The Books I Listened To/Read In October

Fiction
'Tooth and Nail' by Ian Rankin
Before I review the book, I have to say how frustrating it is in the editions of these books I am reading, published in the 2000s to have Rankin's foreword outlining how he went about writing the books.  In contrast to all the strict 'rules' that authors are told they must to adhere to by agents, publishers or general commentators, he seems to have bumbled through writing his books and not making any particular effort to make them successful.  I guess if he had started publishing books today rather than thirty years ago he would be the recipient of tens of comments about how he was doing it all wrong. It is rather galling and makes me wish that I had tried harder to get my books out when it was clearly a lot easier and you were not being harangued by people at every turn telling you how wrong your writing was.

Unlike the other Inspector Rebus stories, this one sees him going to London to investigate a serial killer and it is clearly based on Rankin's own experiences of people struggling comprehending his accent in the capital, though the Edinburgh accent, in contrast to some other Scottish ones, is not too much of a challenge for people in southern England.  He makes much play of the friction between Rebus and the Metropolitan Police officers that he is working alongside who feel patronised by him being brought into assist.  However, the developing relationships with these officers and the psychologist who becomes associated with the case, are well handled.  We see from the perspective of the criminal as well as Rebus, something which seems common these days as with the Val McDermid story I listened to recently, but it makes the criminal credible, though as a reader you do feel rather misled at the end and I found the closing revelations rather bewildering as they seemed to jar with what had been uncovered up until then.  Aside from that sense of a jump near the end, I thought it was pretty well handled with a couple of reasonable twists and Rankin does well characterising the grottiness of London which will be familiar to anyone who has lived there.

'Transition' by Iain Banks
Having enjoyed 'The Algebraist' (2004) by Banks, under his science fiction tag, Iain M. Banks, I was drawn to this book.  While not designated as science fiction, with its story of alternate versions of Earth, to me, it seemed to fit into that kind of category.  It is a well worked theme.  Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter produced the 'Long' series based on the premise, so I was interested to see what Banks would do with it.  I must say that I was disappointed.  He has multiple characters, some of whom may be the same person simply at different times.  However, rather than develop them fully, he flits between them.  I like the concept of an organisation, the Concern, trying to police people jumping between alternatives; individuals having a range of powers associated with the different worlds and an internal battle between people with such powers.  Yet it is all fragmented into small pieces which often do not advance the story; one character spends almost all their time doing very little in a hospital.

Some of the longer sections, such as the assassination of one character's companion in Venice, are suitable as short stories in themselves, but the rest is too insubstantial.  The book reminded me of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius series with repeated characters flitting between various alternatives and with a lot of unnecessary sex.  Aside from 'The Final Programme' (1968), I found these tiresome, but they had the advantage of being short, usually around 150 pages.  Banks, in contrast in my edition goes on for 469 pages.  At times I wondered if he was trying an extended pastiche of one of Moorcock's books.  In summing up, there were some good ideas here and the basis of a good novel; there are some well executed scenes.  However, the books is very much less than the sum of its parts and all of these good attributes are wasted in what turns out to be a real mess.

Non-Fiction
'Medieval People' by Eileen Power
I was recommended this book over thirty years ago and finally got around to it.  I found it far better than most books I am recommended to read.  It was first published in 1924 and I was reading a 1939 edition.  Power was effectively making the case for the study of social history at a time when it attracted minimal attention in the UK.  She did this by focusing on a number of medieval people as the title suggests and showing to the readers how a range of sources can be used to explore the lives of such people.  In particular she looked at government and church records of the time, which were often neglected, especially outside local history research.  By focusing on a mix of well known people, Marco Polo in one chapter, the Prioress from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales', Madam Eglentyne with the far lesser known such as Bodo, a French peasant; a Parisian house wife and two merchants in the wool and cloth trade, she highlights what can be revealed.  Of course, especially since the 1960s and 1970s, social history has become a legitimate focus of study, but this book is a key marker of the start of the discipline.

At times the book shows its age, Power speaks of the 'crafty Jew' and refers to the Mongols as 'Tartars'.  She is also unquestioning of whether Marco Polo actually reached China or just picked up stories from other travellers there, despite highlighting the glaring gaps in his account.  However, despite these flaws, she provides wonderfully crisp vignettes of the individuals which give a good insight into the time periods and what was going on, especially in terms of wool and cloth trade, part of the largest industry of the time.  She counteracts the patronising attitude of people towards the past in outlining how complex relationships of all kinds were and what motivated people.  There are interesting sections on the functioning of inspections of convents, the economics of marriage and the complexities of trading internationally with all the issues around currency exchange and quality control, which are faced today.  Overall, an engaging book, despite its age.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Dead Man's Footsteps' by Peter James; read by Neil Pearson
This is the fourth book in James's Roy Grace series; I read the previous three back in 2016.  Unlike many authors who seek to make it unclear when and where their novels are set, James goes right the other way, with specific settings in the 2000s and in very specific places in and around Brighton in southern England.  This story jumps between two time periods, events around the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and 2007 Brighton where a woman is being threatened and a skeleton had turned up.  Grace is struggling against a colleague being favoured by his boss who seems keen to dig up anything on Grace's missing wife.

I am never keen on stories featuring the 11th September attacks as I feel the incidents have been used very inappropriately and as a justification for attitude and actions that were not right.  Also being someone who grew up in a country plagued by terrorism throughout my life, the sense of many that terrorism somehow only appeared in the Western world in the 21st century.  However, I can see why James made use of it as it provided a great opportunity for people wanting to cover their tracks and much of this novel is about people not being who they seem to be and others exploiting that situation.  James typically had strands which seem unrelated but slowly come together.  In this novel, that seemed to take far too long compared to some of the others.  The theme of high-value stamps feels rather levered into the novel but I can understand why it interested James as they are a way of moving a lot of money around easily.   There are some good dramatic scenes and given that James is not afraid to kill or injure his principal characters, you have a real sense of jeopardy.

I found it rather unsettling to have Pearson reading the book as I have recently been listening to the Martin Beck series of plays in which he appears as recurring detective.  He is not too bad as the voice of this novel, but is too well known for you to detach from envisaging him rather than him acting all the characters as an audio book narrator needs to do effectively.  Overall, this book was not bad, but in some ways I did not feel it was the best of the series.

'Dead Tomorrow' by Peter James; read by William Gaminara
This is the fifth book in the series and follows on some months after the one reviewed above.  Fortunately the two most annoying characters in that book have moved on.  As is common with the series, James has apparently disconnected threads, including street children in Romania, a Brighton teenager needing a liver transplant and bodies found off the coast of Sussex.  Though at times pretty gruesome, I felt this story, which revolves around the trafficking of people for organ harvesting was much tighter than 'Dead Man's Footsteps'.  The story felt credible and less convoluted.  Again you feel, though, that the jeopardy is genuine and I am glad James does not let off characters who we might sympathise with, especially not in bending the law on compassionate grounds.  We find out more about Roy Grace's missing wife who popped up incongruously at the end of the previous book.  However, Grace not stumbling across evidence he needs at a crucial time in regard to her seemed terribly contorted.

Overall, this is a gritty novel with no easy answers to the moral dilemmas.  If you dislike sustained scenes of surgery then it is best avoided.  I much prefer Gaminara in reading these books to Pearson, maybe because I am not as familiar with his voice.  He does tend to make some of the younger police officers sound older than we know they are.

'Dead Like You' by Peter James; read by William Gaminara
This is the sixth in the series and again is set not long, though not immediately after the previous book.  Again it jumps between the present, i.e. 2009 and the past, 1997.  James's last three books have seemed to have a theme: stamps and organs, in this book it is shoe fetishes.  However, despite initially feeling this was a kind of 'McGuffin' especially as the stamps had been, in fact, James uses it much better.  As is common in his books we see through the eyes of the killer, but in this one there are three candidates, all shoe fetishists, and it is intriguing when seeing through their eyes to work out which is truly the killer, who is the rapist and who is trying to go straight but on the edge of the other two men's crimes.  This is a very gritty novel in the series, in part because we get the sordid nature of the men and their disgust at women coming from three sources rather than one.  The victims themselves do not simply lie down in the face of their attackers and the climactic battle between the final woman and the murderer is well handled.  As usual, James ties his stories to very specific times and places, you could walk around many of the locations for real.  I like the fact that he does not try to make them slightly timeless as authors are often encouraged to do.  It does make it possible for him to reflect on current developments and he seems hooked on connecting them to others over the decades too.

