Books I Listened To/Read In March

Fiction
'River of Gods' by Ian McDonald
Though published in 2004, this book is very much a Cyberpunk novel of the old style from the 1980s.  Set in 2047 the action largely takes place in an India which has fragmented independent states, sometimes at war with each other.  Artificial intelligence has advanced to a level at which it can exceed human thought and its application is policed.  In the classic Cyberpunk approach, McDonald weaves together a range of apparently disparate characters whose various stories come together towards the climax.  He handles this in a less clunky way than some of the 'heroes' of Cyberpunk, notably William Gibson.  Though a westerner, he has done well, in my view anyway, in envisaging a future India, though some traits such as a love of cricket and soap operas, perhaps have been assumed to continue unchallenged.

The level of technology with drone attack devices and surgery that has led to the rise of 'nutes', literally surgically created neuter people, seems appropriate for the coming decades.  It even features a sentient soap opera which I liked as a concept. There is some standard science fiction with a device close to Earth which is of ancient alien design and the development by a company which derives power from parallel universes, but they are merged in with the more down-to-Earth Cyberpunk technology without much of a jar.  In addition there is a small scale war and climate change that has led to extended droughts.  However, to some degree including all of these elements is pretty overwhelming for the reader.

The characters are diverse and believable, with their different motives, some pretty mundane such as escaping a cloying marriage, others exotic such as connecting to another universe.  He has done reasonably well in looking at how a different world would shape attitudes, but crucially old world attitudes repeatedly shape the action and the fate of a number of the characters especially those that end tragically.  Overall, this is an interesting book and if I had not read as much Cyberpunk as I have I think I would have been excited by it.  The prime problem is the length (584 pages in my edition) and so you reach the closing stages of the book feeling worn out and wanting it to be over because you have had so many concepts, so many twists and turns, that by the end, you simply want the climax to be finished.  The book is good, but ultimately drowns in all of the ideas, characters and activities that McDonald piles in.

'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson
It was ironic that the next book I read was by William Gibson who had been one of the leading lights of the Cyberpunk era.  However, I have been unaware that he has continued writing, indeed I was not even aware he was still alive.  He seems, if 'Pattern Recognition' is characteristic of his post-Cyberpunk writing to have moved on to contemporary novels.  This one is set in 2002, only a year before the book was published.  Much activity happens in London, especially around Camden an area I visited a lot at that time.  The first thing I noticed is how much Gibson has improved as a writer since I read his books in the 1980s.  As noted in the review above, I always found the working out of his stories very clunky and you could see where they were heading from very early in the book.  Added to that his writing has become far more lucid and there were passages in this book that I really admired for their skill.  I cannot remember seeing an author develop so far as Gibson seems to have done and I guess it suggests there is hope for all authors, or maybe he just employed a better editor than before.  Perhaps writing contemporary fiction, publishers do not simply bow down before his apparently stunning concepts as they might have once done.

The book focuses on American Cayce Pollard who has an allergy to brand logos and so is used by companies to test out whether their new logo will have impact.  She is also alert to global trends and highlights 'the next big thing'.  Rather erratically she becomes involved with artists and film makers, but as it progresses the book narrows down to her pursuing the maker of snippets of a film which have been released sporadically over the internet with no contextualisation.  A community has grown up trying to read meaning into the snippets.  The quest means her interacting with cool people from London to Tokyo to Moscow as ultimately she is successful in locating the source and keeping the information out of the hands of wealthy obsessives and corporations.  At times the book is satirical about corporate culture and especially marketing and branding and takes a wry look at life in the capitals of the UK, Japan and Russia.  The improvement in Gibson's writing really helps these elements be effective.  His characters are interesting, not all of them are likeable and some verge on caricatures, but he creates a rich complex environment both real and virtual which does not go too far the way McDonald does to drown you in all that he has conjured up.  While I will not rush out and buy all of Gibson's 21st Century output, if I come across others from this phase of his writing, I would not pick them up.

'Death at La Fenice' by Donna Leon
I have been given a lot of the books in Leon's Comissario Brunetti series, this book, published in 1992 was the first.  I think this is because I enjoyed Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series also set in contemporary Italy.  I have been annoyed by comments made by Leon in an interview to 'The Guardian' newspaper in which she said while no male author can successfully write female characters, female authors, because they live in a male-dominated world, are well capable of writing male characters.  I found that a very arrogant attitude but given that she is an American I suppose such sweeping claims are to be expected.

This book is certainly a feminist crime novel.  Though her police detective is a man, much of the story features women who have suffered at the hands of men.  All the men beside Brunetti are at best bitchy or short-sighted in their arrogance and at worst repeated paedophile offenders.  The story is around a famous German conductor who is found poisoned mid-way through a performance at La Fenice opera house in Venice.  The story is pretty straight forward, like many detective stories set around theatres or concert halls.  Leon is less concerned about the mystery and in fact the reader may be able to work out the solution from very early on.  Her concern is showing how nasty the dead man was in his treatment of women, children, gay men and lesbians.  These factors are more important to the story than the conductor's collaboration with the Nazi regime.

Perhaps it is Leon's upbringing, but in many ways I felt this novel was far older than 1992, especially in terms of its attitude to how women and lesbians are perceived.  The view that the entire population is interested in opera and familiar with its participants also jarred. Hanging over much of the book is a very old fashioned social attitude.  I think Leon, who lived in Italy for man years is chiding the country for not being up-to-date.  In passing she notes it corruption, something which often featured in Dibdin's books.  However, she does not successfully disengage from the dated social attitudes in her own portrayals which makes her seem complicit in them even while she might be aiming to counter them.  Then again, she might not, but given what I have heard from her, I do not believed she sees these things this way herself or maybe she has a range of attitudes that it is difficult to entangle.  Thus, overall, the women are largely victims of circumstances and maliciousness and the men are at least incompetent if not nasty in a range of ways.  The only exception is her hero.

I do not really understand why the book received so much acclaim, perhaps because of its feminist agenda, maybe because of its detailed portrayal of Venice.  It is a standard murder mystery that exposes the author's views on subjects very clearly to some degree removing much of the intrigue and at times compelling characters to be pretty exaggerated.  I have a string of these books to get through and hope that Leon's writing improved especially in terms of subtlety.

Non-Fiction
'Rethinking British Decline' ed. by Richard English and Michael Kenny
There is so much going on in this book that it is difficult to review.  It was published in 2000, but it is fascinating reading it now because of so many of the antecedents of the current Brexit crisis can be seen in it, even going back to 1962 and the leader of the Labour Party of the time, Hugh Gaitskell, warning about the dangers of European federalism.  The first part of the book is a series of interviews with many of the great economic historians of the last two-fifths of the 20th Century, Sidney Pollard, Samuel Brittan, David Marquand and other commentators from that late period such as Corelli Barnett and Will Hutton.  Much of their time is spent dismissing the views of the others and in some cases, notably Jonathan Clark, arguing that Britain actually did not decline in the 20th Century, in part due to the more widely held view that its economy has always been more about finance and insurance than manufacturing and emphasis on standards of living and opportunities; Britain still being in the G7.

The second part of the book is a more standard collection of chapters looking at the same aspects often mentioned in the first half of the book, such as problems with British culture and institutions, plus relationship with the European Community and the former Empire.  There are no firm conclusions, except perhaps that declinism as a political tool has been greater than actual evidence of decline itself.  Interestingly, it is all handled at a very high level of society and politics and aside from comments on the rise of unemployment under the Thatcher governments, there is no reference to rising poverty, debt, homelessness, ill-health and declining education and opportunities across the UK.  I do not think an update today would have such a neutral sense, but then it was produced in the days of 'things can only get better' early in the Blair governments.  I think this is a good summary of the different angles on British decline and especially on declinism as a ideology usable across the political spectrum.  In some ways it also marks a changing of the guard, and despite the persistence of some of those interviewed into old age, it seems unlikely that economic historians will ever have such an impact on politics as they did in the 1960s-90s and that in itself is interesting to see as that breed of academic/commentator was coming to their sunset in terms of influence.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Sepulchre' by Kate Mosse; read by Lorelei King
I felt I had read Mosse's best seller 'Labyrinth' (2006) longer ago than it had been published.  I have seen some of her later books, including this one published in 2007, regularly in charity shops, but had been put off by the length of them, so it was ideal to have as an audio book.  As with 'Labyrinth' in 'Sepulchre', Mosse uses the approach of parallel stories between two women's lives, one in the present and one in the past, in this case 1891 rather than the 13th Century.  Meredith Martin travels to France to research the life of Claude Debussy for a book she is writing and as a side mission to find out a little about her birth family, which it proves, originated in southern France.  Martin ends up going to Rennes-les-Baines and staying at a hotel in the Domaine de la Cade.  In 1891, with her brother mixed up with a jealous wealthy man's revenge and fleeing creditors, the teenager Léonie Vernier travels to the same house owned by her widowed aunt.  A further connection is a sepulchre in the grounds of the house, apparently connected to the Cathars persecuted in the region in the 13th Century and the source of both music and art work, notably tarot card designs, that both Vernier and Martin come into contact.

