first novel and there is an air of naivety about it.  Aside from a couple of sex scenes, it feels very much like a book Henry Treece (1911-66) would have written for children in the 1950s.  Everything is very earnest and the good and the bad are painted in stark colours.  There are few moments of real tension, which can be achieved even in historical novels when we know the outcome as seen in 'Munich' by Robert Harris which I listened to last month. 

The book owes a lot to 'The Last English King' (1997) by Julian Rathbone with Hereward even ending up in Byzantine Greece.  However, even more than that book it is a labour and because of the lack of tension, it becomes a depressing book as Hereward steadily moves towards defeat and loses his 'family' the friends he has acquired through the book which have become rather like one of these superhero ensemble movies currently so possible.  Binns also has not learned how to get historical detail into a book without breaking off to give us a mini-lecture on who the person is and who their ancestors are.  We hear about the War of the Three Sanchos (1065-67) in the Iberian Peninsula without this having any real relevance to the story.  Binns was very fortunate to get a publishing contract for this book and certainly needs to work at his craft as a novel writer if he is going to produce satisfying books.

'Knots and Crosses' by Ian Rankin
I have been given a lot of books from Ian Rankin's Rebus detective stories.  This one, set in Edinburgh in 1985 is the first.  In an introduction which was added to this edition, Rankin outlines how this was his first novel and that he knew nothing about police procedure, though he was able to get up to speed liaising with staff from a Leith police station.  At times the book feels like a first novel and I imagine a more experienced author would not have relied so much on coincidence or have a lead character with such an incredible background and then ironically one who is pretty ineffectual.  At first it appears that the 'hero' Detective Sergeant John Rebus is only going to be on the edges of the investigation of a serial killer of children.  However, ultimately it turns out that he is right at the centre and as much a victim as an investigator.  However, Rebus, though seeming rather downbeat and hardly sharp, is not simply a former paratrooper, but also a trained member of an elite sub-unit of the S.A.S. specifically trained to fight in the civil war which had been expected in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s/early 1980s; the legacy of his training comes back to haunt him in all senses of the word.

There are some pretty well drawn characters, though, as Rankin notes himself it does feel all very historical now, especially the bars and the journalists in an age when the mobile phone is uncommon and computers in police stations are handled by a small band of specialists, though Rankin reveals good insight in what was to come.  Rebus's brother, a drug-dealing stage hypnotists appears interesting at the start but soon seems to just be a plot device.  Rebus's ex-wife taking his boss's son as her lover, seems particularly contorted.  The book is quirky enough to keep one's interest and it moves along briskly, describing Edinburgh and people in it well.  It was not as outstanding as I had expected from the acclaim that has been heaped upon it, but it was not sufficiently disappointing that I will throw out the others in the series that I have been given.

'Cartomancy' by Mary Gentle
This is a selection of short stories.  I had been slightly misled by it as 'cartomancy' actually means telling the future using playing cards, but though Gentle does feature some tarot dice in one story in fact she uses it more to mean telling things by using maps.  I read 'Rats and Gargoyles' (1990) many years ago, but this book does not really make much sense and you have read a lot of her other books, notably, 'Ash: A Secret History' (2000), 'Grunts!' (1992) and the Orthe trilogy, 1984-2002.  This is because many of the stories are prequels or offcuts from these series.  Most do not stand well as simply short stories without knowing those contexts, which Gentle only tells us about in numerous 'afterwords'.  There are some interesting counter-factuals, such as a Visigoth kingdom in Tunisia and Burgundy being a dominant country in Europe in the late 20th century.  It is interesting to see the female warriors she includes.

There are some which are decent as short stories, 'Kitsune' and how the eponymous character wrecks lives, 'The Harvest of Wolves' set in a 20th century Britain where austerity has become authoritarian, 'The Pits Beneath the World' about a human uncovering lifecycles on an alien planet and 'Cast a Long Shadow' which is a good piece of magic realism set in 20th century Britain. 'Orc's Drift' is really silly. The rest are clearly disconnected parts of novels or prequels and while some have some good ideas, though not satisfactorily developed and because we do not know who these characters become, they lack the import that Gentle tries to instil in the afterwords.  'A Shadow under the Sea' about battling a Kraken is probably the best of these.  'Human Waste' is utterly horrendous.  I know authors have licence and nanobots being able to repair a child in seconds seems to make the impact lesser, but I certainly do not welcome a story of sustained cruelty and physical abuse repeated over the space of some minutes.  I get the point, but regret ever coming near that story.

Overall, then, this is really only a book for dedicated fans of Mary Gentle.  Even then I would advise against reading 'Human Waste'.