Gaminara is in his stride reading this book.  He does well in voicing sordid characters, but also being convincing as the women under threat.  In the moments of fear, he is good at communicating this, the energy and the reactions from both sides, so does very well as a reader of James's take on the police procedural.

'The Novice' by Trudi Canavan; read by Samantha Bond
This is another book with a different reader to the previous one in the series.  This is the sequel to 'The Magicians' Guild' which I heard last month, but read by Kellie Bright.  Bond is far better known not simply in the UK but globally.  She does very well in voicing the spectrum of characters and is in large part close to Bright's interpretation, though they do pronounce some of the names differently.  This book follows Sonea now that she is a student in the Guild and all the bullying she faces as a result of being brought up in the slums.  She also faces danger from what she knows of the High Lord the head of the Guild and the practices he undertakes.

I guess all books about magic colleges/universities end up sounding like British boarding school novels of the 1930s because of the set up and the old fashioned nature of magic users.  I also worry that the High Lord is becoming rather like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, though Canavan was writing these before he was fully revealed in published books.  What is different in these books is what is happening elsewhere in Canavan's world a character from the previous book, Lord Dannyl travels the world trying to uncover the background to the High Lord's powers and comes to understand his own homosexuality.  Canavan does go out of her way to try to subvert a lot of fantasy tropes.  At times it can feel that these, as with suppression of the lower classes in the first book, are rather plastered on, but I concede that might be because we do not see them often in fantasy books and I read far fewer these days than in my youth.  The arena scene at the end of the book is very well done and leads to a great climax.  I do hope that Sonea does not spend too long in the guild university and gets out into the wider world once again.

I must say I do like how Trudi Canavan handles magic in these stories.  It is a force that is a kind of mix of mental and physical power, with the magicians envisaging what they want to achieve in their minds, but it still draining them physically.  Little is said of the alchemy studies, but this is generally a magic system without magic potions or ingredients, not even magic words and somehow this makes it seem 'credible' even though it is something fantastical.

'The High Lord' by Trudi Canavan; read by Samantha Bond
Coming to the third book in the trilogy I was beginning to feel that each of the three had been written by a different author.  The character of Sonea seems to alter so much.  There is a complete flip around in this book and I know Canavan is trying to spring surprises on the reader, but these are so severe that it reduces confidence in the characters.  In this book we find that Sonea is now 20, even though it has been only three years since 'The Magicians' Guild' was set when she seemed to be a younger girl, probably no more than 15, if not younger.  The two readers have voiced her that way, so it is rather startling when she is suddenly naïve, despite growing up in the slums, but sexually active in this book. I am not convinced by her change in loyalties.  To draw a Rowling parallel this would be like Hermione Granger running off with Professor Snape, if not Lord Voldemort himself. The book has some good scenes.  In this series Canavan has always been strongest in writing about people charging through the city, so the battle to defend it, is as good as the first two-thirds of 'The Magicians' Guild' when Sonea is hiding in the city.  Her wandering around the wastelands is far less interesting.  In fact too many people wander around too many wastelands and the magicians in general turn out to be pretty pathetic.  The action scenes are good but not the bits in between.  The three love interests are not really resolved.  In many ways I admire what Canavan has done with the series, but it has been far too erratic in nature for me to enjoy.

Samantha Bond does the voices well, they are now established.  However, I feel she, like the reader has been caught out by Sonea suddenly leaping to being 3-5 years older than envisaged and so she still sound 14 even when she declares she is 20.

'First Contact' by J.M. Dillard; read by Gates McFadden
I saw the movie this novel was based on some years ago but had forgotten enough of the plot for this to be alright to listen to without me knowing what was going to happen next.  It is a 'Star Trek' story featuring Captain Jean-Luc Picard fighting against the Borg, a cyborg race that travel back in time in an attempt to stop the first test flight of a faster-than-light drive by humans which attracts the attention of the Vulcans and then the humans' integration into the Federation.  What is rather surprising is the development is made in the mid-21st century after the world has suffered a nuclear war, so there is an element of a survivalist story in here, probably the most unlikely context for the development of such technology especially given that the lead scientist is an alcoholic living in a tent in Montana.  There are parallel developments involving different members of the crew of the Enterprise, working on Earth and battling through the space ship in an attempt to dislodge the Borg from it.

I guess one extra element that you get from the book are the thoughts of Picard and other characters.  These are very important in the captain's case because as a former prisoner of the Borg he gets more than an inkling of what they are going to do and this helps him fight back.  Overall, it was rather a workerlike story rather than one with great moments of tension because those who are lost and assimilated by the Borg are not characters that have been developed beyond their names.  To enhance the drama the producers of the audio book have added in a lot of sound effects.  McFadden's voice is often moderated, beyond her acting the voices of the different characters.  There is music which is sometimes too loud to hear the text, laser blasts, explosions, engine sounds and worst of all squelchy sounds of surgery.  Overall, I feel these detract rather than add to the book.  McFadden, otherwise, does pretty well in capturing the full spectrum of characters.  I had not realised that she was the actress who played the character, Chief Medical Officer Commander Beverly Crusher in the Next Generation stories of  'Star Trek'.


'The Bourne Deception' by Eric Van Lustbader; read by Jeremy Davidson
I have seen the first three movies of the Jason Bourne series, but have read none of the original books by Robert Ludlum nor these successor ones by Eric Van Lustbader though I did read a martial arts adventure by him twenty years ago which I thought a friend of mine was giving me as a recommendation to read, but it turns out he disliked it and thought I was better placed to dispose of it!  Reading this book, I realised why the source of some gripes from readers of my own novels.  The majority of the readers who contact me are right-wing men from the USA.  It is clear now that they expect their books all to be written this way, especially if dealing with warfare.

The language is incessantly bombastic, but with the most contorted similes you could imagine.  Furthermore, it keeps stopping to give a highly technical read out of the weaponry being used.  When a man is seeking to shoot Bourne we get a whole slew of data about the gun and the telescopic sight he is using.  Later there is a description of the three calibres of the different ammunition on board a helicopter.  Thus, you have a breathless style which is interrupted by likening things at length to other things, often utterly unrelated and a manual on whatever machinery a character is using.  I could not write this way even if I wanted to and think it is a rather mind-numbing and certainly unsubtle approach, which actually reduces any genuine sense of jeopardy.

The sense of jeopardy is further reduced by the fact that Jason Bourne himself seems invincible, to the extent that this is even commented upon by characters.  In contrast others, especially the women, seem disposable.  I accept there has been some attempt to include women as agents and controllers, but at times they seem particularly vulnerable and too many carry sexy sounding guns in thigh holsters for it to seem feasible.  A further weakness is how twisted the plot is.  The attack on Iran seems contemporary as does featuring 'security' consultancies working for the US government but to their own agenda.  However, there are too many threads and especially too many people in prosthetic disguises to really get your head around.  It also distances Bourne from the action for much of the book and instead we see things largely through disposable characters.  I guess, however, this is how people expect action novels to be written these days and they are intolerant of anyone who tries anything marginally different.

Davidson does a good job with the voices of the different character of both genders.  He manages Russian and Egyptian accents pretty convincingly, but struggles with the Australian and New Zealand ones.  I have no idea why Van Lustbader has such an aversion to Munich; his description of the city is terribly misplaced and erroneous, he could have picked scores of other German cities that would have fitted better.

