Books I Read In March

Non-Fiction

‘When Swan Lake Comes to Sarajevo’ by Ruth Waterman

My parents were evacuated from Croatia where they had been holidaying when the war in Yugoslavia broke out in 1992.  In that decade, living in London, I met quite a few young people who had fled from the conflict.  In the 2000s I would write a short story set in Bosnia.  These aspects led to me discussing with an author I had met, a proper one who has produced paper books, not just e-books like the stuff that I write and people simply condemn.  She lent me this book which is a memoir by a orchestral violinist and conductor who helped assemble and train various classical ensembles in Bosnia in the period 2004-6.  In my teenage years, I used to read travel memoirs of people in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century and this took me back to those books.  Whilst I have heard about, sometimes at first hand, what happened in the former Yugoslavia, I suppose I have always felt it as far removed from me as someone writing about travelling in the region when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  To some degree this book did not change my perspective though I do feel I have a slightly more up-to-date impression.  Waterman’s story shows simply how long it takes for a country to put itself back together and that no-one should be expecting a restoration of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya in the next few years.

The book is like two books combined into one.  The passages of the challenges Waterman faced in rehearsing the ensembles and having them perform have quite a light tone and at the end are pretty life affirming, though perhaps less so than Waterman initially thought.  They are cut with testimonials from many of the people she met outlining what they and the people they knew experienced during the war.  What alarmed me was that I could process these testimonials without difficulty.  Some small snippets, such as blame put by a Bosnian on the war being caused by the Americans rang true when you have heard about the agents provocateur in the region at the time.  Similarly finding out the post-war Bosnian currency was the Deutschmark also answered another question I had had about the political situation behind the war.  Perhaps it is because I remember news from the locations at the time; maybe as a historian, dealing in the deaths of millions I am now immune even to hearing the experiences of individuals.  I felt surprisingly numb reading this material.  This made it hard for me to accept why I was unsettled by the books.

The aspect that I felt unease with was when Waterman outlined how orchestras work.  Each member does not simply play the music on the sheets in front of them; they are in a constant dialogue through gestures and expressions and can deliver very different output from the music they read as a result of this.  Perhaps everyone already knew this and I am just a fool not to have realised.  I have always felt inadequate in the face of people who can play music, speak a foreign language or do a martial art, three activities that I have utterly failed at.  This book simply made it worse.  I now realise that musicians, certainly working at the level of playing public performances are a species apart from me with alien capabilities.  I came away from this book wishing I had not read the elements about how an orchestra works and had stuck simply to the material about the war.  I came away from reading this book unpleasantly unsettled and embarrassed at my own failings.

 

‘Brest-Litovsk.  The Forgotten Peace.  March 1918’ by John W. Wheeler-Bennett

I have noted in recent months how history books fall down once they try too hard to draw parallels from the past to the time when the book is being written.  This book was written in April 1938, though my copy was published in 1963.  Thus the author tried to draw parallels between the reshaping of Eastern Europe by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the developments in the region at the time he was writing.  He failed to see the persistence of appeasement, the absorption of Austria into Germany and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia let alone the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the subsequent division and re-division of Poland.  Thus the points he makes seem strained and now erroneous.  It would have been better if he had dropped the Introduction and got on with the history. 

The story of the negotiations between the Socialist Federal Republic of Russia and the German Empire and its allies Austria Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire are rarely told.  This book certainly gives a good impression not only of the negotiations but of the motives of those involved in them and the directions they were receiving from their leaders back home.  What is interesting is how weak the Bolsheviks were even after they had closed down the Constituent Assembly and within the party how weak Lenin was.  Wheeler-Bennett seems rather in awe of Lenin and very dismissive of the liberal government which had followed the February Russian Revolution.  It becomes clear in this book, more than in other general histories of the October Russian Revolution, how Lenin may have been excluded from developments or even once the peace talks had begun, have had his policy ignored and dismissed.  His almost unique early recognition that Russia could not fight the Germans any longer and that to oppose them would simply provoke harsher terms and that there was not going to be an outbreak of revolution across Europe, meant that he was proven to be right and gained immense credibility.  Wheeler-Bennett reproduces one of Lenin’s speeches and you can see that he gained nothing through his rhetoric unless it was to bludgeon his audience with his constant repetition of bare bones ideas.  You wonder how much worse those he faced down were at public speaking. 