Fiction - Audio Books
'From Russia with Love' by Ian Fleming; read by Toby Stephens
The movie (1963) of this novel (1957) is my favourite of the James Bond dramatisations and is one that feels most like a spy movie than a kind of international crime drama.  In the novel, there are continuities with other books.  Bond's relationship with Tiffany Case from 'Diamonds Are Forever' (1956) has just come to an end with her returning to the USA with an American major.  The snagging of Bond's .25 Beretta (the 6.35mm Beretta 418 pistol which was still in production in the 1950s) in this novel leads to him being issued with the Walther PPK in 'Dr. No' (1958).  In the movie, Bond is facing the international crime syndicate SPECTRE whereas in the book he simply continues to battle Smersh, the unit of the Soviet intelligence organisation which carries out torture and executions.  He has crossed them in 'Casino Royale' (1953) and effectively battled their agents of in 'Live and Let Die' (1954); Sir Hugo Drax in 'Moonraker' (1955), in contrast, has been backed by GRU, the Soviet military intelligence body.  However, overall, the books are more clearly Cold War novels in a way that, by the time the movies were made and there was some brief thawing, it was not felt appropriate.

There is much from the book, including specific lines of dialogue which made it into the movie.  The significant characters are the same.  Fleming loves extended descriptions of people, especially the opposition.  We encounter the first female opponent of the novels in Colonel Rosa Klebb, a Smersh torturer with poisoned knitting needles rather than a shoe spike as in the movie, until the very end.  She is rather overwritten, but does come across as a genuinely sinister person especially in the descriptions of her torturing people.  She is what he calls 'neuter', what we would call bisexual now rather than asexual, which is used to add to her sinister nature.  There is Donovan 'Red' Grant, an Irishman in the book, a psychopath who loves killing and Kerim Bey, Bond's larger-than-life contact in Istanbul.  Even as an ebullient ally he is portrayed as having a dark side, having kept a woman chained naked in his house when a young man.  Interestingly, the entire first section of the book does not feature Bond except being discussed in the third person; we see Grant's and Tatiana Romanova's lives inside the USSR and the behaviour of the men controlling them.  At the time I guess this would be something unfamiliar to readers, but it re-emphasised to readers then why the Soviet system needed to be opposed by Bond.

As I have noted with the previous novels, Bond makes mistakes, often serious mistakes.  As Grant notes, throughout this story, the Soviets are able to play on Bond's vanity and curiosity to manoeuvre him almost precisely where they want him.  Only the availability of a 'gadget', the first to appear in the books, a throwing knife concealed in his attaché case, saves Bond from simply being shot and humiliated.  The other elements are there as in the movie, such as watching the Soviet embassy through a periscope; Kerim Bey's sons; shooting a Bulgarian agent as he escapes through a billboard advertising a movie; the fights at the gipsy camp; Bond foolishly allowing himself to be filmed through a two-way mirror in a hotel, even the breakfast he eats.  The climax comes in Paris rather than Venice and Kronsteen, the chess master, has not been killed. In this book, the Lektor of the movie, is called the Spektor and it is booby-trapped.  Bond is shown as complacent to the very end and when the book was published, the cliff-hanger must have been gripping for readers.

Toby Stephens, who appeared in the Bond movie, 'Die Another Day' (2002) is very good at the voices, having to affect a range of Russians.  His Kerim Bey is particularly good and the way he portrays Grant using his own voice and then acting as Nash, is subtly handled.  Overall, this is a quite gripping book especially as we can see how fallible Bond is and how easily he is played.  The Soviets almost manage to pull it off.  There are rich, if highly unpleasant, characters throughout, that stay the right side of being caricatures.  I have already listened to 'Dr. No' so the next one in series for me is 'Goldfinger' (1959).

'A Reconstructed Corpse' by Simon Brett; radio play with narration by Bill Nighy
I met Brett in the 2000s and have read one of his novels in a different series, 'The Body on the Beach' (2000).  This one is the 15th story (of 20 at present), published in 1993, from the Charles Paris series so far published 1975-2018, though with a long break, 1993-2013.  This explains why Paris seems rather anachronistic, regularly referencing 1960s and 1970s pop songs.  This is one of a number of Radio 4 dramatisations of the novels, that are sometimes also available on demand via the BBC I-Player.  It is kind of a hybrid though, because while many scenes are acted, there is a regular first-person narration from the character of Paris, perfectly portrayed by Nighy in his kind of washed up, but positive old actor/rock star approach which he sometimes portrays, e.g. in 'Love Actually' (2003).

It moves along briskly and snatches of pop songs indicate chapters well.  In many ways Paris is an old fashioned character, an (attempted) womaniser and heavy drinker who flits between minor acting roles.  However, Nighy ebullience and contemporary references keep this feeling fresh rather than jaded.  In this book, perhaps unexpectedly, the relationship with Paris's long-suffering wife, Frances, played by Suzanne Burden becomes an interesting reflection on middle-aged relationships and I like how Frances takes the lead in some of the amateur detection, which in this novel focuses on corrupt police and a public information programme called 'Citizen's Arrest'.  These CDs often turn up cheap, and having enjoyed this one, I will look out for others.