'Attention All Shipping' by Charlie Connelly; read by Alex Jennings
Though written by a Briton, this is very much in the Bill Bryson area of writing.  Feeling nostalgic for the daily radio shipping forecast, Connelly decided to travel to all of the zones mentioned in the broadcast, along the way visiting the locations of some interesting people and recounting to readers about how the structure of the forecast came about and developed.  The trouble is that many of the zones are simply chunks of sea and Connelly made no effort to even visit one oil or gas rig, though he did get to Sealand.  Many of the other zones cover bleak islands or soggy coastal regions, so a lot of what he articulates is about being depressed in a rundown place.  It is quite stunning how ill-prepared Connelly is for many of his journeys especially to the more remote places, so a lot of the time he comes across as a really pathetic character, a little xenophobic when he finds things are different to back home, both in the way Bryson did in some of his earlier books.  There are highlights, primarily when he is outlining his family history, the achievements of a particular individual from the town or about the story of some light houses.  Overall, there was insufficient of interest to make this journey worthwhile and so recounting it is naturally lacking in substance.

I now know Alex Jennings well as a reader of audio books.  This is one of those where the reader seems so close to the author, that you feel he is almost that man.  That helps a little, though it just emphasises how desultory the whole project was and largely how ill-prepared Connelly was for it.  Thus, there is little to admire, bar what he read up on about local heroes.

Mark In The Sea: The Persistence of Islands of Doggerland

 

This book is for sale via Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07JK5QZZV/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2 

Doggerland is the name given to the land which covered what is now the southern North Sea, at the time of the last Ice Age. It connected the east coast of England to what is now the Dutch, German and Danish coasts. You can find out more about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland The area was settled by farmers and is thought to have been very fertile with a number of rivers running through it, feeding either into what is now the English Channel or the northern North Sea. Archaeological remains have been being fished up from the region under the sea, since 1931. Modern technology and continued finds keep expanding our knowledge of the region. New finds often trigger newspaper articles and claims that the region was a kind of British 'Atlantis'.

Following the last Ice Age sea levels rose and the land was inundated. However, as late 6225–6170 BCE there were still a number of islands of the kind shown on the front cover of my book. These, though, were submerged following the three Storegga Slides, vast geological movements in what is now the coast of northern Norway sending out tsunamis across the region. Not only did they drown the remaining areas of Doggerland but they altered the British coastline too. While this event might not have been the origin of Atlantis myths, one can imagine the human tragedy for the people living on these islands with their settlements and culture almost erased from existence, only to be recovered in bits and pieces millennia later.

I have occasionally done geological rather than social or political 'what if?' stories and this seemed like a good one to do. Stephen Baxter had published a trilogy of books, 2010-12, showing people on Doggerland stemming inundation, but his books had only covered up to the Iron Age. I was interested in seeing what might have happened if the islands had continued right up to present day so my stories run from 12 BCE to 2017. Rather than trying to have a story covering centuries, I decided on the approach of a 'fix up' book, i.e. a series of short stories, in my case 19, connected by a theme. This has quite often been an approach for alternate history books. I just have to mention 'Pavane' (1968) by Keith Roberts, 'Agent of Byzantium' (19877/94) by Harry Turtledove, 'The Years of Rice and Salt' (2002) by Kim Stanley Robinson  and 'Roma Eterna' (2003) by Robert Silverberg, amongst others, to show the standing of such books in this genre. 

I was also influenced by 'Ulverton' (1992) by Adam Thorpe, set in a fictional English village 1650-1989, seeing it through a range of characters and indeed very diverse forms of story telling. I have not gone as far as him in the formats of my stories, but have tried to include some variety of formats, e.g. in the form of a diary covering the impact of elements of the Spanish Armada being washed up among the islands. That did cause challenges I had not foreseen as in 1588, Spain was using the Gregorian calendar (was we use today) but England was still using the Julian calendar. Historical accounts in English and Spanish tend to refer to the dates by the calendar prevalent in the respective countries at the time which as you can imagine causes confusion when you are a poor author jumping back and forth between the two. Throughout I have tried to bring in actual historical figures to give some implication of the impact the islands would have on wider European history, but especially in north-western Europe.

For the geographical basis of my alternative, I took that which was published in ‘Ocean Modelling’ in 2014 and presented to the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in May 2014 by Alexandros Avdis, Gareth Collins, Jon Hill, Stephan Kramer and Matthew Piggott. This provided me a range of different sized islands to work with. I drew on what we knew of the flora and fauna of Doggerland to suggest what might have lived on in terms of the islands, for example, the deer. We know deer migrated across Doggerland, but I envisaged a smaller breed being trapped on the islands and so ending up a bit like the Svalbard reindeer. Looking at the trees grown in neighbouring regions and the animals, then led me to think about the food which people would eat. I imagine as with Denmark, fish would be important and indeed as we know happened in Roman times, such as in southern Spain, whales would be fished. This led me to invent the 'national dish' of the islands - smoked mackerel, oatcakes and pickled cabbage, influenced by a mixture of Scottish and Danish dishes. In terms of other resources, we know that natural gas lies under the region and it also seemed possible given what is found on nearby coasts, that iron ore could be mined on the islands too. This allowed them not to become backwaters in the industrial age.

Politically, perhaps I have pushed what might be deemed feasible a little further. It certainly seemed reasonable that the Romans would reach and settle the islands before they took on Britain, especially given their exploration along the 'Dutch' and 'German' North Sea coasts. It seemed fair that given William the Conqueror was almost defeated in Sussex in 1066, his forces, might have been thrown back from the island and so they became more associated with the Low Countries, though continuing a connection to Norman England. The connection to England sees stories around the time of the Anarchy and later the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (formerly the English Civil War). However, the connection to the continent means a greater involvement in the French Revolution and Napoleon's plans for expansion.

Work on the Camstonisland which was very active on Reddit in the early 2010s envisaged a single island in the North Sea. It is worthwhile checking out given the Low German dialect, flags, etc. which have been worked up for this alternative. Another similar one are the islands of Caproney, a couple of long thin ones with some smaller islands, but I have not seen more detail on these. I named them Yonisleland in the modern version of the name. While the islands in my book have tended to have received Frisian names, I have envisaged that English is the predominant language though residents of the islands are fluent in more languages, especially Dutch, German and Danish than most residents of Britain.

One step which might be challenged is that when Elector Georg of Hanover became King George I of Britain in 1714, the islands were seen as being more part of his German territory than his British and then like Hanover were overrun by the Prussians in 1866. This would have brought Prussian control right close to the British coast and while I have not done it in this book, this no doubt would have had a great impact on naval warfare between Britain and Germany in the First World War.  The islands do come back to Britain in 1919 only to be invaded by Nazi Germany at the time of the taking of Denmark and then the Netherlands in 1940, so exposing more of the United Kingdom to Nazi occupation beyond the Channel Islands.

The stories were written roughly in chronological order, so I came to the modern ones while the Brexit Referendum was happening and then I was encouraged to envisage how the residents of the islands would react to the break from the EU. I hope I give a fair reflection for people who would have a much stronger connection to mainland Europe and indeed particularly Scandinavia. I also had the sense that the people of these islands facing the wrath of a rump of the North Sea would be like the Scots in many ways and so similarly be reasonably supportive of the EU. Another parallel is in the independence movement which is shown, as happened in Scotland and Wales, receiving a revival in the 1970s, but never rising to a sufficient level to lead to a full secession.

I have tried to make all the stories different but engaging. I know some readers rail against short stories as 'going nowhere', but I do think they are useful with alternate history in allowing the reader to see multiple facets of the alternative that the author has created, especially when, as in this case, the repercussions of the change appear over centuries. I also know that there are readers who believe that the only 'real' alternate history books are ones about warfare. This book has scenes of battles, notably fighting against a Viking raid, a Norman invasion, French-influenced revolutionaries, the Prussians and Nazis, but it also shows less violent, though hopefully as engaging times in the islands' histories. The advantage of a fix-up anthology is if you do not like a particular set of characters or scenario, you do not have to read long before another one turns up!

Death in Amiens: Contemporary Mystery set in Northern France

Death in Amiens

This book was in part a new departure for me, as it is a crime novel, but set in 2018.  I have visited Amiens on a couple of occasions and while there I began thinking about the contrast between how different people see life.  Thus, was born the concept of a novel in which you have an apparently unhappy man and one, despite the pressures he faces, finds life worthwhile and fulfilling.  In my crime novels, this is the nineteenth of those, I like to look at aspects of the characters that go beyond the crime itself, to provide rounded individuals which you can believe in as genuine, even if they are fictional.