At first I thought that the book was going to be at a very populist level.  King's opening narration, very breathless in the US audio book style, added to this sense.  However, I was glad that I persisted.  Both King and the book settled down and while you might feel the connections are rather contrived, as the story progressed you had the sense that the motives and behaviour in both times were legitimate.  While the genuinely nasty antagonist closes in on the Vernier siblings, Martin becomes involved in investigating the death of her new lover's father.  This was the section which jarred most.  Martin, in her late twenties, seems willing to hop into bed with a stranger and to become his partner very quickly, involving herself in a dangerous situation with aplomb.  I do not know if that is the self-confidence of American women, but given that the author is asking us to accept tarot readings and phantoms and does so pretty well, this aspect really jarred and I felt she had been ordered to include it for some sex rather than to genuinely advance the story.  Interestingly, this was a book that I enjoyed as it progressed.  However, I do think she did not need to go into the latter years of Léonie Vernier's life and it would have been crisper to end it all in 1891.  Thus, at times I had mixed feelings about the book, but was ultimately satisfied by it.  I largely believed the characters and what they go up to.  The Gothic elements were handled well without becoming overblown or too deeply trope coining.  The research and attention to detail was excellent.

While I often have difficulty with US narrators over-exaggerating their readings and really worried that King was going to persist with this, as I have found with other such readers, if you give them a few chapters at the start, they settle down and given a more level tone.  She does the range of voices both male and female, in both time periods well.  While I feel a reader of a different nationality would have made the story sound more sinister, King's performance was not as much out of step as I initially feared.

'Fever of the Bone' by Val McDermid; read by Michael Mahoney
I listened to the first of McDermid's stories featuring psychologist Tony Hill and police detective Carol Jordan, 'The Mermaids Singing' (1995) last year.  This book published in 2009, is the sixth in the series which this year reached 11 books.  Hill and Jordan now live in the same building though not together.  In large part this is blamed on Hill's impotence which has continued through the novels.Furthermore Jordan, heading a specialist murder investigation team, is encouraged not to call on Hill's services when teenagers begin to go missing and then turn up dead with their genitals removed and instead use a cheaper police psychologist.  Hill goes from the fictional Bradfield to work for the police of Worcester which develops the sub-plot of the death of his father who disappeared before he was born and his own poor relationship with his nasty mother.  Hill is brought into a case which soon connects to the killings in Bradfield and aided by the arrogant incompetence of the police psychologist is brought into the broader case.  While the book is about a serial killer, the motive differs from those which usually turn up and the twist to keep the killer's identity secret is well handled.  Overall, the book is competent and engaging with very believable characters.  I have another of McDermid's novels on my stack to listen to.  Mahoney handles the story telling well and does convincing women, not simply Jordan but also a range of bereaved mothers and female friends of the victims, to the extent that you forget he is there, a sign of a good reader.

'The Secret Adversary' by Agatha Christie; read by Samantha Bond
Most people tend to think of Agatha Christie having written murder mysteries set in English country houses.  However, this, like 'The Seven Dials Mystery' (1929) which I read last month, is one of her adventure stories, of the Bulldog Drummond ilk, though with women taking a leading role.  This is the first of five books featuring Thomas 'Tommy' Beresford and Prudence 'Tuppence' Cowley who subsequently marry.  Though published in 1922, it is actually set just ten months after the end of the First World War, so around September 1919, though is not dramatized as such when seen on television.  Seeking work, Tommy and Tuppence set themselves up as private detectives and are drawn into a conspiracy by Bolshevik agents to trigger a general strike, influencing trade union leaders by revealing a secret deal that was to be brokered with the Americans in 1915 but which was thought lost when the RMS 'Lusitania'.  At the time it is set the Russian Civil War was still raging and the Russo-Polish War was about to break out.  There was a concern about Russian revolutionaries trying to spread unrest across exhausted Europe, so it has a political currency akin to featuring ISIS agents planning unrest in Britain today.

As with 'The Seven Dials Mystery' the tone of the book is almost like an Enid Blyton story with lots of haring around Britain and being confined and escaping.  At the heart of the mystery is identifying the prime Russian agent, Mr. Brown and recovering the proposed treaty, which is interesting to speculate on what it might contain.  Fortunately the antagonists are not idiots and pull off tricks on the heroes and there are two well handled deceptions by other characters.  Again, common with 'The Seven Dials Mystery' it is impossible to trust many of the characters and rather than the bulk being suspects, the majority are trusted until the real malefactor is revealed.  This adventure story probably lacks the stately unravelling of a Christie mystery; instead it has frantic action and demonstrative dialogue and is very much of its time.  I enjoyed it as a romp but little more.  Samantha Bond is now one of my favourite readers and handles a whole spectrum of European accented English as well as catching the energy of the two leads appropriately.

'Poirot's Early Cases' by Agatha Christie; read by David Suchet and Hugh Fraser
This book was published in 1974 but was made up of 18 short stories that had appeared in magazines between 1923-35.  You can see Poirot's progress through the stories.  At the start he and Captain Hastings are sharing rooms and stories are told from Hastings's perspective, very much like John Watson recounting Sherlock Holmes's cases.  By the end of the collection, Poirot is widely renowned, Hastings has moved out and Miss. Lemon has been appointed as his secretary, though she is less enthusiastic than portrayed in television dramatizations.  Having seen dramatizations of all of the stories, it is interesting to note how they are fleshed out, I will not say 'padded out' because I do not feel there is anything extraneous in the television versions, but coming back to the original stories, you see their epigrammatic nature and demonstrate that Christie was adept at short story writing, something which requires different skills to writing novels, especially in terms of crime fiction.

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings, appeared right throughout the TV series 'Poirot' (broadcast 1989-2013) so it is fun to hear them when putting on the voices they acted with, when presenting these stories.  They read alone on different stories.  Suchet is far more adept at not only doing his Poirot voice, but a wide range of characters that feature in the short stories.  Fraser, puts on the voices far less but I know some listeners appreciated the story being narrated rather than the norm of performing it.  Both bring a richness to the stories and conjure up the time in which they are set.  The crispness of these stories, interesting characters, the clever ploys used by the criminals and the detective, plus some interesting twists even in a short story, make these very enjoyable without having to become involved in lengthy detail.  They do very well at showing up a particular side of Christie's writing.  The two actors associated so much with the stories in the public consciousness being the reader just rounds off the success of this audio book. 

Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction
'The Black Book' by Ian Rankin
This is the fifth book in the Rebus series in another edition in which Rankin starts by outlining how lucky he was in his career.  Having moved to live in France, his wife has a baby and then he gets a writing fellowship in the USA.  You realise that there is no point comparing yourself to Rankin, because he is not an outstanding writer, but he has been a very lucky writer.

One thing I have liked about Rankin's Rebus books is that they do not follow the clear linear narrative that you find in so many crime novels.  At times you are not even certain of the mystery he is seeking to uncover.  This comes across as a realistic reflection of police work.  However, at times it goes rather too far.  While in this book Rankin has revived characters from previous books, including Rebus's brother, Michael, you feel that a lot is missing from the back story.  Both with this one and the previous, 'Strip Jack' (1992) you feel as if you have missed out on a book in between.  Having decided to live with Dr. Patience Atkin in the previous book, he has now been kicked out by her after coming back late from the pub.  She is just a shadowy figure in this novel as if Rankin was uncertain whether to bother continuing with her.  DC Siobhan Clarke does turn up for the first time in this book and will prove to be an enduring character in the series.

