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.

Books I Listened To/Read In August

Fiction
'Cyberabad Days' by Ian McDonald
This book consists of 8 short stories set in the same context as his 'River of Gods' (2004), what was India but around the year 2047. That book, I felt: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html jammed in far too many Cyberpunk ideas to work effectively. This book, by including just some of the ideas in each story is better. However, having read about the nutes, the battles over fragmented India's control of water and the genetically modified Brahmins already, these seemed spent. McDonald reworked the ideas and even simply showed incidents from the previous book from a different perspective. Interestingly, a number of the stories are from the view of children. There are interesting concepts such as a woman marrying an AI creation from a soap opera (another idea extensively used by McDonald) and the battles between water-controlling families which looks like 'Romeo and Juliet' only to go down an unexpected route.

The introduction of a character from Nepal, a temporary goddess, provides a fresh angle. However, by the end you really feel McDonald has gone at all of these things so intently, that they are now exhausted. This is not a bad book and McDonald has done well in giving new life to Cyberpunk tropes in an atypical setting for English-language readers. I would suggest that you ignore the publication dates and read this book first then, if you enjoy it, 'River of Gods' next. That way you will have some knowledge of the setting and had glimpses of particular incidents, before diving into a thorough story of them. If I had read this book alone I think I would have praised it more. I certainly think it contests the view too often expressed these days that 'short stories go nowhere' and McDonald shows himself capable with them as with epic science fiction. I am glad since this book, he has gone off in new directions, though perhaps as with his 'Luna' series he is in the territory of classic science fiction rather than the other sub-genres, though Cyberpunk always had its space corporations even if they were not a popular focus of the novels back at the sub-genre's height.

'Where Eagles Dare' by Alistair MacLean
I have seen the movie (1968) of this novel (1967) multiple times so when I saw this for 10p, I thought it would be interesting to see how it differed. The movie sticks quite closely to the novel, except there a long passages about a mad pilot flying the team to southern Germany in the book and the team have to do mountaineering not featured in the movie. In the movie, they have a lot more explosives. However, the story is much the same, a team of largely British operatives is flown to the German Alps in 1943 supposedly to free a US general held in a Gestapo headquarters located on a mountain top. In fact it is a mission to root out traitors at senior levels in British intelligence. Some of the names are changed and Clint Eastwood's character Lieutenant Schaffer does not have any romance in the movie in contrast to the novel. The killing of the three traitors is clustered together in the book rather than one separated off as in the movie.  In disguise the British agents visit many more pubs in the town before ending up at the sole one they visit in the movie.

At times I felt Maclean had been anachronistic. However, I found that the Miss. Europe competition begun in 1929 and the commercial production of asbestos dated back to the 19th Century.  The helicopter featured in the book is larger and more sophisticated than those used by the Germans during the Second World War and the term 'chopper' for a helicopter only appeared during the Korean War, 1950-53, at least 7 years after the book is set. Similarly at the time of the story there was no Heathrow Airport. It did not open until 1946 and was known as London Airport until some years later. I guess it shows how hard it was for an author to get details right in the years before the internet.

Overall, especially if you do not know the story, this is an interesting action novel. Unlike modern equivalents it is very tight and gets on with the job. If you do not know the twists, that is an advantage too. Eastwood felt there were too many, but I think that for a modern reader, this is what lifts it above many war action books.

Non-Fiction
'Ring of Steel': Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918' by Alexander Watson
This is a hefty book (788 pages in my edition) but is an excellent read; one of the best history books I have read in a while.  Watson's scholarship is supreme and he brings to English-speakers a range of resources especially in Eastern European languages, that are not normally accessible. He also draw on books published throughout the 20th Century that have fallen into obscurity. Watson also makes good use of correspondence and diaries as illustrations of the human reality of the statistics and the strategies. It is his ability to connect the strategic and political to the everyday experience that makes the book so strong. The book details the different ways in which the two empires engaged their people and the mistakes they made. Challenges that the regions would face in terms of deprivation, massacres, nationality tensions and anti-Semitism are brought out. Watson is careful not to push a direct causal link especially from the Eastern Front to the activities of Nazi German forces in the Second World War, but does highlight parallels and the simple amount of murder going on in many of the same areas some twenty-five years earlier.