Opposing the first German offer led to the loss of all the Baltic States and the Ukraine, though Germany was too weak to enjoy these gains for long.  In fact if the Soviets had accepted the first offer it would have been better for Germany as so many troops would not have been tied up occupying vast areas that had formerly been Russian.  The book is also good in showing how dependent Germany and especially Austria-Hungary were on the grain and other resources that they could insist on delivery from Russia and the Ukraine.  Again, an earlier peace may have led to their economic situation being aided sooner, though given the difficulties the occupying forces faced in securing the grain they had been promised the benefits may have been minimal. 

Another interesting element often overlooked in general histories is how the extreme demands of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk altered the attitudes of the Americans away from the conciliatory Fourteen Points to the far more aggressive peace treaty sought by the British, French and Italians.  This was despite the Western Allies unease with the new Soviet regime.  The Treaty made claims of the barbarity of the Germans appear to have been true all along.  In part this was an accurate assessment as Wheeler-Bennett shows how the expansionist fantasies of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, effective dictators of Germany from 1916 onwards, were allow to run free with the treaty and the Soviets’ vacillating attitude while they still had to learn that Lenin had been right all along.  If the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had not been so harsh, then it seems likely that elements of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany the following year, would have been milder, though the Allies were committed to the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine and Poland, no matter what, so in German eyes the treaty, even if more moderate than the one our world saw, would have been deemed to be harsh.

 

Overall, in large part this is an astute book which still provides aspects that I find too often missing from general histories of the period and benefited from the author being able to interview participants in the story that he outlines.  It would have been better still shorn of the very rapidly anachronistic introduction and the unnecessary and rather tedious appendices of documents.

Room Hunting

I have commented over the past few years how traditional modes of residence have come back into style as work in the UK has become more geographically concentrated, pay has fallen in real terms and the cost of accommodation has risen particularly rapidly.  I guess I am wrong to have ever thought that I should perceive what I think of as ‘old fashioned’ modes of living as such.  It is clear that they are, in fact, part of lifestyles of the 2010s and completely bury the myth of a ‘property-owning democracy’ that was once peddled in this country.  Thus, I guess it is unsurprising that as a man in my forties, I have lived with my parents: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/never-as-bad-as-we-had-it.html ; in a guest house: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/living-in-guesthouse.html  and as a lodger: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/living-withas-lodger.html  Working in London I am again looking for accommodation, a process which is fraught with difficulty.  I am more alert to the hazards of 419 scammers in the market place for renting rooms: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/419-scams-connected-with-renting-room.html  and so far, this time round seem to have only encountered one.  This was a very low-key one without all the grandeur and fake photos of those I ran into back in 2013. 

One lesson I learnt back in 2009 is that there is no point in me responding to advertisements for rooms.  There are a number of characteristics which rule me out.  First is my age.  I am now in my mid-40s and for some reason people letting rooms seem to feel that there is something sinister about a man my age renting a room.  Even when they say in emails that they are happy to have me, meeting me they change their minds and I suddenly find the room has been ‘allocated to someone else’.  I accept I am overweight and unattractive, but I am clean and tidy and do domestic chores.  However, I clearly do not fit the image that people have of a young, dynamic businessman.  If I did, then presumably I would not have to rent a room. 

I think part of the problem is that they think that I will not tolerate poor things about the room.  I certainly think that if I am paying rent for a room, I should get all that is advertised.  Perhaps I am overly demanding in expecting cooking facilities and heating.  If you have a cooker and a heater, then they should work.  However, maybe this is too demanding and is what rules me out when there are others who will accept no heating or no cooking facility.  For me it is rather selfish because I know it is far more costly if I eat out every meal and I find I cannot stomach living on sandwiches constantly. 