The story, when it finally decides what to focus on is about a murder and a fire at a disreputable hotel 5 years previously.  It seems to have been triggered as an insurance scam, but the body found it the fire had been shot dead.  On his own initiative Rebus treks around the gangsters and others who might have been at the hotel and as often happens in the Rebus books it overlaps with other cases he is working on.  Ultimately though he has to set-up the main suspect and you feel in this book that he is on the fringes of the law.  The black book of the title seems to fall away as having minimal purpose in the story.  It is not a bad novel and certainly avoids the linear path of so much crime fiction.  However, while it is part of a long-running series you feel you are missing so much 'between' the books so it is rather than disruptive as you are trying to work out what has happened, especially in Rebus's personal life, which confuses your following of the crime plots.

Non-Fiction
'The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1985-1991' by David Pryce-Jones
This is a very disappointing book.  Pryce-Jones put a lot of work into it especially in interviewing people at all levels of society across the former Soviet bloc.  However, he kept forgetting that he was writing a history book and his editor seems not to have put in any effort to keep him to his title.  Thus, between sporadic accounts from people who experienced the period and knew the bloc before and during its fall plus interesting statistics and some analysis of how the system 'worked' and failed, you get pages of polemic from Pryce-Jones.  He seems stunned that more violence was not used and keeps asking why that was not the case.  The polemic which is just him wittering on, often with no reference to time, place or people, so it simply is sounding off.  This weakens the strong parts of the book by losing them among personal opinion.

As you read on you realise that Pryce-Jones actually thinks that nuclear weapons are a good thing and he is disappointed in President Ronald Reagan, otherwise his hero, when he began to take steps to nuclear disarmament.  Pryce-Jones believes the 'Star Wars' SDI weaponry was feasible; a real thing which impacted on East-West relations. He is highly dismissive of President George H.W. Bush and sees the reason for him not securing re-election in 1991 as down to him being too weak towards the USSR and insufficiently supportive of the nationalists wanting to break away.  Of course, given Pryce-Jones's politics, Bush's defeat could have nothing to do with the US public tiring of New Right economic policies and the impact on their lives.


While he is disparaging of Republicans for being insufficiently hardline, Pryce-Jones's prime problem is that he has an all-consuming hatred of liberal and left-wing opinion in the West.  Thus he articulates its horrors and its failings as a weapon then to go on and hammer anyone who did not subscribe to Reaganite values.  Such people are deemed to have been a collaborator with the Soviet regime.  Activities such as welfare states, a desire for nuclear disarmament, an attempt to prevent proxy wars in the Third World are not seen as having any intrinsic value for anyone living in the West, they are purely driven by Soviet covert activity and funding.  He portrays large portions of Western societies and government as willing puppets of the Soviet machine without indicating how it was apparently so successful when it was useless at so much else.

What might have been a decent book, with very useful accounts and some good insights, simply drowns in him slipping off regularly to have another go at anyone to the left of the far-right of the US Republican Party, before he remembers the title of the book and slips in a bit of history before he loses control of his anger once again.  An editor should have reined him in and got him to stick to writing history.  Few people alive at the time will be able to read this book without being offended by the author's attitude towards them.


Fiction - Audio Books
'The Seven Dials Mystery' by Agatha Christie; read by Jenny Funnell
I remember enjoying the 1981 dramatisation of this novel so when I saw it for sale cheaply, I decided to come back to it.  I realised quickly why I had enjoyed it as a teenager.  It is more like an adventure story for young adults, though many of the characters are in their twenties.  It features 'jolly' young people - notably Lady Eileen Brent known as 'Bundle' (who also featured in 'The Secret of Chimneys' (1925) along with other characters in this book) with lots of rushing around in cars between London and the countryside, and the secret society, The Seven Dials.  There are two murders, but as critics at the time it was published in 1929 noted, it is not a murder mystery of the kind that Christie usually writes.  There were times when she did do conspiracy stories such as 'The Big Four' (1927) and 'Passenger to Frankfurt' (1970) but you can understand why critics were rather exasperated by this one, seeking a return to her more classic crime stories.

For all the caveats about this seeming more like Dornford Yates novel, I enjoyed it, because though it is light, it proves very good about wrong-footing you about which of the characters can and cannot be trusted.  This is something which distinguishes it from many of Christie's books.  The fact that two of them turn out to be untrustworthy and others prove to be reliable despite first impressions, is refreshing for a book of the period.  Critics complained that Christie did not follow the rules in providing the reader with all the information they needed to be able to work this out for themselves.  I disagree with this.  Looking back you can clearly see indications to both of the guilty parties throughout.  It might not be the best Christie novel, but it has charm and it additionally appealing for stepping away from the usual pattern in this playing with who you can trust.

Jenny Funnell sounded very like Samantha Bond to me, who also voices audio books.  Funnell is ideal for the bubbly young characters in the book, both the men and women.  The only one who rather riled with me was Superintendent Battle, who while described often as 'wooden,' comes over as too ponderous when Funnell voices him.

'I, Alex Cross' by James Patterson; read by Tim Cain and Michael Cerveris
I was not certain why there were two readers for this book. I wondered if it was because Alex Cross is a black Washington DC detective (this was the first of 6 books featuring him) and people might feel that a white man voicing him was cultural appropriation.  However, I searched out all the Tim Cains and Michael Cerverises and while I might not have found the correct pair, all those I can find are white.  I guess then that this approach was to distinguish the first person and third person narrative, though the latter declines a great deal as the book proceeds.

Having got that out of the way, and ready for very breathless narration from a US crime novel, this book was not too bad.  Cross finds out that an estranged niece has been working for a high class brothel in Virginia but has been shot and then minced.  It draws him into the disappearance of other young women and then to the place itself where the wealthy and influential go.  One of them who names himself Zeus, has to kill whenever he has sex there and the book is about identifying him.  Obviously given the powerful men involved, Cross runs up against lots of obstacles.

The second element is Cross's attempt to maintain his family life, especially with his elderly mother having a heart attack and being hospitalised for much of the book.  Despite his efforts to spend more time with his family (and why are US women called 'Bree'? This one is 'Bri' short for 'Brianna'; I keep thinking on audio that it is 'Brie' as in the French cheese) he utterly fails and actually puts them at risk.  At the end of the novel his wife gives up on ever changing anything.

The book is not too bad.  There is a lot of running back and forth which at times seems excessive.  However, the frustrations of dealing with different branches of law enforcement come across as realistic, though Cross is lucky that he has so many friends.  The setting is an alternate history because there is a female President in the White House, Margaret Vance, whether any relation to Cyrus Vance, the US Secretary of State in the late 1970s is not made clear.  The conspiracy and the killer are believable.  The family elements are rather cloying but I guess that is usual for a US novel.  I do not know which of the men voices who, but one of them does a reasonable British accent for brothel-owner, Tony Nicholson, though making him sound pretty much like Russell Brand.


'Zero Hour' by Andy McNab [Steven Billy Mitchell]; read by Rupert Degas
I was surprised by this book.  Down the years I have come across various novels by former soldier Andy McNab, but have avoided them fearing they would be macho books glorifying war.  I got this in a mixed box of audio books and decided to listen to it.  It is an action story but it comes over as both gripping and gritty.  Unlike the US versions there is not a bombastic approach.  McNab is low key, and while he will put in the technical details of guns and vehicles which appear essential for this genre, there is a credibility about him and it does not come across as a 'trainspotter's book'.  The novel features Nick Stone, a former SAS soldier.  This was the 13th book in the series that McNab began publishing in 1998.  In 2017 the 19th book came out, rather undermining some of the premise of this book.

Stone is suffering headaches and a diagnosis shows he has an advanced brain tumour.  Having been happy with his life and his Russian journalist girlfriend, but now thinking he has only months to live, he decides to do one last mission.  British intelligence asks him to track down the kidnapped daughter of a Moldovan arms manufacturer who has been abducted by people traffickers.  The mission takes Stone to Moldova, Denmark and the Netherlands.  He shows the impact of his illness and the thought that he must 'do the right thing' beyond completing the mission.  It is also increasingly clear that he is being manipulated and cannot trust anyone much. As you can imagine from the sequels, the illness does not prove to be as terminal as Stone believes for much of the novel.  The book is fast moving and feels realistic in terms of locations and action.  Degas is excellent in portraying Stone's very deadpan manner but is also surprisingly good at doing a range of young Moldovan women.  While I will not rush out to buy more by McNab, I would certainly not ignore another of his books if it turns up in a mixed box of audio books in the future.