Amiens is a pleasant city in northern France which possesses one unique aspect - the hortillonages.  These are floating gardens that were developed in the Middle Ages and are very much in use today.  A market selling produce from the gardens has had a revival in recent years.  You can walk alongside these or even pay to have a boat tour through them.  I thought this tranquil setting would be an interesting place for a body to turn up.  A few other things came into play.  One of these was finding out that French policemen retire at 52; until recently it was 50, so they are comparatively young when they stop work.

I was keen to include places I have visited in Amiens and indeed in Arras and Dunkirk which feature in part in the book.  If I had written this 5 years ago, perhaps only 3, it seems many more of them would still be open; there has been a spate of closures in recent years.  However, given the wonders of the internet I was able to replace them with real places still open (as well as a few fictional ones) and even find out what would be on the menu if you decided to visit one of them.

I hope that readers find the book engaging, not simply for unravelling the mystery but also for the portrayal of life in contemporary France and for looking at the different ways in which men cope or do not cope with ageing.  We are currently being told so often what we are assumed to be and how we should behave, it makes it harder than ever to know where we should be going next and if there is actually anything in our lives we can legitimately enjoy.

The book is available on various Amazon websites:
UK @ £2.64:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evening-Amiens-Mystery-Alexander-Rooksmoor-ebook/dp/B07HTWY4JM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1538400245&sr=1-1
USA @ US$3.46:
https://www.amazon.com/Evening-Amiens-Mystery-Alexander-Rooksmoor-ebook/dp/B07HTWY4JM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1538400344&sr=1-1
Canada @ CAN$3.50
https://www.amazon.ca/Evening-Amiens-Mystery-Alexander-Rooksmoor-ebook/dp/B07HTWY4JM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1538400427&sr=1-1
Australia @ AUS$4.79
https://www.amazon.com.au/Evening-Amiens-Mystery-Alexander-Rooksmoor-ebook/dp/B07HTWY4JM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1538400530&sr=1-1
Germany and I imagine other parts of Europe @ €2.99:
https://www.amazon.de/Evening-Amiens-Mystery-Alexander-Rooksmoor-ebook/dp/B07HTWY4JM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1538400676&sr=1-1

Books I Listened To/Read In September

Fiction
'The Redbreast' by Jo Nesbø
I was given this book by people who read a lot of crime fiction, I think because it is one of those novels which parallels events in the Second World War with contemporary events.  The book is set in Norway in the 2000s, notably around the rise of neo-Nazis, but also looks at the lives of Norwegian volunteers in the SS who fought for the Germans on the Eastern Front.  I know Nesbø is incredibly successful, but I found this book incredibly hard going.  I can accept narratives jumping around in time and confused characters, but this book goes too far.  Some chapters are only a couple of pages long and as a result the whole book, despite its length (618 pages in my edition) is incredibly fragmented.  Towards the end we are told of people taking on other identities and the format makes this very difficult to follow.  There is some tension towards the end of the book, but generally most of it felt like a pile of numerous disjointed bits that did not hang together and so I did not engage with it, just worked my way through some lumps of text at each setting.  The attention to detail and the core characters are well done, but I felt distanced from them as with this format they were just like icing on a pile of cake crumbs which it was hard to envisage as a cake.  I will not try any of Nesbø's other books even if they turn up in a charity shop.


'I Shall Wear Midnight' by Terry Pratchett
This is the fourth of the five Tiffany Aching books which I think are the best among Pratchett's 21st Century work.  They retain the humour of his earlier books but get the messages about tolerance which were clearly increasingly important to Pratchett in a way which is far less cumbersome and overwhelming as was the case in the mainstream Discworld novels of this time.  Tiffany is now established as the witch of the Chalk, a downland sheep-raising region.  Her role is largely as district nurse and social worker, her main magic abilities being able to fly a broom, disappear into shadows and take pain from people.  The main challenge of this book is facing rising bigotry against witches, stimulated by an ancient force called the Cunning Man.  Pratchett deftly balances the humorous and the sinister.  You genuinely feel his characters are vulnerable.  In this book he does not avoid the challenging, aside from the Cunning Man and the evil that he encourages people to do, Tiffany has to deal with a tough case.  A thirteen year old girl has been made pregnant by her thirteen-year old boyfriend and then has been beaten so hard by her father as to miscarry.  The father attempts suicide.  Pratchett shows Tiffany dealing with the social pressures and the need for compassion in a way better than many authors for adult audiences.  Overall, this was an enjoyable book with some challenging elements.  If you enjoyed classic Pratchett then I think you will like this, with a dose of Pratchett-with-a-message from his later books but not stifling good story telling and humour.


'Guernica' by Dave Boling
This is not a bad novel.  You have to appreciate Boling's research into Guernica and its surrounding area in the late 19th and early 20th century, running up to 1940.  In immense detail he writes about two inter-linked families and their neighbours.  Little happens and this is very much a 'slice of life' novel with the author jumping between the various fictional characters in Guernica and real people such as Pablo Picasso and Oberst Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen.  It reminded me of the 'Larkrise to Candleford' series (2008-11) based on a trilogy of semi-autobiographical books by Flora Thompson, published 1939-43.  The characters are interesting enough, but as it goes on, it is all rather 'twee'.  Furthermore, like a story set aboard the 'Titanic', you cannot escape knowing that it is building up to the bombing and strafing of Guernica on 26th April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War by German bomber and fighter aircraft.  The novel continues three years after then and abruptly introduces two British characters.  In a rather contrived way, these people end up connecting back to the surviving Basque characters.  The book passes by without really engaging you.  The only jarring section is when Boling speaks about the two Britons, considering 'going back to school' and utterly inappropriate phrase for British adults, when in fact he means returning to university.  Overall, I admired the book but got very little from it and by the end found it tiresome and increasingly contrived.  There is no over-arching story and like with 'Larkrise to Candleford' you have snippets of story with the novel being less than a sum of its parts.


Non-Fiction
'From Crossbow to H-Bomb' by Bernard and Fawn M. Brodie
This book takes military technology from ancient times up to the early 1970s.  It is almost like two books, one before the detonation of atomic bombs in 1945 and then one afterwards.  It is clear that the Brodies are really primarily interested in the developments in nuclear weapons.  These are pretty technical at times but are useful especially in these days when fear of nuclear war has subsided to indicate their nature.  Their points about the ongoing need for conventional weapons and their increasing sophistication remain as relevant now in the 21st century as at the time they were writing.

Going back from this second chunk of the book, the rest is pretty interesting.  What comes across is not how fast weaponry developed but how slowly.  Medieval warriors were using equipment that the Greek hoplites would have understood and then even with gunpowder, the weapons at Waterloo were simply augmentation of the firearms seen in the latter years of the Hundred Years' War.  Throughout they show how innovation was turned away from and that governments tended to order more of what they already had rather than seek anything new.  At times, though, they fall victim to stories that were probably around at the time they were writing but now are certainly known to have been wrong.  For the First World War they believe that with a little more consistency the German U-boat campaign could have starved Britain, utterly neglecting how successful the Allied blockade of Germany was leading to the so-called Turnip Winter as early as the end of 1916, which saw German civilians malnourished.

Similarly they over-estimate the German tanks in 1940 saying they were larger, faster and better armoured than the French equivalents.  This is wrong on all counts.  The Panzer I had never even been intended to go to war and many German tanks involved in Blitzkrieg only had machine guns, weaker than the French tanks facing them.  The Brodies do not see the point they make in passing, about the disposition of French tanks and the recklessness of the German tank commanders, which meant a victory largely through bluff rather than technical superiority.

Thus, while this book has some very interesting nuggets and makes good points on the reasons behind failing to innovate, it is patchy and this represents a sometimes distorted view of history and the Brodies' overarching fascination with nuclear weapons above all else.


Audio Books - Fiction
'More Than You Can Say' by Paul Torbay; read by Jonathan Keeble
There are not many audio books that I have to stop listening to.  While I finished this one, there were occasions in the process when I had to switch it off because it annoyed me so much.  Keeble is good at sounding like the hero of the story and voicing the other characters he encounters, even the women.  It was more the nature of the story which riled me.  Basically it is a John Buchan story brought forward a century, but retaining many of the elements of the early 20th century, i.e. the hero Richard Gaunt is a member of a gambling club in London where he is bet that he can walk to Oxford by lunchtime the next day, in his dinner suit.  Later when escaping the baddies he runs into a friend out on a partridge shoot in the Oxfordshire countryside and later still he finds refuge in a stately home owned by a friend.  You could find some of these elements in 'The Thirty Nine Steps' (1978) movie version of Buchan's novel.