The other key factor is that I am a man.  Around 75% of the advertisements I see specify that only women can rent the room.  At least people say this now up front, whereas in the past you had to ring or go there to find out ‘well, we’re actually looking for a woman’.  Yes, it is prejudicial, but I would rather see the prejudice before I waste my time.  Of course, no-one is allowed to specify ethnicity.  I am a very pale Caucasian.  I find that other people in that category do not want to rent to people like me because of the concerns about.  I get on far better with landlords/ladies who are South or East Asian.  However, not being from that background myself I am sometimes jumped over by someone ‘from the home country’.  This happens even when I have said I like a room and want to rent it.  Of course, in some cases it is just because they have met me and now the other negative aspects kick in.

One key negative aspect for me is the company that employs me and the fact that I now do administrative work.  For some reason there is a prejudice against people who do not work in making earnings.  Strangely I was told that people prefer a salesman on commission to someone who does a solid administrative job day-in/day-out.  Again, I think this comes down to the sense that an administrator renting a room must be a serial killer.  However, ironically, I am actually a better lodger as my income does not fluctuate and I certainly do not have alcoholic lunches and noisy celebrations the way some people in sales still do.  However, it is clear that it is better for me to lie about where I work and the nature of my work or run up against this prejudice.

The other thing is people’s sense of geography.  If I say that I want a room in North London, then clearly I will consider places in North-West London or North-East London and having a car and a parking space at work, I am not tied to bus, tube or train lines the way that many people are.  However, somewhere in South London or East London are of no use to me and it wastes my time to have to deal with these people contacting me.  Conversely, when I put an advertisement about being in a certain radius of work, I found I got no responses.  When I took this criterion off, I then had loads of people contacting me with properties precisely within that circle.  It is clear that, certainly in London, that people have little idea where their house is in relationship to other areas or even points of the compass.  I suppose if you travel just from home to work you do not gather this information.

I accept rent by the week.  However, there is now this common thing of accepting weekly rent and then after a period of time requesting the ‘make-up’ rent for the months which have passed.  This is because, aside from February in non-leap years, months have 2-3 days more than 4 x 7 days = 28 days.  Rent by calendar month appears to have disappeared and rental weeks that go over months also appear to be too difficult for landlords/ladies to work out, so you have this cluster of days, which add up to 29 days in a normal year, 30 days in a leap year.  Thus, you can suddenly be charged with an additional four weeks’ rent.  Storage places pull off this trick as well.  A key problem is that some charge you for it even when only four or six months have passed, so you have only tallied up a fraction of this additional month. 

I have now tried to rent three rooms only to have my application rejected or reneged on at the last moment.  I know the competition for renting a room is very high in London, but it is clear that my optimism that as when living in Exeter and Uxbridge that I would be able to find a place within a few weeks, has been entirely misplaced.  Though my income has fallen I did think I could rent somewhere at the same kind of level, with a 25% leeway, as I did last year.  It is clear that I need to accept that I am not going to find somewhere even within those parameters now and will have to put up with an unheated room or one with no access to cooking facilities if I want to rent for £4-500 per month.  Saying that, at this moment, I cannot even afford that.  I am not clear how I can go any lower in terms of finding somewhere to rent.  A job outside London or with higher pay is clearly necessary but is as difficult to conjure up than an affordable room as a lodger.

Fight Back Against Trolls – Become a Goat

I recognise that almost inadvertently, since I was encouraged into writing e-books, this blog has mutated into being a bit of a writer’s blog.  Rather naively, I thought producing e-books would not be easy, but certainly did not anticipate having them stamped on by people whose hobby is simply dismissing books.  Clearly I should have read more of the writers’ discussion boards on Amazon before embarking on involving myself in the self-publishing e-book world.