Non-Fiction Audio Book
'Toast' by Nigel Slater; read by the Author
I do not read or listen to many autobiographies, but I had imagined that most do not seek to turn the reader off from the person featured.  Nigel Slater has been one of the most popular food writers in our house.  We have some of his recipe books and watched his television programmes, liking the mix of gardening and cooking and his quiet but enthusiastic tone.  However, this book has really turned me and my wife away from him.  The book covers his life from his childhood (he was born in 1958) to when he was 18 and went to work for the Savoy Grill.  He has focused sections on different foods, going through many popular recipes and brands from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.  I think he intended the book to be rather like a version of the Adrian Mole books.  The trouble is, it is clear that Slater was a very nasty boy; snobbish and spoilt.  He cannot keep those traits out of his writing.


Slater's father owned an engineering factory and they were clearly a lot richer than he tries to make out.  Not only did his father drive a Rover, but employed both a gardener and a housekeeper.  He attend social events.  Slater got pocket money daily and had so many toy cars that he could lay them out in a line right across the large house.  Slater  is highly dismissive of his mother primarily on the basis of what a poor cook she was, though she seems to have put a lot of effort in.  For any recipe she cooked he cannot hold back from saying (with knowledge he only gained much later) how it should be done.

Slater only seems to come to love his birth mother even a little, after her death from asthma when he was approaching his 9th birthday.  He is very snobby especially to his step-mother who had formerly been their housekeeper.  Though she is a far better cook than his birth mother, he is scathing about her throughout on the basis of lots of social mores and no understanding of what challenge it must have been for her, especially in an age when divorce was rarer.  Unsurprisingly his step-sisters who he is equally unpleasant about have contested his view.  His father died when he was 16 and he is pretty nasty about him too, especially in marrying the housekeeper and moving them to the Worcestershire countryside.  The book was published in 2004 when Slater was 56 but he clearly has done nothing to shake off his spiteful manner from forty to fifty years earlier.  Overall, the book is a very long whinge, lacking in humour and given you a dim impression of the author.  I suppose this is the privilege of celebrity that you can portray everything the way you see it with no real challenge.

Slater was sexually abused by his uncle and one of the gardeners.  He was also sexually assaulted by a neighbour's dog.  It is fine that he includes these incidents in an autobiography, but they certainly jar with the light, even whimsical tone, Slater seemed to be affecting at the beginning. The book literally left a bitter taste in my mouth and I certainly will not be reading, listening to or watching anything by him again.

Books I Listened To/Read In January

Fiction
'The Ghosts of Altona' by Craig Russell
Though I have always been interested in crime stories set in Germany, for some reason I had not come across Russell's series though the first came out in 2005.  This book published in 2015 is the seventh, and so far, last book in the series featuring Jan Fabel.  In this book he has risen to the rank of Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar which Russell clumsily renders as 'Principal Chief Commissar' and is even offered the chance to become head of all of Hamburg's detectives.  It is always a challenge with a successful police detective character that they tend to get promoted and so moved away from the heart of crimes.  Ian Rankin has resolved this by trapping John Rebus at Inspector rank for many years.  The rendering of Hamburg police ranks, though not other German titles into English is one thing I do not like about the book. It leaves the reader in confusion about what standing the various police have.

Overall, I felt this book was much like one written by Colin Dexter, added to by the fact that it features a club from a university.  Though at times Morse's investigations on screen felt ponderous (the books are far brisker) this book stretched for far too long (535 pages in my edition).  Though there are some reasonable twists, a bright reader, let alone one who reads crime novels regularly, will have solved the crime well before Fabel does, so it is rather frustrating to find that the detective who is supposedly nationally famous for his skills, is slower than amateurs like us.  It would have been a far better book with 200 fewer pages.  The details about Hamburg and its surrounding districts, plus Fabel's background, his colleagues and family, are fine, but at times feel like padding when we want greater speed.  The murders are well portrayed and the meshing of different cases is reasonably done, though the 'lesson' from one for another seems heavy handed and again suggests that Fabel lacks imagination, even deductive powers.  Fabel could be an interesting character, and maybe he is in the earlier books.  If Russell has decided not to continue with this series, it is probably slightly overdue.  I might check out one of the earlier books if it crosses my path, but while this book was not bad, it was far from brilliant.

'Ruled Britannia' by Harry Turtledove
This was another book that could have benefited from tightening up.  My edition came in at 458 pages but with smaller than standard text size, so probably as wordy as 'The Ghosts of Altona'.  Turtledove is the undisputed king of alternate history fiction and it is disheartening to read quoted on the cover '[n]obody plays the what-if game of alternate history better' in one stroke being complimentary to the author but utterly dismissing his genre as a 'game'.  I notice his latest book will be historical fiction rather than alternate history.

While with my alternate history books, I often get people complaining that the focus is on everyday life in the changed world and that the focus should always be the point of departure, typically a violent one, I am glad that Turtledove takes a different line.  This novel is set in London in 1597, nine years of the victory of the Spanish Armada.  Queen Isabella and Archduke Albert are on the throne of England, with Isabella's father, the ailing King Philip II, still in charge of Spain.  The book focuses primarily on William Shakespeare and the Spanish playwright, Senior Lieutenant Lope de Vega, who is serving with the occupying army.  Other real people appear including the imprisoned Elizabeth I and some of her ministers, Christopher Marlowe, killed 6 years later than in our world, and a range of people connected with the theatre that Shakespeare knew or worked with.  The plot is around Shakespeare being pressured to both write a play celebrating the life of Philip II on behalf of the occupiers and one around the story of Boudicca in an attempt to rouse English resistance to the occupation.

The setting is excellently portrayed.  Turtledove shows acute knowledge of the context and paints it richly in this novel.  He makes use of plays from the time to provide 'what if?' lines and plays for Shakespeare - he has not produced any of his historical plays, but his comedies and tragedies are well liked; he is still active as an actor too.  It takes some time to become comfortable with the Tudor language and terms.  At times you feel Turtledove does not know where to go next and though the book builds to a climax, you feel it wonders and could have been tightened a great deal.  The role of a witch with the ability to hypnotise really riled me and she seemed just to be a very irritating plot device.  There is also far too much sex in the book.  Shakespeare is at it a lot of the time and De Vega has a string of mistresses, some simultaneously.  At times it gives the author a chance to show different facets of the alternate London he has created, notably the bear-baiting, but given the longeurs anyway this just adds more padding.  Thus, while there were points which irritated me, even riled me, I felt this was a very strong alternate history book, well researched and very interesting.  I hope people will remember it when insisting that all alternate history novels must focus on the immediate point of departure and subsequently only on warfare.

'Redcoat' by Bernard Cornwell
This books suffers from a problem that I have noticed in other of Cornwell's books set in North America and many which do not feature Richard Sharpe.  The problem is, that while he creates rich characters with a good attention to attitudes and behaviour of the time, far too few of them elicit any sympathy from the reader.  As a result you wade through nasty people being nasty to other nasty people.  While is it great to have some strong antagonists, if unpleasant people are in the vast majority, it is difficult to be more than a spectator sitting well back from the conflict.  In the Sharpe books, while you had nasty people, you could always fall back on Sharpe and his comrades, who while flawed, were people you could feel sympathy for, even affinity with.  Cornwell seems to have particular problems with sergeants and women.  All the women in this book are self-serving even when professing zealous patriotism, deceptive and really people you would not want to go anywhere near.  There are the fragments of a love story, but even then the woman featured is so hard, she seems to have very little romance in her and is much more concerned about victory for the American side than anything or anyone else.