While the human aspect is a strength, Watson also proves excellent at analysing the economic challenges and shows how poorly prepared Germany and especially Austria-Hungary were for a sustained war. The astounding achievement is that their commanders, bumbling along at times, managed to keep the two countries fighting for so long. He also highlights Allied errors which did not exploit the weaknesses of the Central Powers, but the mobilisation of the public including schemes such as the 'nail' figures are fascinating. Overall, a thoroughly engaging book which at times is grim, but like all the best history books, leaves you feeling a greater comprehension of what happened and why it happened than before you read it.

Audio Book - Fiction
'The Girl Who Played With Fire' by Stieg Larsson; read by Martin Wenner
This is the second in the Millennium Trilogy published after Larsson's death. It follows the next steps for Lisbeth Salander, the violent hacker and Mikael Blomqvist the philandering journalist from the first book that I listened to back in May: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/05/books-i-listened-toread-in-may.html This book is very messy. The first quarter of it is really a chunk of the previous book in which Salander continues the break in her contact with Blomqvist and goes to the Caribbean where she murders a man during a hurricane, something unconnected with the rest of the novel. She also has her breasts augmented. This highlights a worrying aspect of this novel. The augmentation runs utterly contrary to the character of Salander as we have come to know her. In this novel you really feel the male gaze. The repeated focus on Salander's bisexuality is another aspect of this and one can imagine Larsson as rather creepily poring over these elements, very much like some of the unreconstituted misogynist police officers he features. At times it is almost as if Salander is not developing properly as a character but being forced down certain paths to satiate the author and that jars.

There is an overly complex plot involving the abusive care system into which Salander was forced as a child, a biker gang and a Russian defector turned people trafficker. I like twists, but trying to bring all of these elements together, largely so that there can be more interaction between Blomqvist and Salander, feels really forced and it makes the book heavy going. The situation is not helped, especially in an audio book, with so many characters having similar names. In the end the mass of journalists, security officers, police, care workers, bikers, etc become impenetrable especially as we see through so many points of view and certain sub-plots fizzle out, perhaps only to be revived in the third book. As common with this trilogy there is a lot of violence but this is handled pretty well and you can see/feel the difficulties of an ordinary person facing a thug. Still, there is another aspect of the male gaze, carried over from the previous book, in that there are detailed naming of every piece of equipment whether a computer, a car, motorbike or gun, which does not help with the book flowing smoothly.  Perhaps being Larsson's legacy it was under-edited. Overall, this is even less impressive than the first book.

Wenner does reasonably well, though, unlike most of the Swedish sounding voices, Salander ends up sounding like she came from South London. Wenner is good as the voices when the character is injured or disabled in bringing that aspect to what they say.

Books I Listened To/Read in May

Non-Fiction
'Don't Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890' by John Ramsden
I have noticed that historians who become 'grandees' with a career of academic books under their belts, are often exempted from being edited.  This can make their later books (Ramsden retired in 2008, three years after this book was published and died in 2009) rather bloated and often meandering.  This book is an example of that problem.  It is interesting and despite the title, actually goes back much further than 1890, looking at relations between the British and Germans in the early modern period and the full length of the 19th century.  The problem is that Ramsden keeps wandering off the thread.  He confesses at the start to being a fan of opera, so music and indeed the broader arts, whether high-brow or highly populist, are probably over-represented when talking about relations.  The book really gets going when it reaches 1914 and Ramsden is best on the animosity between Britain and (West) Germany in the post-1945 period.  However, he spends a lot of time considering specific war films and goes on at length about Noel Coward and Bert Trautmann.  Their role is important but the space Ramsden gives them is out of scale with their importance to the story and means he neglects broader issues and wider examples.  East Germany is largely forgotten.