It was not as if I did not know about ‘trolls’, i.e. people who go around the internet usually anonymously making offensive remarks about anyone they choose.  Quite often these are well-known people.  Recently I have read some of the horrific stuff sent to Classical historian, Professor Mary Beard, OBE and the pro-rape ‘communities’ that FaceBook refuses to remove though it does take down pictures of a woman breastfeeding her child.  Ordinary people also suffer trolling and often lack the range of supporters to fight back.  It is a form of bullying that clearly allows some people to get a buzz about pushing down others.  It is clear that there a individuals who subscribe to an unacceptable view of what society should be, largely violent, racist and anti-women, to shout out their views wherever they chose.  Their view of society is so distorted that they get angry at people who seek to instil any sense of humanity into the debate.  The ground is fertile, when publications like ‘The Guardian’ and even specialist journals like the ‘Times Higher Education’, as one regular reader of this blog pointed out, have discussions in which commentators just attack the abilities and knowledge of each other in offensive terms, you almost appear to be half-way to the really outrageous stuff from the outset.

In some, perhaps many, cases trolling appears to stem from a sense of inadequacy.  As the person cannot run an interesting blog or write a novel, they feel no-one else should be allowed to enjoy the success of doing so.  In many cases, like the specific one I discuss below, they seek to assert their superiority by being a better ‘train spotter’ than others and insisting that their spotting of minutiae is important.  In the past such people were confined to their clubs of like-minded people.  At worst you would encounter them like the Harry Enfield character telling you ‘you don’t want to be doing that’.  They were tiresome but avoidable.  On the internet they are less easily avoidable and when ratings and sales are important and these days are not allowed to be independent of ‘feedback’ they have a destructive edge.  It is the revenge of the geek, they now hold the power online and they are not satisfied even with smearing your reputation, they want you to suffer and to be seen to suffer.  It is like a drug that they have to keep coming back to.

In this posting, I am not going to take on the whole trolling community, but am going to focus on those who impinge most on what I do.  As a blogger I have been very fortunate that I have not received the kind of attacks so many do, especially women blogging.  Running the blog we have the control to delete comments that offend us and can respond immediately.  Such facility tends to be lacking when you move on to selling e-books, in my case, via Amazon.  I have commented on previous postings about the negative comments I have received so will not revisit those.  I have removed almost all the alternate history books which attracted this attention.  However, looking around other writers’ books I have seen a common pattern.  The one that was sent to me by the regular was ‘The Nanking War’ (2009) by Ryan McCall.  This book has been available as a paperback and now as an e-book on Amazon.com the generic and US version of the company.  The book considers a war breaking out between the USA and Japan over the Rape of Nanking [Nanjing] in 1937.  As readers know, I like alternate history fiction and essays, so this attracted my attention, especially as it neither started from ‘what if Hitler had won the Second World War?’ nor ‘what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War?’ the basis nowadays of a large number of books.

The review on Amazon.com gave it a 1-star.  What was interesting was that the structure of the review was almost identical to one I had received for ‘His Majesty’s Dictator’.  This is unsurprising given that these troll-reviewers are pretty small in number and unimaginative.  It started by saying the ‘I found Mr. McCall's writing to be technically correct and the story is well edited.’  They usually put in a positive, though editing, something the trolls can wheedle out small errors from is often a target.  The reviewer then complains that the story fails because even though it is alternate history ‘that history must be grounded in some sort of reality for the reader to suspend disbelief.’  Fine.  Now, personally I would challenge this book on the fact that the USA did very little in response to the Rape of Nanjing and in fact did very little in response to the sinking of the USS ‘Patay’ by the Japanese or their invasion of central China.  Even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than four years later, it was not clear that the USA would enter the war.

What grounds does the troll-reviewer condemn this book?  I quote:

‘Mr. McCall chooses 1937 as the time frame for his story therefore he needs to ground the reality of his story to that year. For example, McCall arms the U.S. Marines in Nanking War with magazine-fed Winchester rifles. In 1937, U.S. Marines assigned to China were issued Springfield 1903, bolt action rifles. McCall's lack of understanding of military rank structure also hurts the story. He claims the Marine Lieutenant was a squad leader. Marine Lieutenants were and are platoon leaders not squad leaders.’

It is on this basis that the reviewer gives the book 1-star.  This means it will not be recommended to people searching for alternate history and given that sales end once you have a 2-star review, he might as well take the book off sale.  As my correspondent highlights, these minor details would be overlooked by most readers anyway.  In addition, given that it is alternate history, what is to say that the USA would not have issued different rifles?  The US Marines in China were a garrison force not one going to war.  In addition, many officers who have gone into combat have ended up taking different roles as a result of local circumstances.  A further point is, if the reviewer felt these small issues utterly undermined the book, then s/he could have written to the author.  You can amend and republish a book written in English in under 12 hours on Amazon, sometimes far quicker than this.