The book is set in Philadelphia in 1777 during the American War of Independence.  It was the largest city in the Thirteen Colonies at the time and at the start of the book is occupied by British forces.  However, many still loyal to the American side remain in the city and most of the book is really about spying and passing on information, focusing on the British soldiers and American civilians who get mixed up in this which ultimately leads to the British occupation being troubled and costly, ultimately after the book has finished, to end.  I like the fact that Cornwell has focused on a specific location and set of characters rather than ranging all over the place.  He does well in portraying the city in grim weather (to the extent that I would never want to visit it) added to the growing shortages it faces.  As always, Cornwell has good battle scenes, but in this novel they are pretty limited.  For the rest you are effectively watching a dance of unpleasant and/or deluded people in a very grey setting.  Thus, it was quite interesting, but far from engaging.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Lifeless' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
This appears to be the fifth of what so far are fifteen books featuring police detective, Tom Thorne, published since 2001.  Again it reminded me of how many books are coming out in genres that interest me, that simply pass me by, for many years at a time, until I stumble over them.  This one sees Thorne go undercover as a rough sleeper on the streets of Central London.  I used to spend a lot of my time in the 1990s and early 2000s in that area and so could really envisage the places Billingham writes about and the kind of people encountered there.  The case involves the murders of rough sleepers.  Billingham cleverly dodges a standard serial killer approach and is very good about sowing distrust about those in authority that Thorne meets.  The case is soon connected to the military - in part because so many rough sleepers are ex-armed forces - and to atrocities committed in Iraq.  I thought Billingham handled the novel very well, especially in terms of the setting and the homeless people that Thorne encounters and develops friendships with.  The plot is reasonably twisted and again, like the setting, very credible.  This might not be the best crime novel I have ever come across, but I was engaged by it and have already bought a couple more audio books of Billingham's novels.  Glenister sounds how you would imagine Thorne to be and that works very well for the story, but he does a pretty decent job with the other characters, including the few women that appear.

'Thunderball' by Ian Fleming; read by Jason Isaacs
This novel has formed the basis for two movies 'Thunderball' (1965) and 'Never Say Never Again' (1983) which stick surprisingly close to features of the book.  It starts with Bond, smoking 60 cigarettes a day and drinking the equivalent of half-a-bottle of whisky a day, being sent to a health retreat where he ends up in a fight with another guest which actually postpones the schemes of SPECTRE - the first time the criminal organisation appears, rather than having Smersh of the USSR involved somewhere even if far in the background.  The story is pretty straight forward, with MI6 and the CIA scrambling to find where one of their atomic bomber aircraft has ended up, Bond is sent to the Bahamas and is fortunate enough, with the aid of his old friend Felix Leiter to find out that Emilio Largo (the deputy head of SPECTRE but in this book number No. 1) has retrieved the bombs and is planning to use them to destroy a US missile testing base in the Caribbean and threaten Miami.  A ransom of £100 million in gold (worth about £5 billion now) is demanded to prevent the attacks.

The book is reasonable.  Fleming returns to some of his favourite themes - the Caribbean and treasure hunting.  Domino Pettachi, the sister of the man who stole the bomber and is kept by Largo, comes over as a flawed character who as in quite a few of these books, is the woman who saves Bond's life when he makes mistakes.  As Isaacs points out in the interview at the end, though Bond and Leiter have clandestine Geiger counters, they are in fact poorly equipped compared to SPECTRE and Bond's intervention to prevent the planting of the first Bond leaves 6 US sailors aiding him, dead.  Bond is certainly not the superhero of the movies, and in fact is very unhealthy.  The book is engaging rather than gripping but also is a slice of history, showing the concerns; the continued hang over from events of the Second World War and even the brands of 1961 and that while they were misogynistic times, Fleming, as in previous books, is content to let a woman win through when Bond proves slow-witted.  Isaacs does the voices very well, including Domino, though as he points out, trying to work out what half-Greek, half-Polish Blofeld, based in Paris, sounded like, was a real challenge.

Books I Listened To/Read In December

Fiction
'Waiting for Sunrise' by William Boyd
It was only after I finished reading this book that I realised I had read two earlier ones by Boyd: 'An Ice Cream War' (1982) which I had expected a lot more of and 'Armadillo' (1998) which I was given and did not see the point of.  I acknowledge that I have not read his books that have been award winning notably, 'The Blue Afternoon' (1993), 'Any Human Heart' (2002) or 'Restless' (2006) but I have to say that I am not really impressed with his work.  The three novels I have read seem to consist on disconnected slices of life which pass rather than building a satisfactory whole.  'Waiting for Sunrise' very much fits that pattern and is almost like a number of books.  It features British actor Lysander Rief who visits Vienna in the months before the First World War to receive psychiatric treatment for his inability to orgasm.  Much of the book has far too much unnecessary sex in it which seems really at odds with the time period it is portraying and so undermines the credibility of the book.  Rief's tolerance of his uncle's homosexual relations with Africans is highly anachronistic at a time when being gay was a criminal offence.

The book then morphs into being a spy novel.  There are far too many coincidences and utterly ridiculous errors.  Rief is sent on a mission very like one of those in 'Ashenden: Or the British Agent'  (1928) by Somerset Maugham and it is unsurprising that Boyd was trying to produce a pastiche of a Maugham novel, though levering in 21st century attitudes to sex along the way.  The wartime spy adventure bit is reasonable with Rief uncovering who is leaking detailed information to the Germans and then travelling to Switzerland to carry out an assassination.  The rather cack-handed espionage of the time, which is responsible for Rief almost being assassinated by his own side, is pretty well shown and the problems with class discrimination and an unwillingness to believe who might be a traitor which plagued Britain through much of the 20th century.  Overall, there are some decent bits of this book, but there are too many free-floating chunks and it seems that Boyd felt compelled to drape a spy story over his primary focus on just recounting someone's life and introspection at a particular time with anachronistic sex piled on top.  I will be more careful in future not to slip into buying another Boyd book by accident.

'Strip Jack' by Ian Rankin
While I continue to be riled by Rankin's accounts of his highly diffident approach to novel writing, which he outlines at the start of each of these novels in this mid-2000s edition, I do admire his approach to the crime novel.  He does not open with a murder, but other incidents and the focus at first in this book are steps being taken to discredit a popular independent Scottish MP, Gregor Jack.  It is only later that the murder is revealed and this means it takes time to establish the possible story.  However, we already know all the suspects.  To some degree I liked the two groups of friends orbiting around Jack and his wife Elizabeth.  However, as the book proceeds and the murder is revealed, they become too similar in nature and to intertwined that by the end it is difficult to tell who was connected to whom and what motives they might have.  I feel that Rankin started with a decent basis but it ran away with him and he should have pared down the two circles of suspects more sharply before he reached the end as weariness creeps in for the reader.

Rankin does say, that with this book he felt he had 'grown up' in his writing by the time of this novel, the fourth in the Rebus series, and the last of three published in 1992.  He moves his characters away from fictional locations to real ones.  If you live in Edinburgh, perhaps that has an impact.  However, to someone who has only visited the city on a few occasions it made absolutely no difference.  I felt it undermined what Rankin had done in the first three books as if they were somehow illegitimate which is rather a betrayal of the reader who buys into the settings an author writes whether they are real or fictional.

Though there were many elements of this book I enjoyed especially in the first two-thirds of it, one jarred.  This was the sudden appearance of Patience Aitkin.  The book opens with Rebus having an established relationship with this woman and spending a lot of time at her flat; even considering moving in with her.  Yet, we have heard nothing of this woman before.  At the end of the previous book 'Tooth and Nail' (1992) it appeared that he was about to embark on a long-distance relationship with research psychology student Lisa Frazer.  In this book she has utterly disappeared and Rebus has been having a relationship running over some months.  It is as if there is a book missing that would have preceded this one.  I accept that Rankin felt he had to draw a line under the first three books, but this abrupt jump, in my mind, really weakens the credibility of this fourth book; it could have been handled so much better with just a little effort.

'Fated' by Benedict Jacka
Shopping for fantasy novels, even first hand, let alone second hand, it can be difficult to find the first book in a series.  Consequently I felt fortunate to find this one, the first in the Alex Verus series; Jacka published the first three of them all in 2012 and six others have followed.  While the characters are in their twenties with Verus running a magic shop in Camden, you feel Jacka's roots in young adult writing.  I do not know if the 'feel' of the characters improves in later books.  The story is quite a common one these days, i.e. that parallel to the cities we know are groups of people with exceptional powers.  In Jacka's book they are divided into Dark and Light, and though these are defined in a particular way in this series this is a very common trope for urban fantasy; there is also a giant spider.  I must say though, that the Dark mages are genuinely manipulative and nasty; they keep slaves and torture them for any failure.  The abuse of novice mages is well handled.