Contrary to this very old fashioned approach to an adventure, there are sections that are basically lectures on the British involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century.  Yes, we know they were a mess and there was torture and the people who fought there came back were screwed up, but these sections are like pausing the novel to patronise us about those things.  Despite his ignorance, perhaps because of his upper class attitude, Gaunt is terrible at listening to what women are saying to him and so the listener/reader ends up many steps ahead of him as he is married to a woman from Afghanistan, Adina, and is drawn into a terrorist plot.  One saving grace is that Torbay gives some recognition to the 'other' side in these conflicts.  There are some points of tension, but steadily you become exasperated by how useless the hero is and how mired he is in such old fashioned attitudes.  I can imagine the kind of reader this book would appeal to and he is certainly different to me.


'The Man on the Balcony' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
This is the third story of the ten in the Martin Beck series and by this stage the BBC were well polished in their presentation.  One gets a real feel for Sweden of the late 1960s, though in this book the authors seem far less negative towards every aspect of it than they did previously, they even seem tolerant of the Christmas period.  This story revolves around finding a child killer and this is done by locating a habitual mugger. It really feels like a work of detection and it is enjoyable seeing the detectives piece it together.  In fact, on the arrest of the murderer the book comes to an end, I guess because Sjöwall and Warlöö's usual line that criminals are simply malfunctioning in the supposedly perfect but flawed Swedish society would be hard to swallow even for their fans with such a murderer.  Certainly, though, it made me want to continue with the series.


'The Laughing Policeman' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
The fourth story in the Beck series is different in seeing what initially appears to be a terrorist attack on a bus killing all the occupants.  The detectives have to work out who was the intended target and why.  What is interesting is that the focus is on another officer working undercover in his own time, so rather than seeing the crime from the leading characters of the series, we witness them reassembling what a colleague was getting up to.  It is an interesting interweaving of a 'cold case' with a terrorist act and reminds us that such things were going on long before the 21st century, despite what many people think today.


'The Lovely Bones' by Alice Seebold; read by Alyssa Bresnahan
This book is seen through the eyes of a 14-year old girl, Susie Salmon, murdered by a serial killer in Pennsylvania in 1973.  She watches from her view of Heaven over her killer, her family and her neighbours.  I worried at times that it would be too American; that all the emotions would thus be taken to the extreme.  I also imagined that it would be mawkish.  It does go that way at times and it goes on too long; I think it would have been better to cut off five years after Susie's killing rather than going on into the 1980s.  I guess the author felt she had to show some of the healing and the 'redemption' of Susie's mother who escapes to California for some of the book.  Overall, it is alright.  The narration has many touches of humour, despite the dark subject, and there are moments of tension especially when Susie's father and sister seek to expose the man they rightly suspect of being Susie's killer.  The book follows lots of narratives not simply about Susie's family members, she also has a younger brother, Buckley, but also people she knew at school and some of their parents.  It is very good at summing up this corner of the USA at the time, though the detailing tends of fade as the book leaves behind the early 1970s.

There is no mention of Vietnam or the US political developments of the times, the focus is really on quite ordinary people, much of the time messing up.  In the latter phases of the book the ghost of Susie has greater intervention and at one stage she possesses a friend to complete something she started when alive and so the book shifts into being more supernatural even at a stage when Susie had appeared to not engage as much as before and her family appeared to be getting over her.  I think this is where the American perspective comes in, everything must be resolved in a way a European writer might resist or even baulk against.  I was also unhappy with the underage sex in the middle of the book, which seemed unnecessary and inappropriate.  I do not understand why authors, whether they are Seebold or Pratchett feel they are at liberty to include such portrayals.

Bresnahan is particularly good in manifesting Susie and the narration, plus is not too bad at the other characters, male or female.  Overall, there were some interesting and gripping parts to this novel.  However, there is too much of it and it is far too sentimental for me to enjoy, but that may be because I have British rather than American sensibilities and prefer a story with out every last loose end tied off leading to contortions for the novel.


'The Mermaids Singing' by Val McDermid; read by Alan Cummings
Though I have been aware of McDermid for many years this is in fact the first of her books I have engaged with.  It is a brisk story of a serial killer in the fictional town of Bradfield, though some of its locations seem to owe a lot of Manchester.  We see events from the perspective of a female police detective, a profiler with sexual dysfunction that she works with and the serial killer themselves.  Cummings does a very good job of inhabiting these different perspectives and bringing out the ambivalences and misunderstandings which are essential for this particular story.  The story is credible, though at times some of the stubborn old police officers seem rather hackneyed, more turn up in the next review.  The fact that errors are made and even trumped by other errors make the story engaging even within the police procedural genre.  The only tough bit for me was the descriptions of the torture methods that the killer uses, they are very graphic.  Overall, however, now I have sampled McDermid's work I would not be averse to returning to it.


'The Complaints' by Ian Rankin; read by James MacPherson
Though this is by Rankin and set in Edinburgh, it does not feature John Rebus.  Instead it focuses on the post-alcoholic Malcolm Fox who works for Lothian and Borders Complaints and Conduct unit, an internal affairs unit which has appeared in the Rebus stories.  Fox is assigned to investigate a Detective Sergeant Jamie Breck from a neighbouring force suspected of accessing child pornography.   However, in turn Breck is set to investigate the murder of the abusive partner of Fox's sister.  This begins a complex story with inter-locking cases and lots of corruption involving the police, local criminals and property developers.  Rankin provides an involved story, though the full extent is only unravelled towards the end.  I think he just stays the right side of it becoming too involved and at the end I felt both Fox and Breck had been luckier than they had deserved; it all ends rather too neatly.  In some ways it was good that Rankin provided something different to Rebus, but despite some trips to other cities, you are still largely being taken around Edinburgh.  However, I have not yet tired of Rankin's work whether in print or on audio.

MacPherson's voice is very familiar for someone who watched 'Taggart' for many years and at times, you have to remind yourself that this is a different set-up, not a story from that series.  It will be easier if you are less familiar with the actor.  However, he does the range of Scottish voices very well, even when Rankin also features gruff, stolid old police officers, bellowing, the way McDermid did to some degree.  I guess they must reflect reality to such an extent as to be compulsory for police procedurals.


'The Magicians' Guild' by Trudi Canavan; read by Kellie Bright
I had not realised that this was a young adult series, though having got through the Harry Potter books, that is not really a problem for me.  It is a while since I have read a real fantasy novel.  It is important to remember that this book was published in 2001, when only four of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books were out and the darkest phase had not been reached, thus while you might think there are similarities, they were written in parallel rather than Canavan copying Rowling.  The story is set in the fantasy city of Imardin.  A girl, Sonea, gets involved in a protest against 'The Purge' a periodic clearing of the city's slums, in part carried out by the magicians.  During the protest her own magic skills are revealed and she is hunted down by the magicians for the first three-fifths of the book.  At first I was worried that it would be full of tired tropes.  The magicians dress in colour robes and have guild buildings that sound like bits of Oxford University.  However, fortunately, Canavan is more interested in the functioning of her city and, in particular, its social class relations.  Much of the book is the pursuit through the city with Sonia having to rely on slum-dweller friends and The Thieves.

When Sonia is caught, you feel that a lot of the book has been wasted.  One of my central problems with the novel is that it went in directions which irritated me.  I was also less than happy with the patronising attitude of the magician characters.  However, I guess the social hierarchy and the claustrophobia of the city and then the guild buildings does distinguish this from other fantasy novels and gives it a degree of 'realism'.  I guess being fearful and making poor decisions should be expected from a teenage character.  The number of people that she is uncertain whether she can trust or not, keeps the plot bobbing along and lifts it up on occasion from being mired in the tropes you would expect from a magicians' guild.