This book has interesting points, but it very much feels to be not a thorough history book, but more a transcript of what you would have heard if you had sat down with Ramsden over tea and talked about Britain and Germany over a number of afternoons.  That may have been the intention, that it would be a book that straddled the popular and academic spheres.  However, if that was the case, it is too bulky for the popular audience and too meandering for the academic.  Aside from this character, Ramsden, a historian of the Conservative Party, misses no opportunity to make petty, almost childish jibes against not on the Labour Party, but even the liberal media, being very dismissive of  'The Guardian'.  Again, with proper editing these barbs, which are entirely unnecessary for the story being told, would have been eliminated. Left in they add to the sense that this was a late draft of the book rather than a version which could be deemed a finished book.  However, perhaps that is no surprise in the 21st century when editing is left to authors and people they may employ rather than being done by the publishers themselves.

Fiction
'Witch Hunt by Jack Harvey [Ian Rankin]
This book is from 1993, early in Rankin's career but not at the start.  As is typical for successful authors it seems his agent or publishers encouraged him to try other series aside from his long-running Rebus books.  This is a sort of a spy novel.  It attempts to be a John le Carré novel and a little like the Villanelle e-novels/novel that Luke Jennings produced 2014-18 with much greater success.  A major problem is that Rankin is uncertain who he wants to focus upon and whether the tone will be the downbeat, almost desultory one of Le Carré's work or something a bit more action filled and glamorous.  As a result it feels very much like a book of bits.  He lacks the ability to make the downbeat elements as intriguing or tricky as Le Carré so they just come across as tedious.  He even has a retired operative, Dominic Elder, a specialist on the assassin being hunted, brought in just as George Smiley is to deal with Karla.

There is far too much about different levels of the British security system that adds nothing of interest and slackens off any tension Rankin has built up with the killings.  The relationship between Michael Barclay from Special Branch and his French equivalent in the DST (now the DGSI) Dominique Herault is so predictable as to be painful to read; only Herault's mother adds an interesting element.  The novel is about the hunt for a female assassin, codenamed 'Witch' who has returned to the UK at the time of an international summit and the rather ineffectual attempts to prevent her.  There are some interesting twists, but overall, because of his uncertainty the book really lacks life.  You feel he could have taken all the same elements and written a much better book.  It does show that someone who specialises in police procedural can struggle when attempting a spy novel.

'Brasyl' by Ian McDonald
This book is marginally better than 'River of Gods' (2004) which I read in March: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html  While McDonald continues to completely overload the reader with too many characters, haring around, he at least restricts himself to three settings this time, different parts of Brazil in 1733, 2006 and 2032.  A lot of McDonald's, and indeed Cyberpunk's, themes come out again in this book.  Especially the 2032 features all the trappings of the cyberpunk tropes and indeed the mono-molecular blades so favoured in classic Cyberpunk, appear in all three time periods.  As with 'River of Gods' McDonald is interested in the quantum and the use of alternate universes, in this novel to provide computing power rather than energy.  The book ends up being pretty much like 'The Matrix' movies (1999-2003), in revealing that the universe is almost dead and we are in fact living in a computer simulation of previous versions of the universe.  The antagonists, The Order, are reminiscent of Mr. Smith from 'The Matrix' movies.  However, the overarching context strays into Michael Moorcock's principles from 'The Dancers at the End of Time' books (1972-81) too.  This multi-layered context shows the central problem of the book.  Added to this, at least two of the characters have doppelgangers from other realities.  The 1733 strand is laden with heavy parallels to 'Apocalypse Now (1979) itself drawing on 'Heart of Darkness'  (1899) by Joseph Conrad and 'The Mission' (1986) especially with its very robust, sword-fighting priests; the floating cathedral reminded me much of  'Oscar and Lucinda' (novel 1988; movie 1997) as well.