Of course, the objective of the reviewer is not to alert readers to minor errors or show that the book is no good.  Ironically these trolls often laud the good aspects of a book and then make judgements on minor points as if any spelling or grammar mistake or any technical detail which does not fit their memory is enough to damn an entire book.  On this basis, Ian Fleming’s James Bond series with their erroneous technical details about guns and geographical locations should not be in print.  The same goes for work by Henning Mankel and Philip Kerr.  Even Robert Conroy and Harry Turtledove that the reviewer recommends instead, have made such minor ‘mistakes’ in their work.  There is no capacity for the author to diverge from what is perceived to be the ‘truth’ despite writing fiction.  It goes for genres as a whole too.  I had ‘His Majesty’s Dictator’ rated 1-star not for the quality of the book, but simply because the troll-reviewer felt that there was no demand for a 1940s pastiche.  He had made a judgement for the entire reading population about what they might like to read and sought to censor a whole genre.

I accept that books may be poorly written and this should be highlighted to readers.  However, the utter condemnation of a novel simply because of minor, easily altered aspects or the type of novel it happens to be, is unproductive.  It utterly crushes innovation.  Authors of the 1960s and 1970s could not have moved on contemporary writing if they had been open to the kind of attacks writers of nowadays face.  It seems that there are particular approaches, with nerdy attention to passing details that are the only acceptable books.  I guess this is why there are no many novels dealing with Islamist terrorist attacks as these appeal to the mindset of the trolls.

I wondered if there was a way to deal with troll-reviewers.  I have no desire to write the kind of books they insist upon and yet do want to get my work out there.  Ultimately, I think once I have got my career back on track, assuming that ever happens and I do not slide even further, then I will make my work free once more.  For now, however, I welcome the little bits of income and what they can buy for me and the ones I love.  ‘The Guardian’ provided some anti-troll guidance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/12/how-to-deal-with-trolls

However, what was suggested to me was that more of us need to become ‘goats’.  The term might not be an attractive one, but apparently comes from the fairy tale, ‘The Billy Goats Gruff’ about a trio of goats who trick and then butt off a troll that lives under a bridge they have to cross.  You have to have a strong stomach as I guess the trolls will turn on you if you goat.  I have seen people who have challenged such reviews patronised as naïve and ignorant.  However, you have to believe that you are right and remember that some poor author has spent months, perhaps years, writing a piece of work.  While some writers may need to enhance their skills, no-one intentionally puts up a shoddy, rushed book.  However, all of this effort can be destroyed by someone bored for ten minutes or less, over their lunch break, who wants to boost their own ego by kicking someone else.

Yes, if the book is bad, then a critical review is fine.  However, it needs to be constructive and not simply bury a book because it does not cover some niggly detail or is a different kind of book to what the reviewer wants.  I have heard that writers of gay fiction get this all the time.  Despite labelling it as ‘gay fiction’ which you can do on Amazon and having covers which suggest the content, they get virulent complaints from male readers who feel they have been ‘tricked into reading this filth’.

Challenge reviewers. It seems easier for people in general to comment on reviews on Amazon than it is for the writer to respond to them.  If the book has some minor errors, then it probably deserves a 3- or a 4-star rating, not to be condemned forever on the basis of these.  Challenge reviewers who argue that no-one will want that genre.  That is not a question of quality, that is a question of consumer choice.  If it gets a 1-star, then of course, no-one will go near it.  However, a writer can quickly tell which genres do not sell, they need no reviewer to tell them that.  Challenge reviewers who make patronising judgements especially on the age, gender or nationality of the writer.  A lot of great fiction would not have come about if writers had faced these prejudices so extensively in the past century.  There was prejudice, but there is no place for it now.  The internet is supposed to be free to speak and express ideas and self-publishing is an element of that now.  However, if trolls are free to shut down innovation and a range of authors, we are effectively seeing amateur censorship, intolerable in large parts of the world.