One challenge for this book is that Jacka felt the need to do a data dump on the reader.  Thus while there are some well thought out and portrayed scenes, making use of iconic London locations, the flow is often disrupted as Jacka tells us about the world he has created, with Verus speaking to us in the first person.  The magic involves a range of psychic and elemental powers.  Verus is a seer which makes a change from magic users with strong physical powers and there are true elementals with different natures, again the way one kills has a good sharp edge to it.  Aside from the jolts to stop for an info break, and the characters seeming younger than their true ages, I found myself enjoying the end especially the extended climax in which different groups are jostling for supremacy in the space contained within a statue held at the British Museum.  While I would not rush out to buy the next book 'Cursed' (2012), if I saw it second hand I would buy it, in the hope that with all the background established Jacka could give free rein to his story-telling which, aside from the YA caution, is not bad.

'Empire of Sand' by Robert Ryan
This book, published in 2008, should not be confused with 'Empire of Sand' (2018) by Tasha Suri.  While drawing on what is known of the life of T.E. Lawrence, this is a fictional adventure which speculates on his activities in Persia (now Iran) in 1915 before he became involved in the Arab Revolt, though it does include interludes focused on that later period.  Having listened to 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' (1926) earlier this year, I know Lawrence tended to skim over his actions that were less than successful.  This book is better balanced than his own descriptions of what he did.  It shows his sexual ambiguity, that in many ways he was asexual but liked the companionship of Arab boys which naturally has led to questions about him.  It is certain that he 'enjoyed' physical hardship which the desert was able to provide in great quantities and that he thoroughly admired the Arabs as a chivalric people.

The adventure is pretty straight forward with Lawrence working in intelligence in Cairo seeking to stop the shipment of Arabs and Farsis opposed to British rule in the region, masterminded by a German agent, Wilhelm Wassmass.  When a British officer is captured and offered in exchange for the agent's luggage, Lawrence keen for adventure in the desert sets off with an assorted band, including one British charged with assassinating Wassmass.  The venture does not go as planned, but Lawrence's ability to live like a local, endure all that the desert throws at him and to improvise gives the small band a chance.  Aside from not shying away from referencing Lawrence's atypical way of thinking and having an active role for female agents, this could have been a book from the 1930s.  Despite that, it moves along briskly and the outcomes, bar the survival of Lawrence are not known.  The portrayal of the locations in Egypt and Persia are handled very well and you really get a feel for the places the characters are travelling through.

Non-Fiction
'The First Crusade' by Steven Runciman
This is effectively the first of the three-volume 'A History of the Crusades' by Steven Runciman published in 1951 with the other two volumes following up to 1954. This is an illustrated version produced in 1980. However, aside from some useful photographs of the locations mentioned to show the landscape, many of the illustrations are just generic medieval images of warfare and the one of supposed trebuchets is entirely spurious. It feels as if the editor in 1980 simply chucked in anything that fitted and looked vaguely appropriate.

Runciman has been criticised for simply narrating what happened in the crusades without analysing what happened. I feel this judgement is unfair. He drew on a wide range of sources in different languages. Especially for a book written in the early 1950s it shows surprising awareness of the divisions among those that the crusaders faced and how the Islamic forces were weakened by local rivalry. The book also articulates well, the difficulty the Byzantines had in wanting crusaders to fight for them but not wishing to have their towns wrecked as the caravan of soldiers and camp followers, often ill-disciplined, past through their territory. He also captures in an accessible way the tensions between the different European lords, many bent more on creating a state for themselves than on 'liberating' Jerusalem. Runciman is not simply interested in the military but looks at why civilians travelled often at great harm to themselves.

The book is mainly a history but it does try to show a rounded picture of the First Crusade in all its complexity, accessibly. It probably sounds old fashioned now, despite its references to women and non-Christians, but is no painfully so. The aspect most wasted was the images included and a lot more useful information could have been included with a better selection rather than having them as a decoration.

'End of Empires: European Decolonisation 1919-80' by Gary Thorn
This is another historian I met back at the end of the 20th century when this book was just coming out.  Like 'The Spanish Civil War' by Andrew Forrest, also published in 2000, which I read back in October 2016: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-books-i-read-in-october.html this book by Thorn is aimed at assisting students, in this case taking A Levels in addressing questions about the theme.  For all of that and the structure it imposes, it is still a good read for someone wanting to look at an important part of what was going on in the world, especially post-1945.  In particular, Thorn does not simply look at the British and French empires, but does very good comparative analysis of the demise of the Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese empires, which are often overlooked, at least in English-language texts.  The book has a very brisk, at times chatty style, which can contrast with the violence it highlights.  At times it feels rather breathless, but I guess this is to keep the interest of students.  I do not know if I received an early version but in the copy I had there were some errors: misplaced footnote numbers and a typo on a map, showing an 'Austrian mandate' in the Pacific rather than the correct, 'Australian mandate' which makes a huge difference.  Overall, I found it very informative and in a good analytical structure, which for some may seem plastered on, but you can forgive that for the target audience.  Despite its brisk manner it references a good range of sources and points to interesting cultural perspectives, which I would have liked to have seen more of.

Fiction - Audio Books
'Crooked House' by Agatha Christie; Radio Play
I do not list all the radio plays I listen to on CD, but some seem worthwhile mentioning especially if based on novels.  This is one of Christie's books that I have never read or seen dramatised.  In part I guess it is because it features neither Poirot or Marple and it is a rather claustrophobic being set primarily in one house soon after the Second World War.  The nature of the murderer is also unlike in any other of Christie's books and for that reason I think dramatisers have tended to shy away from it.  However, I have just found out a version came out in Italy in 2017 and was shown on UK television last year; it passed me by entirely.  Anyway, it is set in the house of a wealthy British businessman of Greek extraction, Aristide Leonides.  The nephew, Charles Hayward, of the main detective, Chief Inspector Taverner, is engaged to one of the dead man's grandchildren, Sophia, and is sent in undercover to find out what is happening.  The family in which all members are nasty and/or suspicious is quite a common setting for Christie, but in this one there seems to be no-one who is pleasant; even Sophia is a highly credible suspect.  In particular they seek to put the blame on Leonides second wife and the tutor employed by the family.  It is harder in tone than many of Christie's other books, perhaps reflecting the nature of the time when it was written, being published in 1949.  I found this story pretty gripping as it was one with which I was unfamiliar with so could appreciate the skill in it and certainly did not foresee the final outcome.

'Star Trek: Generations' by J.M. Dillard; read by John de Lance
This was very similar in nature to 'First Contact' also by Dillard that I listened to back in October: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html  Despite all the voice manipulation and the sound effects, I found it pretty tedious all round.  It links the 'Star Trek' stories of the Captain Kirk era with that of the Captain Picard era by having Kirk sucked into the Nexus after he has retired, a kind of timeless heaven.  Picard is drawn in through trying to stop a scientist blowing up a star so that he can be swept into the Nexus in order to be reunited with his late wife.  There are some renegade female Klingons who are the most interesting characters but are soon despatched.  Picard gets to use the Nexus to travel back in time and correct his error; the paradox he creates are completely ignored.  Despite all the bells and whistles, the story lacks tension.  In part this stems from the worthiness of the 'Star Trek' approach, but I think it is worsened with the Next Generation crew as they often seem highly childish.  An early scene in which they are on the holodeck enacting a scene from 18th Century sailing, seems both juvenile and patronising to the non-humans.  Overall I was rather exasperated by this book.

Non-Fiction - Audio Book
'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson: read by the author
I have sometimes been exasperated by Bryson's work, though I do feel he has improved as the years have passed.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book and with him reading it himself, he has really caught the spirit of what he wrote.  It is a popular science book looking at the creation of the universe and the earth, then life on it, especially humans, with lots of detours into various sciences.  At times too many of the examples are drawn from the USA and much of the developments across the world, outside the West are neglected.  However, it is told in a brisk, engaging way and puts a lot of the wonders of our planet and the universe it sits in across clearly.  I was surprised to enjoy this book but I certainly did and can recommend it if you want a crash course in these issues or are just curious about our world.  There are loads to fascinating facts from it to quote at family and friends.