Kellie Bright turned out to have an English accent which works reasonably well in articulating the levels of Imardin society in a way an American may have struggled with.  The only thing to note is that she tends to make the slum dwellers sound like the cast of 'Oliver!' (1968) especially Sonea's best friend, Serry who sounds like the brother of the Artful Dodger.  I have the other two books in the trilogy, but given my irritations with this one, I am uncertain whether I will listen to them.

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.

Books I Listened To/Read In July

Fiction
'Knights of the Hawk' by James Aitcheson
This is the third book in a sequence about a Breton knight fighting for the Normans in the period of the Norman Conquest of England and the subsequent suppression of resistance to it.  The first two books were 'Sworn Sword' (2011) and 'The Splintered Kingdom' (2012).  He has written another book called 'The Harrowing' (2016) set at the same time period, but featuring different characters.  I was drawn to this book having read 'Conquest' by Stewart Binns last month as this book shows the defeat of Hereward the Wake from the Norman rather than the English side the way Binns did.  This book is better written than 'Conquest' and that may be because it is Aitcheson's third whereas it was Binns's first.  There is some wandering around, but far less than in 'Conquest' and though the hero, Tancred is worthy, lots about companionship with various warriors, but the book is far less earnest throughout than Binns's story.  This book effectively is split into two - the first section sees the suppression of Hereward's forces at Ely and the second part sees Tancred hunting down his lover who it turns out has been taken by a Danish warlord based in the lawless Inner Hebrides leading to an epic battle to release her.  The book is generally brisk and has good detail without giving the history lectures that Binns has a tendency to provide.  Overall I would say it was reasonably engaging, more satisfied than with 'Conquest' but not sufficiently to make me want to rush out and buy the others of Aitcheson's books.


'The Tiger in the Smoke' by Margery Allingham
This book, published in 1952 and the 14th in the Albert Campion series of books is apparently J.K. Rowling's most favourite thriller.  I was far less impressed.  It is very much of its time, though initially it even felt more like post-First World War than post-Second World War.  A widow, Meg Elginbrodde just about to remarry begins to be sent up-to-date photographs of her husband, Major Martin Elginbrodde, who was declared missing presumed dead in the Normandy invasion of 1944.  Her fiancé, Geoffrey Levett, amateur detective Campion and the police begin to investigate this occurrence.  It eventually leads them to a ragtag band of buskers, the core of which had served under Major Elginbrodde when sent to assassinate a leading German during the war, who was using the house on the French coast that the Elginbroddes had inhabited before the war.  Elginbrodde rewarded the men with antiques from the house and there was talk of a far greater treasure hidden there.  With the escape of the sergeant from the mission, murderer Jack Havoc, also known as Hackett and even Johnny Cash, the 'tiger' of the title, steps are taken to gain the clues to the treasure.

The trouble with this book is that it is very fragmented, in part because so many people are involved in the investigation.  Even Canon Hubert Avril, the landlord of Meg who knew Havoc as a boy, gets involved in a very ineffectual way.  Levett gets abducted by the gang and the police are involved in searching the killer of one of their number.  Havoc himself kills more people in seeking the information he wants.  As a result, we have a lot of people speculating on what is going on whether verbally or in their own heads.  Meg is edited out of much of the revelation in a very patronising way by the numerous male protagonists which I think was probably insulting even in 1952 but is galling today.

Campion plays a very minor role to Levett and Avril, and later Meg Elginbrodde herself, which does not help clarify matters.  There are some moments of genuine tension, usually involving Meg, but in between there is a lot of chatter and reflection which adds nothing to the story but rather confuses it more without providing tension.  As a result, towards the end I was just wishing for it to be over.  There is one chilling character, Mrs. Cash, the loan shark who seems largely untouchable despite having 300 clients down the years.

Perhaps the only strength of this book is the setting.  The action takes place largely during one of the thick smogs of early 1950s London.  The streets are often confusing, with left overs of old buildings and locations parcelled up or damaged by bombing.  Food is still on the ration and so the feel of the very austere nature of Britain at the time is made really clear throughout with the fog even penetrating inside buildings.  However, with far too many detectives bumbling around, it is a very irritating book and I fail to see why people like Rowling value it.


'Mortal Engines' by Philip Reeve
This book, published in 2001, is the first of a tetralogy.  Online it says it is a young adult book, but I think it is in fact a children's book, though as the series progresses and, I presume, the young characters age, maybe it evolves into that.  The book borrows from a number of authors' works.  The idea of mobile cities I have seen done by Christopher Priest and Michael Moorcock.  These of different guilds competing to run the city is a common trope. The book is set some centuries into the future (the 34th Century is noted as being historic) when ravaged by some apocalypse, mobile cities move around large parts of the world like creatures.  The story features characters from London which is shown as eating smaller towns.  Some humans opposed the concept of Municipal Darwinism and have settled in static towns; treated as heretics by the mobile city dwellers.  The book has a common set of characters for such books, such as an orphaned boy and the daughter of one the leading adventurers of London, who has been involved in dubious activities, that reminded me somewhat of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' series.

Despite its juvenile focus, some derivative elements, this is a fast moving and enjoyable book.  It throws up loads of stuff about society and how it functions.  There is quite a bit about emotions and falling for people you would not expect to, which I guess is compulsory for children's books these days.  It has great descriptions of the various mobile and fixed towns, their levels and their people.  While I would not rush out to buy the rest of this series, I have owned this book more than seven years now, if I came across others from the series in a charity shop I would buy them for something quick, pretty well written and with genuine points of drama, to read.


Fiction - Audio Books
'Shelter' by Harlan Coben; read by Kerry Shale
As I buy the cheapest audio books I can buy, I often end up with quite a random selection.  I had never read a book by Coben, but understand he is a successful US thriller writer.  I did not realise that this was a young adult novel either.  It is the first featuring Mickey Bolitar, a 15-year old, 6'4" tall student at a high school in New Jersey.  Bolitar has already had an exceptional life having grown up all around the world while his parents worked for a charity rescuing children from exploitation and he is drawn into this organisation.  Bolitar can already drive, having learnt in South Africa and is a skilled martial artist, having been trained by various masters, particularly one in the Amazonian rain forest, so he is not your usual child.  His uncle was a professional basketball player and his mother a very competent tennis player until both had their sporting careers brought to an abrupt end.  Following the killing of his father, Bolitar's mother has become a drug addict. 

The story is very much a traditional young adult adventure set in the USA.  Steadily Bolitar builds up a team of friends, including a smart-talking Goth girl, a nerd and a cheerleader and they investigate both the disappearance of a high-school pupil and the strange organisation that Mickey's parents worked for.  There is all the usual tensions with parents, guardians, teachers and school mates, many of which are painfully stereotypical.  The bad guys are effectively nasty.  Shale does very well voicing this spectrum of people.  At times there is exposition but generally the book is reasonably credible and has decent points of tension and frustration.  I think a younger person would find it fresher than I did, as I kept on being reminded of a hundred things I have seen from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' to 'My So Called Life', I suppose because US high school adventures are so common in so much produced in English.  I would be interested to read one of Coben's novels aimed at adults.


'Crime and Punishment' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; read by Alex Jennings
This is one of these books that you have some idea about, but in fact it turns out to be quite a bit different to what you had expected; for me 'Great Expectations' proved to be that way.  This book is incredibly gloomy.  It was published as a 12-part magazine story throughout 1866 and then as a novel.  It is set in a few poor streets in St. Petersburg, at the time capital of the Russian Empire.  It focuses on a former law student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov now facing absolute poverty.  It seems he might be insane even before the book begins and certainly his mental faculties fall apart in many ways through the book.  He murders a female pawn broker who he has borrowed money from and kills her sister when she stumbles over his actions.  Yet he does not effectively rob the woman and ultimately casts away the stuff he does steal from her, despite his desperate need for money.

There is a strong sense that Raskolnikov does the murder more for an intellectual exercise than for anything else.  This is heightened by the fact that, despite lucky breaks in escaping from the scene of the crime, the detective assigned to investigate the murders, Porfiry Petrovich, determines very quickly that Raskolnikov was to blame and how he went about it.  Much of the book is taken up with Raskolnikov prevaricating about what to do; breaking up his sister's engagement to a wealthy civil servant and striking up a highly improbable relationship with a prostitute, Sonya, daughter of a neighbour who dies during the course of the book.  Eventually as we expect throughout, Raskolnikov confesses to the detective who has known he would throughout, and gets a surprisingly light sentence in Siberia for the two murders.