I am going to be using my own goats in an attempt to get back at troll-reviewers.  Thus, I would encourage you to get out there goating for other writers, starting with poor Ryan McCall if you can spot no-one else just yet.  Be proud, be a goat!

The Books I Read In February

Non-Fiction
‘Hugh Gaitskell’ by Brian Brivati
I read this as a complementary book to ‘Clem Attlee’ by Francis Beckett that I read back in July 2012. Like Beckett, I met Brivati in the mid-1990s at the time when there were lots of historical events around the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Despite recognising the changes to the Labour Party that Tony Blair had brought, when the book was published in 1997, unlike Beckett, Brivati manages to avoid making constant links between the past and current developments. One of the key difficulties, however, is that Gaitskell lacked experience in government. He only delivered one budget and was out of power from 1951 until his death in 1963, aged 56. Thus, in contrast to Beckett’s book, a lot of the details are about small-scale internal Labour Party business, often at a painfully local level.

Brivati tends to avoid wandering off his subject in the way that Beckett did, though Brivati’s weakest sections are when he steps away from the narrative to try to assess Gaitskell’s ideological steps. In general Brivati remains objective and it is difficult to tell if he is a partisan of Gaitskell or not. This is better in a political biography than when the author is clearly writing about one of their heroes. Brivati’s objectivity only slips when he begins to discuss things closer to his own life, for example, the view that CND was funded by the KGB. The key problem with this book, as with many biographies, is how fragmented it is. This is not helped by Brivati breaking it into chapters covering just one or two years. I certainly cannot understand why the book received such acclaim when published and can only think it was because it fitted in with the mood of the times of the late 1990s.

It is clear that many of the reviewers whose comments on the back, have not read the book or if they have, it was unable to shake them from their misguided beliefs about Gaitskell. What Brivati adds to the debate are the oddities, things such as Gaitskell’s love of dancing and jazz; the fact that he may have been bisexual and that he had a long-running affair with the wife of Ian Fleming. These are more like details from a celebrity biography and do not really round out the political picture of Gaitskell.

The one thing that is very apparent from Brivati’s book and strongly opposes the views expressed by some of the quoted reviewers is how destructive Gaitskell was. It is very clear that he was arrogant and self-centred. Despite his protestations of being a Socialist there appears to be little that Brivati details which fit that pattern. Rather, as the publishers note, he was more like an American Democrat. He was often opposed to the bulk of the party he sought to represent and used divisive, conspiratorial methods to get his own way. ‘Own way’ is the key element that comes out. Whilst Gaitskell adhered to and created factions, these were generally simply to serve his own interests and he felt no compunction and betraying his own partisans, notably over the relationship with Europe.
Gaitskell was both out-of-date in his adherence to the Commonwealth and the view of Britain’s role in the world. The fact that this was not greatly apparent was simply because the Conservative Party of the 1950s was a generation even further out-of-date on such issues. Owing to his dated views and his personal obsessions which constantly triggered active divisions in the 1950s and early 1960s, Gaitskell rendered the Labour Party incapable of adopting policies that were distinct from the Conservatives and yet ready for the era. Brivati’s book makes it clear that Gaitskell has a fair part to take of the blame for the ‘thirteen wasted years’ of Conservative governments 1951-64 due to him driving it to cope with one of his obsessions after another rather than evolving to cope with the context it found itself in.

While I would never wish to welcome anyone’s premature death, it is clear that without Gaitskell being removed from the leadership of the Labour Party in 1963 he would have utterly destroyed the party. Some argue that he was a precursor of Tony Blair in his Atlanticist attitude and turning his back on the history of the party. Certainly Gaitskell sought to shape the party into being a Gaitskellite Party rather than the Labour Party but if he had succeeded then there would have even been nothing for Blair to pick up and finish mutating into that British replica of the Democrats. You may wonder how such a vane and damaging man could have risen so high in a party when so opposed to what it stood for. One thing Brivati does show is the success Gaitskell had in the ‘dirty’ tactics that managed to manoeuvre him to this level much to the detriment of Britain but especially of the Labour Party.