Books I Listened To/Read In November

Fiction
'Head of State' by Andrew Marr
This is a peculiar book.  It seems to stem from Marr's wish to provide a range of caricatures of people he has met in British politics.  I recognised one of the academics in it from my days in London and probably if you are in the know, there are other such portrayals throughout the book.  However, this is the problem.  It is like attending a drama or even being in a conversation that involves so many inside jokes that appear hilarious to the people in the relevant circle, but mean nothing to you.  As a result it is pretty tiresome.  A further fact is that in seeking to avoid offending real people, rather than being an exposé of the genuine UK political system Marr effectively creates an alternate reality.  I obviously love these, but it is not sold as that.  In the book, Queen Elizabeth II has died in the 2010s and Charles III has come to the throne.  After David Cameron, Boris Johnson has briefly been Prime Minister and one of the leading conservative newspapers is the fictional 'Daily Courier'.  Thus, it comes over very much as a fantasy.  Marr could have learnt a lot from reading 'A Very British Coup' (1982) by Chris Mullin.  Unlike Marr, Mullin is able to produce fictional characters, but still somehow be relevant in critiquing the British political system of his time, something Marr fails to do.  Perhaps a problem is that his love of caricature means he clings to a rather light-hearted tone when trying to produce a gripping thriller.  Mullin takes his set-up seriously throughout.  Thus, Marr falls between two stools, not being something truly humorous as Malcolm Bradbury would have produced, nor a real thriller.

All these drawbacks aside.  The story surrounds the referendum on the UK leaving the EU, which is held later than was actually the case.  The fictional pro-Remain Prime Minister, perhaps modelled on William Hague, dies during the campaign with days to go.  Members of the government and various fixers conceal the fact but it comes to light and the Leave campaign wins as a result.  However, as noted above, it falls down on many aspects and comes over as pretty lifeless, neither funny nor gripping.  It even fails to adopt the approach of 'Primary Colors' (1996) by Joe Klein, which given Marr's background (he even references his own real politics TV show twice in the book), he might have pulled off with greater success.

'Ostland' by David Thomas
Despite being sold as fiction, this is really a true crime book, not a genre I enjoy.  It is wrapped up in fiction.  It concerns a real German officer, Obersturmführer Georg Heuser who served in Minsk during the Second World War and was personally involved in shooting hundreds of Russians and Jews from Germany and Austria to death and ordering the execution of thousands more.  He was arrested in 1959 for war crimes.  He was sentenced to prison in 1961 and was released in 1969.  He died of natural causes in 1989.  In the early years of the war, before being sent to the Eastern Front, Heuser had been a young detective in Berlin and helped capture a serial killer who was first sexually assaulting women then murdering women on trains.  The book has two elements.  It follows Heuser's career in the first person and jumps back and forth to the two investigators and (highly unnecessarily) their sexual relations.  The problem with this book is that in adopting the first person view of a war criminal it cannot escape from making apologies for him.  His qualms about being introduced to the 'actions', i.e. mass murders, and taking part are very weak.  He excuses a lot of what went on as men having to obey orders and having to dull their senses by being drunk.  He tries to show his human side by saving three Viennese Jews who 'do not look Jewish' but even then rapes the eldest daughter.  I know we now have novels in which we see the perspective of the serial killer.  However, their murders are fictional, these were real and as Heuser recognises himself, far beyond the scale that even the worst serial killers had murdered on.  It is horrendous that Thomas put so much work into this to produce such a sordid book which can only help Holocaust deniers and those on the extreme right-wing no matter how far the author pleads the opposite in the essay apologising for his apologist book at the end.  I hate the fact that I bought this book; I feel utterly dirtied by it.


'The Shepherd's Crown' by Terry Pratchett
This is the fifth book in the Tiffany Aching novel and the last Discworld novel that Pratchett ever published.  It is not particularly funny and like many of Pratchett's later books, the message is more important than the humour.  In the books Tiffany grows into her role of being a witch fully and brings together a wide range of witches and brings on young aspirants as well, so it is really about her coming to maturity.  She takes over from Granny Weatherwax who dies near the start of this book and overall it has a bittersweet feel.  However, in this series Pratchett never shied away from addressing the challenges of every day life, even when dealing with magic and a fantasy world.  The fact that Tiffany and Preston find a long-distance relationship a challenge and their jobs get in the way of any married life they might have seems very true to life.  Battling against an incursion of elves into Discworld is the hook on which the story hangs.  Yet, overall, it is a pleasant story which is engaging rather than laugh-out-loud in the way one might expect from Pratchett, but worthwhile all the same.

Non-Fiction
'1815: The Armies at Waterloo' by Ugo Pericoli and Michael Glover
This book is highly illustrated and largely focuses on the ornate uniforms of all the different units that fought at the Battle of Waterloo.  Thus, it is pretty much a 'trainspotter's book' for people interested in the minutiae, for example for making dioramas or painting models of various soldiers.  Glover provides a decent summary of the campaign and explains the background to the different units, why they were there and what they did.  I plan to write a novel with the campaign as the background, so will retain this as a reference book.  However, if you want more details beyond the uniforms, this is not really the book for you.

Fiction - Audio Books
'Toys' by James Patterson and Neil McMahon; read by Matthew Bomer
As regular readers will know I often buy batches of audio books without really knowing what is in them.  This turned out not to be a contemporary thriller, but a cyberpunk novel, set in 2061 (though some elderly hippies from the 1960s are still alive) when parts of the world, notably North America are ruled by the 'élites', genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced people who look down on 'humans' who do the mundane jobs.  The hero of the book Hays Baker is a anti-terrorist police officer who moves in high circles and works to eliminate humans aiming at disrupting this dystopian society until an accident reveals that he has not been born an élite in an artificial womb only made to appear one through surgery.  The book then develops into a classic style US thriller with flying cars and high tech as Hays goes on the run and connects with the human resistance which is still in control in Europe.  It has that breathless, constant active voice of US books and 109 chapters, some breaking mid-way through a scene which seems pretty weird, but as far as I understand is no a norm in the USA.  There are qualms on the part of Hays especially about losing contact with his daughters and learning of his wife's true age and complicity with the coup which brought the élites to power.  The way they intend to cull the humans is telegraphed well in advance and what the humans do to the élites seems to suggest they are no better, but that is not really questioned.  It was interesting to real a science fiction thriller, but at times the action tends to drown out the points made by the society that Patterson and McMahon are showing.  Bomer is well suited for the style of the novel and the hero.  He is not bad with the European accents, though they tend to be from the Hollywood playbook.

'Redemption Falls' by Joseph O'Connor; read by Kerry Shale
I found this book difficult to engage with and it is certainly not idea for listening to rather than reading. It is set in the Mountain Territory in 1866.  I cannot find this as a historical term, but seems to cover Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.  It certainly borders on Canada and Salt Lake City now in Utah is mentioned. The story largely focuses on the eponymous town to which the characters come.  Many of them stem from the Irish migration into the USA notably the Acting Governor Brigadier General James O'Keeffe, an Irish nationalist agitator who escaped imprisonment in Tasmania and is drinking himself to death, Eliza Mooney and her brother.  It is Eliza's trek from Louisiana into the territory which begins the book.  Both she and her brother become mixed up with bandits in the territory and with O'Keeffe and his New York Latina wife.  O'Connor loses sight of the narrative as the book continues and increasingly we have events reported by a wide range of documents from posters to songs to court records.  This probably works better in book form than when they all have to be voiced.  It means that we are largely detached from the real action of the book and tend to see a lot of the dreary stuff especially about lost opportunities and anger, much more than more engaging sections.

Shale is brilliant at the range of voices, even including an educated Latina woman, a black female servants and a disgruntled 12-year old boy, plus the 'voices' of the official documents.  Overall, however, so much of what goes on is dreary and/or painful and the reader is distanced from the moments of actual tension, that overall, I found the story very tedious.  The use of the different sources is interesting, but it chops up the book even further leading to an assembly of bits and bobs, and not the best of them, which results in a highly depressing book which is less than the sum of its parts.