'The Book Thief' by Markus Zusak; read by Allan Corduner
I had become vaguely aware of this book, first published in 2006 due to publicity about the DVD of the movie, which I am surprised to find first came out in 2013.  Anyway, this is a very dense book.  Most audio books last 3-4 hours, this one is 14 hours.  It primarily covers the life of a German girl, Liesel Meminger living in a suburb of Munich 1939-43.  The narrator is Death, though more human and tangible yet far less fixed than the usual portrayals of personified death.  The book reminds a great deal of 'Cider with Rosie' (1959) by Laurie Lee, in that it goes into immense detail about the life of a girl.  Thus, beside the events of the war, concealing a Jew and the bombing there is a lot about her life.  For some reason at the age of 10 she is still illiterate, despite having Communist parents.  She is taken to be fostered in Molching when her father is arrested and her mother, we assume is soon taken too.  Her brother dies on the journey to Bavaria and is buried.  Her foster parents have grown-up children and are poor.  They treat her rather erratically, the mother in particular, but with affection.  The story then orbits around her school days, her friends and neighbours in Himmel Street, her participation in the BDM branch of the Hitler Youth and occasionally stealing books, fruit and vegetables.

In some ways I was disheartened to be read another book about wartime Germany with many of the standard tropes.  The characters do lighten it, despite all the tragedies that so many of them face; most of the people we meet do not make it to the end of the book, but that is probably no surprise.  The style with Death narrating, jumping back and forth in time and stopping to give little lectures on his/her existence and interaction with humans, is fine for a bit, but quickly becomes tiresome.  This is the main problem with the book, it is very heavy going.  There is so much to get through at such a slow pace that you are quickly exhausted of all the conceits of the approach.  The messages about escape through reading and authoring and the need for basic humanity, as a result, feel piled on and by the end you lose interest in them.  With this heavyweight approach it would have been fine just to feature a single year in Liesel Meminger's life, rather than four.  By going on so much, with so much passion and so many characters, by the end you have lost a lot of sympathy for anyone featured.  I came out of this book feeling exhausted and rather unhappy that I had ever started on it.

Allan Corduner is excellent as Death with rich and in turns flippant and thoughtful tones for this character.  He is not bad at voicing the children, though better with the adults, especially Liesel's foster father, Hans Hubermann.  His German is good too and listening to the book reminded me of numerous phrases that I had long forgotten from my youth when visiting and living in Germany.  Last time I was there was in 2005 but that was more than 15 years since the previous time.

Non-Fiction
'Crowded Hours. An Autobiography' by Eric Roll
This is another author who I have met, back in the 1990s when working for the Warburg Bank.  He is the only person who I have met who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  He lived in the Austrian part which is now in Romania, but came to Britain in 1931 and naturalised.  He was an early arrival in the wave of Central European economists who became so important for the British government from the 1940s to the late 1960s.  The book is very brisk, at times listing all the people he encountered in his career; generally viewing them positively.  Roll was involved in numerous international committees including on wartime food supplies, the allocation of Marshall Aid and on Britain's first application to join the EEC in 1961-63.  He was also an academic and worked a lot in the USA before leaving the civil service in the late 1960s to enter finance and private banking.

The book is apt to read at the moment on two grounds.  The first basis are the challenges of international negotiations.  Some of the commentary could have been written about Brexit negotiations now.  However, what is apparent is that the British have utterly lost the skill of working on international bodies to come to a satisfactory, even if not superb, outcome.  Perhaps we have become too dogmatic; maybe we have lost those internationalists of Roll's generation, adept at a range of languages and able to understand the views of others even while disagreeing with them or seeing them as to Britain's disadvantage.

The other useful aspect of this book is that Roll breaks off from the narrative periodically to bring analysis of economic approaches as found in this other, less personal books.  He is a centrist economically and proposes a kind of social market economy of the kind seen in West Germany in the third quarter of the 20th century - this being the 1994 edition of the book.  He certainly points to the unhealthiness of dogmatism, rather hooded criticisms of Thatcherite obsession with monetarism.  Roll seeks the greatest range of tools and criticises the focus just on interest rates for Keynesianism and on the money supply for the Thatcherism that followed.  He also speaks wisely about the changes coming to the City of London and the need for a sensible degree of control.  Some of his fears in this regard were witnessed in 2008.

Roll was very much a man of his time, but his wealth of experience in academia, the civil service and business and his even-handed approach to negotiations and economic approaches means that even now what he wrote provides quite a refreshing view of how things could be being done better, especially in terms of exiting the EU.

Non-Fiction - Audio Books
'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' by T.E.Lawrence; read by Jim Norton
This seems to be a popular book for putting into audio formats as I see there is a version read by Roy McMillan is also on sale.  This is largely a non-fiction book, but I believe it was in 'The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia' (2010) presented by Rory Stewart that showed he had been a bit liberal with some of the truth, for example shortening journey times he had recorded in his diaries when he produced this book.  The most notable is saying it took him 49 hours to get from Aqaba to the Suez Canal when it took 70 hours as recorded in his diary.

The book covers Lawrence's involvement with the Arab Revolt in 1916-18, up the western coast of what is now Saudi Arabia through present-day Israel to Damascus in Syria, at the time all territories held by the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany.  Lawrence's largely self-appointed mission was to bring together the wide diversity of Arabic tribes in the region and carry out a kind of guerrilla war, though securing towns along the Red Sea coast.  Much of his work was in leading raiding parties especially attacking trains, bringing more tribes into the fight and funding and training them.