Fiction
‘Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes’ by H.R.F. Keating
This is the third book in the Inspector Ghote series of novels that Keating has been publishing since 1964. The latest of the twenty-five books was published in 2009; Keating died in 2011. The edition I had was an anthology of the first three books, the other two I read last year. I can certainly say that I have no intention in reading any more of them. I often enjoy crime novels set outside the UK and have read a great deal of crime fiction written Georges Simenon, Josef Skvorecky and Leonardo Sciscia. Maybe it is because Keating is not Indian that the tone of the books for me jars badly. I constantly feel that he does not take his detective seriously enough. This may be due to the date of publication of the particular novels I have read, i.e. 1964-7, when British audiences perhaps expected a patronising attitude to Indian characters. However, not having been impressed with these stories I have no desire to risk wasting time on later ones. Of the three books in the series that I have read this one is probably the best.

The story focuses on Ghote investigating the assassination of an American scientist who is an anti-nuclear campaigner. He does this with the aid of the American’s brother, Professor Gregory Strongbow and a member of the local tourist board, Shakuntala Brown. The action takes place in Mumbai and Pune and the surrounding countryside in western India. More than in the previous two novels which focused primarily on Mumbai, Keating does give a good feel for the region in which the action takes place. There are not the unco-operative witnesses that plagued Ghote in the previous two books and come to infuriate the reader. Strongbow is awkward for Ghote to handle but the relationship between them as Ghote seeks to protect the American from being assassinated by the India First terrorist group. Ghote is taken from serving the Mumbai police to working for a shady national body. His key role is to find out what Strongbow learnt from his brother about India’s nuclear weapons programme and who is working for India First.

Much of the book is filled with Ghote battling with incidents of attack on Strongbow. The action is described well but after a while you become tired of Ghote running around after the foolish American. Ghote having to move frantically to aid a Westerner is a recurring theme of the three books and by this stage I had had enough of it. The mix of a light tone which is not humour and police procedure that becomes tiresome is why I will not be reading another Inspector Ghote book. I do like the title, however.

‘Lest Darkness Fall’ by L. Sprague De Camp
Over the years I have been ambivalent to De Camp’s work. I try not to let the author’s political views contaminate my reading of their books, but for some reason have found that harder with De Camp than other US authors of his generation. The first book of De Camp’s I read was probably his best, ‘The Goblin Tower’ (1968). It is a very good traditional fantasy story and probably one of the only books I would consider reading again. ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ (1939) is a very different novel, but of the same high quality. This book was De Camp’s first published one and is very impressive for a debut novel. It features US archaeologist Martin Padway who visiting Rome in 1939, at the time in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, is struck by lightning and is sent back to Rome in 535. His grasp of Latin and knowledge of the final decline of the Western Roman Empire means he has some advantages. However, like most time travellers he struggles to make a living and not be imprisoned or executed as a sorcerer. He also aims to prevent the destruction of the Western Roman Empire which at the time is being run by the Goths as he sees this as triggering the Dark Ages for the bulk of Europe. Consequently he begins to introduce anachronistic technology including printing, semaphore, various military tactics, the working of copper and then iron and ideas including Arabic numerals and zero, emancipation of slaves, double entry book-keeping, the concept of gravity and solarcentric astronomy in an attempt to keep the Gothic state intact and to advance society. He is steadily drawn into politics and warfare.

The skills De Camp shows in this book is in quickly creating a range of interesting characters. Sometimes these are a little too ‘light’ and the money lender looking to God all the time is almost a caricature. The women that Padway encounters and generally has unsatisfactory relationships with are interesting and well drawn for a book of the time. Having read a lot of 1940s science fiction a few years ago, I am not as surprised as I once would have been about the maturity and modernity of the writing. If you did not know you could possibly think it had been written in 1979 if not 2009. De Camp shows the challenges of trying to change a society in decline and the impact on Padway’s morality as he has to deal with distracted and violent monarchs, generals and nobles. He also shows the challenges of working in a context in which a wide range of Christianities are jostling for supremacy and Pagan views are still very much current as well. It is an enjoyable, engaging story which romps along. It is interesting to see someone intentionally creating an alternate history and the reader is left to speculate how the world will turn out differently to the one we knew. This is one of the best and most enjoyable books I have read in a long time.