'A Place of Hiding' by Elizabeth George; read by Simon Jones
Though set in the 1990s and published in 2004, this novel has an old fashioned feel to it.  It is listed as being one of George's Inspector Lindley mysteries, but in fact that character only makes a small cameo appearance.  In fact the main detectives as disabled forensic scientist, Simon St. James and his wife Deborah, who is an friend of the US woman, China River, who has been arrested for the murder of a wealthy philanthropist, Guy Brouard on Guernsey.  Most of the action takes place on the island as the St. James go to find out who actually carried out the peculiar murder, involving drugging and then choking with a stone.  The story draws on events during the German occupation of the island during the Second World War, when Brouard and his sister Ruth who shares his large house, fled there.  It is not a bad story, though there are some rather tired stereotypes.  The motives and behaviour of the murderer stand out and seem more modern than much of the story.  The perspectives of locals with an insular focus is well distinguished from the more sophisticated visitors.  I feel it would have benefited from leaving Lindley out entirely and pushing this back to the 1970s.  While at times desultory, the twist is well handled.  Jones is very good at doing the range of British and Guernsey characters, but has much more trouble with the Americans, especially China and her brother Cherokee.

'For Your Eyes Only' by Ian Fleming; read by Samuel West
This is in fact a collection of short stories featuring James Bond: 'From a View to a Kill', 'For Your Eyes Only', 'Quantum of Solace', 'Risico' and 'The Hildebrand Rarity'. Elements from 'For Your Eyes Only' and 'Risico' appeared in the movie 'For Your Eyes Only' (1981). The stories in general are not bad. They are set around 1960, the year the book was published and so we find SHAPE, NATO's command for Europe still located outside Paris rather than having relocated to Belgium as happened in 1967.  Fleming does seem to be moving with the times as he references jeans in a couple of places, even once on a woman.

These days it can be a real challenge to 'sell' short stories to readers.  Though they are welcomed for their ease of reading on e-readers, the demand that every single loose end is tied off even in novels means that these days people can be unhappy feeling that the 'story is going nowhere' which stands in direct contrast to what Fleming was seeking to do with a good short story in seeking to leave the reader wanting more.  I am happy with short stories like that but accept that nowadays, this would lead to disgruntlement from many readers.

'From a View to a Kill' involves Bond investigating the murder of a SHAPE despatch rider in this region and stumbling across a Soviet base.  Though brief it is well done and quiet adventurous.  Bond is saved by the intervention of a young female British agent who proves to be a crack shot with a .22 pistol when he encounters the Soviets.  The atmosphere of the woodland around Paris is well done.  Fleming is at his best when describing the natural world.  It also highlights the tensions between MI6 operating in France and the NATO machinery.

'For Your Eyes Only' sees Bond on an assassination on the US-Canadian border in Vermont sent to on a personal revenge mission by M to kill officers from Cuba who have murdered to British friends of M's in Jamaica.  The story was published just a year after Fidel Castro had seized power in Cuba, but is set before his victory was achieved.  Ironically the British intelligence services are shown as being more in contact with Castro forces than the cruel Batista government they were seeking to overthrow.  Perhaps like many, Fleming perceived Castro as a nationalist as it was only later once in power he really revealed his Communist tendencies.  The slow advance on his targets and the intervention of the woman orphaned by the killers with a bow (rather than a crossbow as in the movie) complicates matters.  Bond has to yield to the woman who proves more successful in her shot than him.  The jacking up of tension as Bond closes on his targets is handled well.

'Risico' sees Bond sent to Italy to eliminate a particular route for the smuggling of heroin into Britain and as in the movie, he becomes mixed up between two smugglers whose antagonism goes back to the war which finished only 15 years earlier.  This is a clever twist and is atypical for the Bond novels that contacts Bond is sent to, turn out differently to expectations.  It ends with a dramatic gunfight among rolls of newsprint full of opium resin, as is seen in the movie.  Again it is a nice, crisp story with good tension.  However, Fleming does feel obliged as with many of his stories to add unnecessarily at the end that though run by Italians this particular smuggling route is funded by the Soviets in order to undermine Britain, just as he did with stories like 'Live and Let Die' (1954) as if smugglers somehow need to have superpower backing to carry out the crimes that they do.

'The Hildebrand Rarity' is a murder mystery.  Bond is employed by a millionaire who is defrauding the US Treasury and abuses his fifth wife, to hunt for the eponymous rare fish in an island away from the Seychelles.  As with 'A View to a Kill', it provides Fleming an opportunity to write a very rich description of the locations and especially the fish life.  Sections of the story have Bond simply observing this before his employer is murdered using the fish.  Bond tries to discover among the few people on board who committed the murder.  While he narrows down what happened he does not find the answer to the final question and as a short story, it is all the more satisfying for that.

The real disappointment in the book is 'Quantum of Solace' which has no connection to the movie.  Fleming deliberately modelled in on short stories by Somerset Maugham and it is certainly not a spy story; not even one of those from Fleming in which Bond acts as a kind of global policeman. It feels like something from 'Tales of the Unexpected' (1979) by Roald Dahl than anything by Fleming. All it involves is a governor of the Bahamas telling a story about a couple and how they behaved as their marriage broke down.  In contrast to the more positive or brave and/or skilled women in the other stories, in this one a woman's affair is punished severely.  It really brings out the double standards towards women's and men's sexual affairs which are often more attributed to the Bond novels than tends to actually be the case.  A man can have relations with multiple women, but in this story a woman has one affair and it is seen as correct that she is gaslighted and brought to utter penury by her bitter husband's tricks.  I wonder if Fleming included this story to counteract criticism that he was going 'soft' on the 'girls' and letting them have strengths when it should just be the man who could win the day.  I found this story very troubling and the collection is really brought down by including it.  I suggest you skip over it as it comes in the middle and read the other four stories if you are seeking something like a real Bond tale.

Samuel West is pretty good at the voices.  He has a measured tone which particularly fits the tension building that features in a number of the stories better than some of the more ebullient readers in this series.  He is at his strongest when doing the various colonial officials, but all round is good value.

'The Fire Engine that Disappeared' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
One thing that I like about the Sjöwall and Warlöö novels is that they sought to avoid having the same formula in each book.  In this one, a regular detective featured in the stories, Gustavson, is actually at the scene of the crime, an arson attack on a block of flats which naturally proves to be more complex than at first appears.  They manage to mix mundane crime incidents with international high-flying ones.  That is a factor in both this story, which involves an assassin as well as low-level car thieves in Sweden and in 'Murder at the Savoy' which follows.  I think this is one of the factors that explains why people were making dramas of these books in 2012, in this case 42 years after the book was published, and there is such an interest in them still.  It is nice to have a returning cast too as you associate the voices with the particular characters.  Martin Beck's marriage is crumbling in this story.  As before this is a crisp, well thought out story which is very engaging.

'Murder at the Savoy' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
This story also involves an assassination, but the solution almost seems to be about turning the outcome of the previous story on its head.  Given the political nature of much of the business the wealthy man shot at the Savoy is involved with we are reminded of the context of 1970, with reference to Rhodesia, South Africa and Biafra, and the fact that Mozambique and Angola were still colonies at the time.  To some degree, the panic around the political implications by the senior staff are overplayed and the solution almost seems a bit random.  However, refreshingly it takes us away from the line we had expected and lots of dubious characters are shown to be just that, not actual murderers.  In this story there is notable reference to businessmen getting rich off jerry-built flats.  In this story we see the contrast shown up sharply between the rich and the poor in a society which is supposed to be more equal than some others, though I did wonder how poor people afforded the expensive weaponry.  With Beck having left his wife, he has romance with a colleague and I also found the kissing sound effects unnecessary.

'The Locked Room' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
This book represents a bit of a jump.  One reason is personal because it is very difficult to get hold of a copy of the dramatisation of the seventh book in the series 'The Abominable Man' so this is the eighth and another that it features Martin Beck returning to work in 1972 having been absent from work for the past 15 months having suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.  As the title suggests it features a locked room mystery in which an old man is found shot dead in a locked flat with no gun around.  There is a parallel investigation into an bank robbery which also led to the death of a customer and these come together, though, as sometimes happens in the Beck books, not through the person you expect. 

The point about Swedes living in poor accommodation which has featured in 'Murder at the Savoy'
and to a lesser extent in 'The Fire Engine that Disappeared', reappears in this story, reminding the reader of the much vaunted Marxist critique of Swedish society which are supposed to be at the heart of what Sjöwall and Warlöö wrote.  The twists in this story are very well handled.  Only two things chafed with me.  One is that Beck is now divorced and women seem to be throwing themselves at him, leading to a couple of scenes which are really cringe-worthy.  The other is the detective nicknamed 'Bulldozer' who sticks out gravely among the under-stated, well portrayed characterisations of others in the drama.  The actor took the nickname far too much to heart.

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.