There is another problem with the book, which despite all the action scenes whether involving capoeira or mono-molecular blades or rapiers, is a very heavy-going read.  I complimented McDonald on how well he brought to life a future India in 'River of Gods' and here he seeks to do it with Brazil.  The trouble is, that he digs so deeply into the culture of the music, religions, martial arts, soap operas, slums and so on, that some sections are almost not written in English but in Portuguese and dialect.  When you have a 6-page glossary of terms, you have to know that the average reader of the book in the language it is supposed to be written in, is going to struggle.  I have encountered authors before who are more concerned by showing off than telling a good story and it is becoming clear that McDonald was one of these.  Read this book for the bright lights (some of which have been reconditioned from 30 years ago) but do not expect it to make any sense or to be coherent for much of the time, it is pushing around far too much bulk and trying to make it go fast for that to work, especially if you do not speak Brazilian Portuguese slang.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Troll Fell' by Katherine Langrish; read by Alex Jennings
As I often buy mixed boxes of audio books, I sometimes have no idea about the nature of the books I am purchasing.  Though this one is read by (the male) Alex Jennings who I tend to hear reading heavy-weight classics, this is actually a children's book.  It is quite enjoyable all the same.  It is set in a fictional Nordic setting though one which seems to have some connection to the real world as the father of one of the characters sails beyond Iceland and Greenland to land in North America.  However, it is also a fantasy as Nordic creatures including a house 'elf', a were-eel (!) and lots of trolls feature.  The story follow orphaned Peer Ulfsson who is 12, when he is sent to live with his cruel uncles at a watermill near Troll Fell. Dealing with their cruelty and then the deals they make with the trolls who live under Troll Fell, to sell Peer and his new friend Hilde provides the basis of the adventure.  Peer gets aid from some other fantastical creatures.

Like the best children's fiction the book does not baulk from unpleasant elements in the harshness of life, notably the loss of parents and the need to protect siblings. At one stage Peer believes he is going to remain a slave for life or indeed hideously transformed.  Thus, I found this novel easier to engage with than perhaps I would have done with other children's books.  I liked the Norse feel to it as well.  Jennings is a capable reader of audio books, but felt he was out of place with this one, making me feel that it should be a 19th century novel or a dry contemporary commentary.  Still he is not bad with the various realistic and fantastical voices, it is just this is not really his kind of book to narrate.  The book is the first of a trilogy but this story wraps up quite neatly and I am not going to seek out any others intentionally but would not chuck them out if they turn up in a box of audio books I buy.

'Outbreak' by Chris Ryan; read by Rupert Degas
This was another from a box that I mistook.  Given that Ryan is ex-SAS, I had expected something along the lines of an Andy McNab novel.  It is an action adventure, set in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but focused on a 13-year old boy (despite his youth he can drive cars and even a lorry) where Ben Tracey's father, a mining expert is investigating a source of an important mineral, only to stumble across a reservoir of a disease that is worse than ebola.  The story is an adventure set around a small village as Ben tries to survive against the opposition of the mining company and warn the world about the risk of the disease.  It fits different tropes.  It is almost a colonial adventure from the 19th century though, fitting with much children's fiction of today, Ben partners up with a local girl Halima, whose knowledge helps them survive facing not just the baddies but the various ferocious creatures of the region.  It is a frantic adventure, though it feels reasonably realistic.

I was a little apprehensive that it would be a neo-colonial story especially when Halima's beliefs are introduced, and Ryan walks a fine line.  Individual readers will have to judge whether he manages to remain appropriate in his approach.  Similarly I was rather concerned at Degas putting on accents of Congolese people.  He seems to have gone to a great deal of effort and at times, I had assumed that the company had brought in someone else to do those voices.  In reality most of the dialogue would be in French, but Degas, just about pulls off sounding authentic without being a caricature.  Again some readers might be offended by the fact he even tries.  Whereas I might listen to some McNab books, I am unlikely given the areas Ryan strays into, to come back to anything by him in the future, even if aimed at full adults rather than young adults.

'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' by Stieg Larsson; read by Martin Wenner
This book published in 2005 (though not in English until 2008) revived the English-speaking interest in Scandinavian crime novels (as opposed to television series) that had perked up in 1995 with 'Sidetracked' by Henning Mankell having lain largely dormant since the last Sjöwall and Wahlöö book had been published in 1975.  I have seen the Swedish movie, but not the English one.  Coming to the book showed me that really this was a classic detective story with a contemporary, edgy element bolted on top.  Without the appearance of Lisbeth Salander a young female hacker under the care of the state, this book could have appeared in 1976, though some of this made have been due to the toning down of the book for English-language audiences in translation.  The Swedish title of the book is nowadays well known to be 'Men Who Hate Women'.  Larsson was dead when the book was published so had lost control over it.