The book is very irritating, especially that everything seems so sewn up from the start and we are left to witness the leading character simply twisting and turning.  The detective is infuriating in being so perfectly perceptive and smug with it.  The relationship with Sonya is unconvincing and Raskolnikov behaves in a foolish way towards his family; his sister has far more sense than him and would have been a better focus for the story.  The one strength of the book is its portrayal of people often falling from higher social classes, on the edge of absolute poverty in mid-19th century Russia, the kinds of places they live in and how they appeared.  Aside from that it is a book about a weak, mad man, going about his business behaving in an irrational manner at best shocking people around him; at worst killing with only twisted compunction.

Alex Jennings is a good reader for the various Russian voices.  There is a lot of dialogue and interior monologue from the character.  He makes sense of this madness and the charging back and forward.  However, he cannot save what is a highly annoying book.


'Goldfinger' by Ian Fleming; read by Hugh Bonneville
This was the seventh James Bond book, published in 1959 and you can see that by this stage Fleming is beginning to recycle some earlier elements.  Like Sir Hugo Drax in 'Moonraker' (1956), Auric Goldfinger is a naturalised millionaire, in this case a Baltic German rather than from the main part of Germany.  Like Drax, Goldfinger is revealed to be suspicious through cheating at cards; he also cheats at golf.  Also like Drax, Goldfinger lives in Kent, though the latter has places in Switzerland and interests in the USA too.  While Drax was employed by the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, Goldfinger is yet another employee of Smersh which has featured to a greater or lesser extent in all the preceding novels.

The book starts with Bond having broken a drugs smuggling ring from Mexico to Britain and you do wonder why Fleming did not turn that story into a novel in its own right given how much attention he pays to it.  Perhaps it seemed a little too like the diamond smuggling of 'Diamonds Are Forever'  (1955).  Certainly with Goldfinger avoiding restrictions on taking gold out of Britain, in place at the time and smuggling it on to India where it secured a higher price, we are back to Bond being an international detective rather than what might be seen as a genuine spy.  We get all the attributes of a Bond novel, the extensive physical descriptions of people and the details of the games he witnesses or takes part in, notably the canasta game that Goldfinger cheats at in Miami and the golf game he also cheats at in Sandwich. 

There is a great description of Bond pursuing Goldfinger across France and into Switzerland and we see more gadgets appearing.  His shoes contain daggers; he puts a tracking device in Goldfinger's car which he can monitor from his own; his car has adjustable lamps, reinforced bumpers and secret hiding places.  The movies did not make up the love of gadgets, just took them further.  Similarly in the Korean Karate specialist, Oddjob, we see the super-powerful henchman of the main baddie, which becomes such a staple in the movies.  It is interesting that Goldfinger has to explain Karate to readers, wrongly portraying it as a branch of Judo.  We forget how unfamiliar such arts were in Britain at the time.  Racism creeps in this regard too.  Bond keeps on referring to the Koreans as 'apes'.  Earlier the wealthy Mr. Dupont, who employs Bond in Miami explains how Goldfinger would have been barred from his hotel if he has proven to be a Jew, as if this behaviour was something normal.

As I have noted before, Bond's relationship with women in the novels is far more complex than in the movies.  In the first book, Vesper Lynd is working for the Soviets; Solitaire and Honeychile Rider only engage with him at the end; Gala Brand is more effective than Bond and only has eyes for her fiancé; Tiffany Case is similar and though she has a relationship with Bond, she soon leaves him for an American officer.  This novel shows Bond not only getting it wrong with women but his contact leading to the death of two sisters.  Jill Masterton, an employee of Goldfinger's pays the price for going off with him and is painted gold to death.  Her sister, Tilly, a lesbian, seeks to assassinate Goldfinger.  Bond prevents this and then leads the woman into great danger and her own killing.  She only has eyes for Pussy Galore, head of a US lesbian gangster gang, inelegantly called The Cement Mixers.

Bond professes to understand 'true' gay men and lesbians, but is very dismissive of people we would probably call bi-curious these days, seeing Tilly Masterton as being in this category even though she falls heavily for Galore from their first meeting.  Bond seems to feel that such attitudes have been provoked by developments undermining the authority of men such as giving the women the vote!  This reveals he is very Victorian in his attitudes and out-of-date even with even 1959 Britain. Galore herself is revealed to only be a lesbian due to an incestuous rape by her uncle at the age of 12.  This reinforces Fleming's dislike of the USA and the sense of how women can be taken off 'the proper path' as he sees it, of sexuality.  Aside from Galore, Bond's assumptions end up in the death of two women.

There are some reasonably strong parts in the novel, but it is rather fragmented.  The final attack on Fort Knox is well worked out and interesting, though the story passed around, i.e. aircraft poisoning the town is used in the movie rather than poisoning the water here.  Galore is won over by Bond only late in the day when the other gangster leaders have all been killed by Goldfinger.  The trouble, though, is the suspension of disbelief breaks down at the end of the second part of the novel.  Bond and Tilly Masterton have been captured easily by Goldfinger and Bond is in line to be cut apart by a rotary saw rather than a laser as in the movie.  However, then he wakes to find himself in Goldfinger's employment and spends much of the rest of the book, along with Tilly, acting as secretarial staff for Goldfinger.  Given the man has numerous Korean and German employees it is not clear why he uses two people he has been highly suspicious all along, at the heart of his operation.  Fleming could have handled this two ways.  First he could have had Bond worm his way into Goldfinger's employment as he tries at the start and has done successfully in 'Diamonds Are Forever' in a similar set-up, especially given that Fleming was clearly not averse to reusing plot devices.  Alternatively Bond could have escaped in Switzerland and then we would have had a race for him to get everyone to listen to what he had to say about the Fort Knox plot, in time.  Fleming's approach I the weakest.

Though there are some highlights, this is not a strong book in the series and needed quite a bit of rewriting to make sense even within the rules of the genre.  Hugh Bonneville is very good in voicing all of the characters, despite the range of accents.  At first you think he has got Pussy Galore's accent wrong until you hear about where she came from and so he is spot on.  His pacing is good and he does not get over-excited and yet is successful in enhancing the tension at crucial moments.


'The Mayor of Casterbridge' by Thomas Hardy; read by Anton Lesser
I had imagined that I had been missing out on reading classic novels such as this.  However, like 'Middlemarch' (1871) which I listened to in May, it effectively turned out to be like a Victorian soap opera.  Added to that it has the heavy hand of destiny running through it as it charts the downfall of Michael Henchard after selling his wife and daughter to a sailor.  In later years he rises to become the Mayor of the fictional town of Casterbridge and running a successful corn and hay merchant business.  However, the return of his wife begins his decline, so that he dies in poverty having lost all the women he had loved and his entire business.  Thus, it is a very depressing book and Henchard's attempts to save himself from his inevitable fate simply prolong the agony.  There is a lot of deception and misapprehension along the way as seems typical for this kind of novel.

The only positives about this book are well drawn characters and the portrayal of small town society in mid-Victorian southern England.  It informs about the way people lived, what trades were practiced, processes and customs of the time.  Casterbridge is well drawn though rather unrealistically packed with Iron Age and Roman ruins of the highest quality as if Hardy packed together sites from across Dorset, Devon, Hampshire and Sussex into this corner of his fictional Wessex.  I do not think a modern writer (this was published in 1886) would have such unremitting decay of a character (unless, of course, they were Charles Palliser who gets off on such misery!) and it is hard for someone now to go along with such a predestined story with very few relieving aspects.

Anton Lesser is very good for this book.  He manages an appropriate range of male and female character voices, especially for Henchard and his Scottish friend and then rival, Donald Farfrae who ends up marrying Henchard's lover and then his step-daughter.  He has a well-rounded voice for the narration and is able to flick between the appropriate voices very adeptly.  This book, however, certainly showed me that my prejudices against Hardy's work were actually a highly accurate assessment of its nature and I will not be accessing any more of his novels.