Lawrence makes an epic story of what he was involved with.  In particular he makes very little mention of his failures beyond acknowledging them.  It would be interesting to know what went wrong on the failed raids as much as we learn about how he helped with the successes.  Sensibly he punctuates the battle scenes with detail of life among Arabs and at various locations on his journey, giving a rich picture of the culture he was moving among and was largely accepted into.  He spends a lot of time describing individual men and their characters (the book features very, very few women) of the tendency of the early-mid 20th Century writing (Fleming does this all the time too) and describes nationalities in a way that many current readers would find patronising if not verging on racist.  This is not confined to the Arabs and Turks as he is highly dismissive of Indian and Australian soldiers.  In contrast he goes overboard in praising General Edmund Allenby (1861-1936), though for a man of the time, the general appreciated the risks of indulging in crusader analogies and the risk of offending the largely Muslim population. 

It is interesting, despite the popularity of the book with politicians and generals of the time, that the assault on the port of Aqaba (now in Jordan) achieved after a lengthy march across the desert that Lawrence recounts in detail, had so little attention paid to it.  His ability to capture the town with a light camel-borne force because the landward side was unprotected in the expectation of any attack coming from the sea, was much paralleled in the fall of British-held Singapore in February 1942 to Japanese troops behaving in a very similar way, because of the lack of landward protection.

Lawrence articulates the guilt he felt throughout his mission, knowing from early on that the British were not going to permit the bulk of the independent Arab states that they were peddling as a way to try to gain support from Arab fighters.  He hoped that an Arab victory would free them from the imperial constraints, but all but Saudi Arabia became part of the British or French Empire following the Paris Peace Treaties.  Thus, while the book comes over as something from the age of high imperialism and with attitudes that would expect from that time, it is, at times, tempered by a different appreciation.

We know that Lawrence was a masochist and was probably homosexual or perhaps bisexual.  Thus, his frankness, especially when he is being anally raped by Turkish soldiers must have been shocking at the time the book was published in 1926.  At times it is unsettling that he seems to revel in physical discomfort and there are graphic descriptions of the hardships of riding for many hours on camels, with the sores and injuries that he sustains.  He seems to relish describing death and decay such as after attacks and in the conditions of the Turkish Hospital in Damascus which he recondition and improved.  It can be argued that he was in harsh conditions and reflected them for a soft audience back home.  However, from the start when talking about slavery in the Arab world, he seems too supportive of these aspects and this trait appears to be borne out by the actions in his life, exposing himself to discomfort and abasing himself.  In that regard, it takes a strong stomach to engage with this book and I was left feeling disturbed by it.  Despite these aspects, the book is brisk if one sided, being focused on his successes.  There are some very dramatic scenes and interesting information on the cultures of the region at the time.

I must say the little booklet which come with the CDs is invaluable for following the progression of the campaign Lawrence was involved with, especially when working beyond more familiar cities like Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem and Damascus, in places that are obscure but were strategically important.  Jim Norton is perfect for the narration of this book.  As it is an autobiography he is not obliged to do voices for a range of characters.  However, he handles the numerous Arabic names of people, tribes and places very well.  He speaks in a way that you feel as if it is Lawrence himself addressing you.  In some ways, however, this brings home the pain and suffering even more sharply than if he sounded like someone telling a story from decades past.

The Books I Read In October

Fiction
'The Body on the Beach' by Simon Brett
This is another author that I have met.  He came to speak to the writers' group I was a member of, at the time of the publication of the fourth novel in this Fethering series, 'Murder in the Museum' (2003).  Brett is a prolific author, having been published since 1975; there are now seventeen books in the Fethering series alone.  'The Body on the Beach' (2000) is the first in that series set in the fictional Sussex town of Fethering, twenty minutes by train from Brighton.  Brett loves the charming, almost whimsical detective stories of the inter-war period and though some of his stories are set in the modern day (others are set in the 1920s and the Victorian era), they owe a great deal to the so-called 'golden age' perhaps embodied by Agatha Christie's early work and the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. 

I was rather irritated at the start by the clearly fictional nature of the setting.  The village of Fethering is supposedly near Tarring (as in 'tarring and feathering'), perhaps inspired by the real Worthing and Goring-on-Sea (which has a suburb called Ferring) but primarily to be his version of St. Mary Mead.  In addition it seems to inhabit that contexts used in novel, a kind of mid-1970s which persists for decades afterwards, as I have noted in Ian McEwan's novels.  There is one mobile phone featured, a passing reference to the national lottery and a young woman with a nose stud, but otherwise it could have been set decades earlier.  There is a common fictional trope for one of the leading characters Jude (her surname is not revealed until later books) who is a classic middle-aged version of the 'mad pixie dream girl', a kind of hippy who shows others how to live a more relaxed life.  Overall I was reminded of the television series about two middle-aged landscape gardeners who investigate crimes, 'Rosemary and Thyme' (broadcast 2003-2007), which might be unsurprising given Brett's other career as a radio producer.  These are what are now termed 'cosy/cozy' crime stories, though in this novel there is quite a bit of detail about heroin addiction, a decaying corpse, the eponymous 'body' and youth despair.