Still, the bulk of the book is about a journalist Mikael Blomkvist, following a libel conviction, retreating to a remote Swedish island to investigate the disappearance of a girl of a wealthy industrial family in 1966.  Much of his work to uncover what occurred, handling all the unpleasant family members could have come from a book by Maria Lang [Dagmar Lange] who published crime novels between 1949-90.  The fact that Blomkvist reads novels by Elizabeth George and disparages one by Val McDermid for being too gory in 'The Mermaids Singing' (1995) which I listened to last year: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/09/books-i-listened-toread-in-september.html indicates really where Larsson's writing lies.

Salander has her own revenge to wreak which she does with the latest technology of the time and helps Blomkvist in the latter stages of his investigation, though old photographs are the real source of the clues.  Blomkvist has a girlfriend his own age, sleeps with one of the old women of the family and has a sexual relationship with Salander too.  These developments are highly unconvincing and I do wonder if it is to be expected in Swedish novels.  Aside from 'Sidetracked' which I read 17 years ago, I have not read Swedish novels and to be honest this one hardly won me over.  It is not a bad book, but really it is a very old-fashioned murder mystery with more contemporary elements put on top to give it some 'edge' but they are not well integrated into the book and so it seems like two separate novels and the connection between them really forced and unconvincing.

Wenver sounds convincing as the various characters, though far better with the men than the women and his Salander is a real stereotypical Londoner accented young woman, which jars with the rest of the voices.  I have the other two books in the series to listen to, but I am not expecting much from them.

'The Spy Who Loved Me' by Ian Fleming; read by Rosamund Pike
The James Bond movies have done Fleming a great misservice.  While he never would have been notable in the feminist movement, the more you read of the James Bond novels, the more you see a nuanced approach to women and a recognition of the inequalities of the time.  This book is unique among the series as Bond appears only towards the end and it is narrated from the view of a French Canadian woman, Vivienne Michelle.  Much of the book covers her personal experiences being mistreated by men in Britain.  Her shame at having sex in a public place might be absent these days, but this book could come out with modifications in the MeToo era, showing up how men manipulate women for sex and insisting on their own rules.  Michelle is compelled by her second lover to have an abortion when these were illegal in the UK, but given the changes in US law at present such a path is liable to become common once more for American women, bringing the references back into currency.

There is action in this book as Michelle, travelling down the eastern side of the USA on a scooter, is set-up to be the one to blame for an insurance-fraud fire at a motel where she is temporarily working in New York state.  The two gangsters sent to carry out the fire are eager to rape her but want to keep her alive so she can be seen as the cause of the fire when burnt to death.  Though the language is dated, the way the men abuse her and insist she behaves in certain ways could be written today.  Bond turns up as a deus ex machina, recounting at length an action against SPECTRE that he had carried out in Canada.  He does get things wrong even when dealing with just two gangsters and Michelle has to keep active even when he is charge.  Perhaps all of her being joyful at finding a decent man and being lectured by a policeman about not falling in love with men like Bond would be absent from a novel today.  However, ultimately Michelle rides off on her journey to Florida, very independently, simply with a view that some few men can treat her well especially sexually.  In many ways, this book should stand outside the Bond series and is better judged as something distinct which it comes out pretty well for being.

Despite the distinctiveness of this novel among his work Fleming features many of his usual tropes.  At length he condemns the USA as tawdry with few redeeming characteristics and highlights particularly the Italian-American gangster culture.  He shows men manipulating women to their own ends as a signal of their genuine evil.  There is lots of attention to detail in terms of products, vehicles and clothing both in the UK and especially in the USA.   I guess I would not have come to this book if it was in the Bond series, but am reasonably glad I did because it is engaging even for its age (published 1962) which it shows very clearly in its references to President John Kennedy (1917-November 1963).

Pike does the narration excellently.  Much of it is in the first person as a woman, but she does not sound like a British actress, but a Canadian.  Her voicing of Bond is handled pretty well, though the gravity she gives it makes her sound like Honeysuckle Weeks acting in the 'Foyle's War' series.