'The Life and Achievements of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha' by Miguel Cervantes; read by Edward de Souza
There were two volumes to the story published in 1605 and 1615.  This is an abridged version of what in print is often 900 pages long and so I am not really sure what aspects of the two volumes it includes; indeed it seems to have a different title to the one you usually see listed online, i.e. 'The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha'.  The only story from the book I knew was the attack on the windmills which is included, but as to which other incidents are missing, I have no idea.  This edition does take the story right to the end of the life of Alonso Quixano, the man who for much of the book acts as Don Quixote de la Mancha.  It is said that this is the first European novel.  It is also the first European novel about mental health and, as a result, has a particular interest at this time when that aspect is receiving widespread attention.

 Quixano is a well-off man in his fifties who owns a number of houses and estates in the La Mancha region to the South and East of central Spain.  He gets into the habit of reading books about knights errant of earlier centuries and through not sleeping, he becomes convinced that he is such a knight and goes off seeking adventures.  He seems prone to hallucination, seeing windmills as giants and inns as castles.  He also seems to indulge in wishful thinking, for example, believing that a local woman is in love with him.  The people around him generally treat him kindly, though some exploit his delusions.  Friends and his servants, through various means try to wean him off this behaviour which they eventually succeed in doing through becoming part of the delusional world he has created.  They only win through after he has sustained a number of accidents and has been beaten up by a range of men he has offended or challenged to a duel.  Mostly he is simply bruised, though often severely, but he also loses part of one ear to a sword cut.

There is some humour in Don Quixote's bombastic manner and in aping the stories which would have been familiar to people of the time when it was published.  Like some of them, Quixano is able to equip himself with old armour and weapons from the time when these were in use in his grandfather's day probably in the early 16th century or perhaps even the late 15th along with the supposed behaviour of those times.  However, in many ways it is a sad story that an obsession provoked by hallucination leads a man to rush off to behave in such a reckless way.  One sympathises for his friend, and the local peasant, Sancho Panza that he presses into acting as his squire but, often at risk to himself, as when faced with the lions, he points out what Quixano is actually seeing and tries to persuade him to do something less dangerous.  At the end Quixano finally realises what has been plaguing him and it is a gentle and wistful ending.  We learn some interesting things about habits of the time, for example, two monks wearing tinted glass lenses, something like goggles, as they travel on the road, at the start of the 17th century.

There are lots of lessons in here about adventure stories, habits of the past, the myths of chivalry, men ageing and the support of friends in dealing with life's challenges when facing mental health issues.  These factors tend to get forgotten beneath what may be seen to be intended to be humour at the situations Quixano and as Don Quixote, gets himself in for.  De Souza does a good job of voicing Quixano and Panza in particular.  The recording makes him sound distant.  This being a Naxos recording there is some nice appropriate music, sounding like late medieval.


Non-Fiction
'1918: The Unexpected Victory' by J.H. Johnson
The title of this book is rather misleading.  There are some very small sections which outline that the Entente countries thought that the First World War would run until July 1919, perhaps even into 1920, but there is no real discussion of why they thought that or what they did to plan for the continuation of the war or really to accelerate its end.  Instead, the vast majority of the book is simply taken up with detailed description of the fighting of 1918 on the Western Front, usually at corps and division level, though additionally at army level and occasionally at battalion level.  It does make some mention of the French and the Americans, even the Belgians, plus what the German forces were doing especially in the Spring 1918 offensive, but most of the focus is on the British Army.  There is little comment on the Italy, Salonika, Palestine and Mesopotamian fronts even though these brought Germany's allies out of the war earlier.  There is some comment on the internal politics of Germany during 1918 and efforts towards peace, but not a great deal.  Thus, this is really no different to many histories of the closing year of the First World War providing in great deal simply movements of British Empire units through various French and Belgian villages and across railways and canals.

The only real points of particular interest was the fact that if the British had been able to increase the reliability of their tanks, they could have ended the war sooner.  Even in 1918 when tanks were no longer a novelty, their appearance very often tipped the balance in an offensive, in particular, being able to get through barbed wire and removing the need for heavy bombardment before infantry could advance.  However, often a high percentage broke down even before they reached the frontline.  The other factor is that, while I knew the Americans were not allies but associates of the Entente, I had not realised how controlled their involvement in the conflict was.  General Pershing controlling the American forces was loath to let them mix with British or French units and on the rare occasions when they did, he insisted that they were returned to him as quickly as possible.  Furthermore, I had not realised how poorly trained and ill-equipped the US forces in France were even later in 1918, well over a year after the USA joined the war in April 1917.  Though they achieved a notable outcome in stopping the German advance on Paris in 1918, their casualties were high at every stage and their abilities to advance, highly limited even against a hungry and tired German Army, even with 2 million men in France by the end of the war.  This rather gives the lie to all of those who have told me the Americans could have easily repelled any Mexican attempt at crossing the US border in 1917/18 with National Guard troops and armed civilians.

Overall, this book does not deliver what it promises, instead it gives a blow-by-blow history of the British on the Western Front in 1918 and little else.


 Non-Fiction - Audio Books
'The Recollections of Rifleman Harris' by Benjamin Harris; read by Graham Keeling
This is a memoir produced in 1848 by a rifleman in the early part of the Peninsular War, a section of the Napoleonic Wars fought in Portugal and Spain.  Benjamin Harris was a Dorset man who transferred into the 95th Rifles while stationed in southern Ireland.  At the time, most British soldiers carried smooth barrelled muskets and only elite skirmisher troops carried the slower-loading, but more accurate, rifled barrelled guns.  They have been particularly made famous by Bernard Cornwell's 'Sharpe' series which follows a rifleman through his career from private to lieutenant colonel.  One of Richard Sharpe's comrades is named Harris.  The real Harris was involved in the first advance into Portugal and Spain which then led to the ignominious retreat to Coruña in northern Spain in 1808/09.  Harris himself was evacuated through Vigo.  Despite the British soon returning to Portugal and Spain, Harris was sent on the Walcheren Expedition to the Netherlands in July 1809 and there, like most British troops caught the so-called 'Walcheren fever', a mixture of typhus and malaria and was unable to resume active duty before the end of the war in 1815.  He went on to be a successful cobbler in central London.

As Harris outlines, he makes no effort to put the action he saw in any broader context.  What this book is good for is outlining the day-to-day activities of British soldiers at the time, how they were treated and how they died.  Flogging appears regularly with men being whipped up to 800 times.  They were poorly equipped marched to exhaustion, with many dying by the roadside.  They had no tents at this stage of the war so had to find refuge wherever they could, often simply sleeping in the open.  As well as being a shepherd before being called up, Harris had skill in shoe making and was expected to carry his equipment for that on top of the heavy backpack each soldier bore.  His sleep was often disturbed being demanded to repair boots.  By the time of the retreat to Coruña and Vigo, most of the soldiers were moving bare foot.

The fact that they did not rebel despite such treatment and lack of supplies, is shown by the reverence in which officers are held.  There is no respect for a man who has risen through the ranks, but the gentry and noble officers are treated like demi-gods.  Harris raves on about the skills of  Major General Robert Craufurd [sic] despite his cruelty and neglect of the needs of the men.  Small instances of looking to men and making comments seem to have been sufficient to over come the desperate state of so many individuals.  Harris goes on to detail life as a military invalid and then the book ends abruptly.  It does make you wonder how much more effective the British Army could have been if properly supplied and treated sensibly rather than constantly marching men to their death.  I came away from this book feeling I had learned a great deal, but seeing how inimical class divisions and the very hatred the upper classes have for the ordinary man have been to British success in war.

Graham Keeling is apparently a dentist, a volunteer to provide LibriVox recordings.  At times his pronunciation is very odd.  Keeling is British but pronounces 'lieutenant' the American way, 'scarce' and 'scarcely' as if they start with 'scar' rather than sounding like 'scare' and pronounces 'corps' as 'corpse' rather than sounding like 'core'.  As this is a LibriVox recording - you are told that fact in full at the start of every chapter - it means that you do not have to buy it the way I did, but can access it and download freely online; I do not have an MP3 player in my car, it is 15 years old.