As the book progressed I realised that Brett's intention was not so much to write a crime novel but to give him a chance to explore the interactions between various characters in a particular setting.  He manages to stay on the right side of the line of stereotyping and even Jude and her uptight neighbour Carole Seddon prove to have greater depths than might be expected.  There is a whole host of largely middle aged characters which Brett develops deftly throughout the book.  They are not likeable and they may seem over-exaggerated, but in British society it is easy to find real examples; having lived in a small village in Warwickshire for a year, I could draw very tight parallels to people I met there.  This, I felt as I read on, was the purpose.  Brett obviously knows his audience and effectively holds a mirror up to themselves.

I did not enjoy the novel and while I have the fourth book on my shelf, I will not be in a rush to read it.  That is not because I felt the book was poorly written; in fact I welcome Brett's skill with the characters and in how amateurs feasibly could be drawn into investigating a crime.  It is just that this is too close to home; I meet too many people like the characters in it on a regular basis, even among my neighbours.  I am seeking entertainment rather to have the flaws of the society in which I live thrust so capably back at me.

'Stars and Stripes Triumphant' by Harry Harrison
As someone who has written counter-factual historical analysis as well as 'what if?' stories I am often asked to indicate how feasible a particular scenario might have been.  This can be difficult as individuals can vary widely in their judgement of what is feasible and in history, sometimes what happened was the least feasible option, e.g. the Continental forces surviving the winter of 1777/78 intact in the American War of Independence or the Bolshevik forces winning the Russian Civil War 1918-21 against so much armed opposition.  In terms of novels, the two most popular scenarios: Nazi Germany winning the Second World War and the Confederacy winning the American Civil War were both highly unlikely on economic and military grounds.  However, with the trilogy by Harry Harrison which is concluded by this book, it goes utterly into the realms of fantasy.  Harrison does not simply diverge from what happened in history but completely twists it around.  Consequently you end up effectively with a steampunk novel with some unlikely alternate history.

Let us remember that, already in this series, the Confederacy turned its back on substantial British support and ended the civil war in a single day.  Canada forgot all its ties to Britain and, despite many of residents having come from the USA to escape its culture, now willingly accepted everything they imposed.  In the space of two years, the southern states of the USA have been miraculously industrialised, something that President Andrew Johnson, who took over when Lincoln was assassinated and was more supportive of the former Confederate states, was unable to achieve.  In passing, the racial tensions of the southern states have been resolved a century before that happened in our world, even if has been resolved.  The Americans then launched a perfect invasion of Ireland across the Atlantic, eighty years before they struggled to carry out one across the English Channel in our history. Again they have miraculously resolved the divisions in Ireland in a matter of weeks, problems that have dogged politicians in our world for decades.  They have also managed to industrialise Ireland 140 years earlier than achieved during a period of greater peace in our history.

What Harrison forgets in this novel, as with the two that precede it, is that yes, it is great to read about history going down a different path, but there is minimal interest if everything is a foregone conclusion.  In this novel the British military is largely passive.  Despite two wars against the USA, it does not develop any spy network in the USA nor takes care to monitor US shipping.  In contrast, the Russians have a highly developed spy network in Britain that they share with the Americans for some reason.  The Americans, despite coming late to building a navy, construct sophisticated steamships with armour so strong nothing the British fire at them from land or sea can even penetrate it, yet US warships can completely destroy a British ironclad ship or modern fort in thirty minutes.  Along the way, the Americans invent a new version of the 'bomb ketch', a ship carrying mortars, which the British were using against fortifications in the 1800s but seem to have completely forgotten about by the 1860s.  They also develop the internal combustion engine, whereas, in fact, it had been developed in France in 1859 and there were not real cars for another fifteen years.  They create simple tanks, fifty years ahead of this happening in our history and they are hundreds of times more reliable than any which went to war in our First World War, hence me seeing this as a steampunk novel.

Aside from how idiotic and incapable of engineering the British are shown, the Americans have complete luck throughout.  No-one gets a successful shot in against one of their warships, there are minimal breakdowns and no problems with the weather despite sailing an armada across the Atlantic via Iceland.  Even when Britain is invaded, any attempts at warnings are cut off or fail but, in contrast the Americans are able to get accurate information and details from casual observations and amateurs.  Throughout, their casualties are minimal, whereas skilled British units are slaughtered to a man.  Harrison also forgets that the British were keen purchasers of the Gatling gun, particular versions were made for that market and if threatened with them, they would not have sat idly by and not created or bought in something similar.  The Americans have long supply lines even back to their friends in Ireland, let alone to the USA and yet, in the face of this, all the British armies, let alone the militia and yeomanry, evaporate rather than defend their homes.

The other galling thing is that every character speaks so earnestly; none of the Americans is flawed.  This adds to the whole sense that this book is a propaganda book for American nationalists.  The assumption is that everyone from Canada to Ireland to Britain was stupid and, with a US invasion, would suddenly have woken up to how wonderful the American way was and would have embraced a replica of the US Constitution which had only just abolished slavery, decades after Britain.  Ironically the Americans collaborate with Russia which was an autocracy at the time, suggesting that Harrison simply loathes Britons, not undemocratic countries.

The American invaders in the novel are harsher than even the US armies which penetrated Nazi Germany in 1945.  Following both world wars it was down to the Germans themselves to decide on the form of government they would have.  Yet, in this novel the Americans depose the Queen and abolish the House of Lords.  This seems to be largely accepted, provoking no anger from other monarchs across Europe, many of whom were related to Queen Victoria.  It is also horribly anachronistic. I would like both of those things to occur, but even now, 150 years later, the monarchy is incredibly popular and no-one, despite election promises, has done more than tweak the House of Lords.  As for Scottish independence, given that in 2014, after decades of the Scottish National Party, only 45% of the Scottish population voted for it, you can imagine how much more unpopular it would have been in 1865.  Yet, this is of no matter to Harrison, he waves his wand and everyone 'wakes up' to the fact they had been fools before.

This book is poor as it is so imbalanced.  It is also frustrating as Harrison has wasted three books that could have been so much better.  Looking at what would have happened if Britain had recognised and militarily supported the Confederacy is an excellent starting point for a 'what if?' novel; one that has not been explored much.  He could have had the Confederates turn against the British; slavery was always going to be a point of tension and come back to the Union, but to do it in a single day is ridiculous.  From there an invasion of Canada could have formed the next book, but with a recognition that many Canadians were Canadians because they did not want to be Americans and that 'democracy' was a derogatory word for most of the 19th century, not simply in Britain but including among Canadian and Irish elites.

Harrison could have had industrialisation of the southern states, even improvement in race relations, but this would take decades, not just a couple of years.  Furthermore, there is no tension if there is no jeopardy.  An American invasion of Ireland and Britain could have been epic rather than the 'walk in the park' he presents it as.  There would have been triumphs and setbacks, casualties too, on both sides especially given how advanced British military might and technology was at the time.  Instead, you get a tedious clinical victory that seems to have originated in a wet dream of an American nationalist.  I really regret buying this trilogy and understand why Harrison has not returned to 'what if?' history; these books are an embarrassment for him.

'White Eagles Over Serbia' by Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell (1912-90) these days is less well known than his  naturalist brother Gerald (1925-95) but published 1933-90.  My edition of this book, published in 1957, is labelled as 'An Adventure Story for the Young' which just shows how Young Adult fiction has come in the past 60 years.  Even at the time, I would have deemed it 'for the Old' as this spy adventure really has a feel of the inter-war and even turn of the century adventures.  It is set in Communist Yugoslavia, but easily the enemies featured could have been some secret police and army of an earlier era.  The hero, late middle aged Colonel Methuen, with his gentlemen's club, pipe and his obsession with fly fishing, would have not been out of place in something by Erskine Childers, hence being dated, even for the young of the 1950s.

The story is simple.  Methuen is asked by his boss to travel to the border of Serbia and Bosnia, at the time both part of Yugoslavia, where it appears that a number of monarchists are gathering and where another British agent had already been killed while investigating the situation.  He is to find out what is attracting this group, named White Eagles after the monarchist insignia, are up to.  He is taken to the area and sets up a base, eventually discovering the monarchists and their activity in taking treasure hidden at the start of the Second World War to the coast.  They fail and Methuen escapes.  He gets back to the British Embassy having achieved very little except witnessing an attempt to smuggle out gold.  He has had some close scrapes and in between times some wonderful trout fishing.

The book has some moments of tension.  However, it seems largely to be an excuse for Durrell to describe in depth a beautiful and dramatic part of the Balkans and indulge in fantasies of fishing in that environment.  In that respect it reminded me a little of 'John McNab' (1925) by John Buchan, though that book is more entertaining though lacking the Cold War trappings and the life-or-death danger.  I guess that being able to draw a parallel with a book over a quarter of a century older than 'White Eagles Over Serbia' shows how, despite an attempt to make it current, it was based in an older tradition.  It is a quick romp but certainly not a children's or young adult's book.  Rather it would appeal more to middle-aged anglers or would-be adventurers, especially those enamoured of the wild beauty of the Balkans.

'The Necropolis Railway' by Andrew Martin
This is the first of nine (so far) stories set in the early 20th century featuring Yorkshireman Jim Stringer a railwayman and from the third book, a steam (railway) detective.  The story is set on the real Necropolis Railway which ran between Waterloo Station and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey to transport coffins and mourners. Having been to the cemetery and heard of the railway station is what attracted me to the book.  At the age of 19, Stringer is brought down to London to work as an engine cleaner seeing this as the track to becoming a fireman and then a locomotive driver.  However, he is expected to spy on his fellow workers to uncover mysterious deaths not simply of railwaymen but also leading members of the company.

Having written quite a lot of historical crime novels I know that there is always a tension between including detail to give it authenticity and yet overdoing this to make it inaccessible to the average reader.  I remember when I started including the colours of the various tram lines in 1922 Munich.  Martin is an author of non-fiction books on railways and the trouble with this book is that he assumes we are as well.  This problem is multiplied by the fact that he uses 1903 slang and that everything is in the first person so there are not even useful asides from the narrator to tell you what on Earth is being referred to.  As a result I really struggled to comprehend much of the story.  In addition I have no interest of the particular wheel configuration of the locomotive the characters are travelling on, but Martin gives it almost every time.

Almost every character is obnoxious or vicious though some later turn out to be more moderate than they were pretending at the start and others even more treacherous.  The settings are incredibly bleak.  I accept that this is authentic for the time and place but added to the difficulty of the language turns the reader off even more.  The book is unremitting.  Then Stringer works out the murderer who has quite thin motives, and the book is transformed, it abruptly lightens up on the language and just at the point it is coming to an end you find it easier to understand what is happening.  I accept that Martin's technique might have improved across the successive books, but on the basis of this book I have no desire to read them.  I would only recommend them if you are a lover of Edwardian steam trains.

'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' by J.K. Rowling
You would have imagined that, given I have preferred the adventure aspects to the day-to-day details of school life in the Harry Potter novels, I would have relished this one the most.  The action only moves to Hogwarts School at the end of the book and then for a huge battle.  However, in fact I regret reading this book.  Though it is shorter than the previous two (607 pages in my edition; apparently 759 pages in the US edition), unlike them it was broken into two movies.  This, I found reflects the longueurs of the novel.  Much of the book has Harry, Hermione and Ron (on occasion), traipsing around the British countryside to pretty dreary places and failing.  For much of the book, Harry is uncertain if he should be pursuing the horcruxes which hold parts of Lord Voldemort's soul or the three components of the Deathly Hallows which might be able to defeat him.  Furthermore the trio generally have no idea where they should be going to find these things.  I accept that this may represent how people who are 17-18 feel about life, but it does not make for exciting reading.

In fact it is even worse in the book than in the movie, because it is noted at each stage by Rowling that weeks and weeks drag by.  They seem to pass two Christmases and while Harry is almost 17 at the start of the novel, I estimate he must be 19 or thereabouts by the end, suggesting that two school years have gone past though this seems not to impact the same on the pupils of Hogwarts.  Furthermore, while there are fascinating revelations about Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape, towards the end of the book, you do feel that Harry has simply been a pawn for these men and that is incredibly disheartening, though Rowling does seem to track back a bit and try to beef up Harry's part in what has happened.  Yet, it appears that from his birth he has been a tool of others, again something teenagers must feel, but it is hard to swallow when a hero you have followed over thousands of pages is revealed to be a cipher.  The final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort, though long expected, is very untidy and confused.  Michael Moorcock has featured such complex stand-offs with seemingly invincible opponents and Rowling is not as good as him at extricating her characters or herself from this situation.

I do commend her portrayal of the developing Fascist state and Voldemort does become far more part of the Establishment than he is shown in the movies.  I welcome the fact that she allows a number of Harry's friends and supporters to die.  Not doing so would weaken the link to real-life anti-Fascist movements, especially among young people in Nazi Germany, that I feel she is seeking to echo or even highlight in this novel.  It is fine to have jeopardy, something too often lacking in contemporary popular novels.  However, it adds to the weight bearing down on the reader and means it needs some counter-balance from having more spark from the heroes in the story.

Ultimately, despite the epic nature of some of the scenes in the book, I felt this was a damp squib ending to the series that disappointed me, only lifted a little by the projection 19 years into the future, which by my estimation would be 2026, to see that the heroes have largely settled down to comfy middle class wizard life and racial tension among magic-users is a thing of the past.  Neville Longbottom does not seem to get Luna Lovegood as his wife the way he does in the movies, but does end up a professor.

While I accept that Rowling wanted uncertainty and a sense that Harry's victory was not a foregone conclusion, nor that he alone can be a hero without the aid of a wide spectrum of other people, she has gone too far and the books seems to drift far too much.  The set pieces which also feature in the movie are exciting, but too much of this book feels directionless.  She could have instilled Harry's character with doubt yet not infect the actual novel with that weakness.

'Our Game' by John Le Carré
This is a messy book which turned into a slog.  It was published in 1995 when Le Carré appears to have been considering where his books would go next now that the Cold War was at an end.  The 'hero' of the book, Tim Cramner is a British spy who previously controlled a loose cannon double agent, Larry Pettifer.  By the early 1990s, both men have been retired, though Cramner is only in his mid-forties and Pettifer is younger still, though from the writing you constantly feel they are much older, in their sixties.  Cramner has taken over his family's vineyard in Somerset and Pettifer has become a lecturer at the nearby University of Bath, a place it is clear that Le Carré dislikes; he condemns it repeatedly.  It is a 1960s university, but it is well-equipped and popular with its students.  I guess Le Carré does not see any university outside Oxford or Cambridge as legitimate.  I was pleased that this was not set around another Oxford college, but Le Carré still makes the two lead male characters old boys of both Oxbridge and Winchester public school; the title of the book comes from school slang for a peculiar 'wall ball' game played there.

Pettifer continues to be reckless and it turns out has been embezzling funds both from the British and Russians.  He goes round seducing women and being a boor.  Cramner feels continuing sympathy for the man even though this attachment drags him into deeper and deeper problems with the police and then MI6 certain that he is Pettifer's accomplice.  The reader catches on far faster than Cramner why Pettifer took the money and how Cramner's lover, Emma, somewhere in her twenties but a nationally recognised composer, is involved.  For all his 'tradecraft' - spy skills in Le Carré-speak, Cramner is fooled throughout the book and suffers incessantly.  This is a central problem as no character in the book appeals to you, they all seem to be screwing up the lives of someone else and yet presenting a hypocritical face to the world.  Cramner is forced on to the run, something he does pretty poorly despite his training and the book becomes very tedious as he moves from one desultory location to another in dreary vehicles and with dreary assumed identities.  There is minimal action; the fights are always over by the time Cramner reaches them even when he heads to the Caucasus to take part in the ethnic fighting there.  As with 'Our Kind of Traitor' the book trails off and despite/because of all of Cramner's ineffectual efforts, too little is resolved.

Le Carré needs to go back and read his John Buchan.  'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915) shows how the plot of a wrongly-accused man, wrapped up in foreign intrigue as a result of unwanted associations and on the run can be handled dynamically.  I suppose Le Carré was writing in the age of  'doorstop' novels rather than slimmer tones.  However, the length (416 pages in my edition) detracts from the book.  With Cramner traipsing around, bemoaning his life, any dynamism is lost, hence me seeing it as a slog.

Non-Fiction
'Germany and the Approach of War in 1914' by V.R. [Volker] Berghahn
This is another book by someone I have met.  I attended a lecture by Berghahn (born 1938) almost thirty years ago now.  I cannot remember the subject but I know he explained why he was diverting from the given title and it had something to do with a strike which was on at the time.  He came over as a warm, engaging lecturer and I had expected something similar from this book.  It was published in 1975 and is rather over-influenced by his earlier book, 'Der Tirpitz-Plan' (1971).  Around half of this book focuses on the impact of Admiral von Tirpitz's naval expansion plans of 1897-1912, in far too much detail.  Every twist and turn of his progress or halt towards achieving his plan is detailed and it imbalances the book and, in fact, is pretty tedious.  Once Berghahn moves off this specific topic and takes a broader perspective, the book improves.

Berghahn comes from the generation of historians of Germany influenced by the work of Fritz Fischer than began to appear in 1961 which reassessed German willingness to go to war in 1914.  While adopting that as a basis, Berghahn is less bombastic in his assertions and consequently makes a very convincing argument.  Like the Fischerites, especially people like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, he shows how the conservative forces in German society, notably the Kaiser and big landowners were willing to try anything to maintain their supremacy in the face of Germany becoming an modern industrialised state and the consequent rise of Social Democrats and to a lesser extent Christian Democrats.  The naval building plan was one element of this as colonialism had been in the 1880s and a focus on strengthening the Army and establishing a Central European economic bloc were to be in the last couple of years before war broke out.  Berghahn capably shows that such tactics could not dampen the growth of the main left-wing party in Germany, the SPD and yet at the same time stretched the German economy, compelling reforms of taxation that the conservative forces felt inimical to their position.

Germany was less than it thought itself to be.  It lacked the funds to sustain such armament growth, and because of the unwillingness to recruit working class people, even the men to fill the expanded Army and Navy.  It lacked the shipyards to rival the rate of British construction and the colonies to provide the troops that France could call upon.  It lacked the capital needed to economically dominate the Balkans and left with no friends, it was tied to the crumbling Austria-Hungary.  The book, though short (214 pages of text; 46 more of timelines and references) moves painfully slowly but you can see how the German elites around the Kaiser, who despite the trappings of democracy, effectively still ran the state, saw war as the only possible solution for both their domestic political and social worries and their external diplomatic ones.  The book makes a very solid case in a convincing way.  However, the thrust of the arguments put forward are lost in the day-by-day minutiae that Berghahn feels compelled to include.  Berghahn has continued publishing in German and English into the 2000s so I hope that in his later books he has found a style which allows him to deliver his arguments in a more engaging way.

'The Spanish Civil War' by Andrew Forrest
Andrew Forrest is another author that I have met,  Some time in the late 1990s I was at a pub in Surrey to watch a jazz band.  He was a history tutor at a local college and was there with two students; all three had escaped from the college's 'prom'.  They seemed uncomfortable with the growing tradition taken from US high schools of excessive clothing and stretch cars as a way for young people to behave irrationally.  Forrest was a musician himself and a fan of jazz.

This book is not a conventional history of the Spanish Civil War, rather it provides the narrative in a very concentrated form, followed by very perceptive analysis and then model answers of how students can use such text to provide good exam or essay answers.  Though it is aimed at students, it is an excelled condensed coverage of the war.  It demonstrates comprehensive knowledge of all the books that have gone before on the subject (it was published in 2000) and draws on a range of original sources to illustrate what it is saying.  The style with the different sections to each chapter can be a challenge if you are simply reading it as a history.

Though I have read numerous books on the subject and taught on it for four years, there was material here and acute analysis, that I had not encountered before.  The book is particularly strong in showing that the Spanish Civil War was not a bubble in Spanish history but a link in a chain, connecting back to the De Rivera dictatorship of the 1920s and that the fighting did not cease in 1939 as Franco continued in his goal to kill all 'Reds'.  The ongoing covert war that followed in the 1940s has only recently received popular attention through movies.  It is also very good on the factions both within the Nationalist and Republican camps.

I recommend this book if you quickly want to engage with the Spanish Civil War or if you believe all the major insights into the war had been written about by the 1970s.