Watching ‘Van Der Valk’

It is obvious that in the past twenty years television viewing is fragmented: people do not all sit down to watch a programme at the same time, rather they view it when convenient to them, saved on a Freeview box or watched over the internet. Another source is to wait until the programme comes out on DVD. ‘Box sets’ of entire series are now so prevalent that ‘The Guardian’ newspaper even runs a weekly column ‘You Next Box Set’. The advantage is that you do not have to wait for the following week’s episode. If you choose you can watch and entire series at one sitting. The added advantage is that you can access ‘classic’ series that are unlikely ever to appear on television again.

The range of series put into box sets is quite bewildering. I am often surprised to see poor quality situation comedies from the 1970s and 1980s available and I wonder who would want to view them. However, I guess every programme has some fans and even quite obscure ones would elicit millions of viewers. I imagine the overheads for the producers of the box sets must be pretty low so that if they can sell a few thousand they are making money. Conversely the demand for some series remains incredibly high. The first series (of three) of ‘Between the Lines’ first broadcast in 1992 sells for £44 and even second hand it is difficult to get one for less than £30. The series tailed off in the second and third incarnations but even these do pretty well; I hope the remaining actors are getting some of this money.

There are often odd gaps in what you can buy. ‘A Traveller in Time’ an excellent children’s drama from 1978 is still not available on DVD, though other series from that genre have been for a while. I imagine it has something to do with rights. The same explanation appears to be the case for the movie ‘Fatherland’ (1994) for which the only DVD copy is a recording made from the video release. The box set does allow a great deal of nostalgia and sometimes you can rediscover past delights and sometimes you are disappointed. I bought ‘Catweazle’ (1969; 1971), ‘The Clangers’ (1969-72) and ‘Mr. Benn’ (1971-2) over the past few years and have thoroughly enjoyed them. Surprisingly, for their lack of sophistication to modern audiences I have found children have enjoyed them. A colleague of mine argued that that was because the stories are engaging and well told.

As you can tell from the title of this posting, I have recently worked my way through the five series of ‘Van Der Valk’. This is unique in television history for something that is not a soap opera in that the series spanned twenty years, first being broadcast in 1971 and the final episode being shown in 1991. It came in three batches: 1972-3, 1977-8 and 1990-1 with a total of 32 episodes, those in the 1970s being 1 hour long and those in the 1990s being 2 hours long. The series is based on the successful series of novels by Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003) published primarily 1962-72 with an additional one in 1989. They feature Commissaris [Chief Superintendent] Simon ‘Piet’ Van Der Valk an Amsterdam based detective. Much of the series was shot in the Netherlands, though in the 1970s the interior shots were filmed in the UK and cut together with the location footage. 

The role of Van Der Valk was played by Barry Foster (1927-2002) throughout though all the regular roles around him were acted by different people in each of the three blocks of episodes. His French wife Arlette (who featured in two novels by Freeling with her investigating) was played by Susan Travers (born 1939) in the early 1970s, then in the late 1970s by Jo(h)anna Dunham (born 1936) who had appeared as a businessman’s wife in the second series, and finally in the 1990s by Meg Davies, whose birth year I cannot find, but in 1990 in the drama her character is supposed to be 45 which would seem to be about right. Hoofdcomissaris [Chief Commissioner] Samson was played by Martin Wyldeck (1914-88), Nigel Stock (1919-86) and Ronald Hines (born 1929). Brigadier [Inspector] Stribos, played by Dave Carter a uniformed officer appears in a number of episodes. Brigadier Mertens played by Alan Haines (1924-2011) appeared in four episodes.

A large number of leading British television actors of these eras appear, some more than once. Clifford Rose (born 1929) appears as a sculptor in one series and an art dealer in another. Geoffrey Bayldon (born 1924) turns up first as a hotel employee and later a man who runs a religious refuge for the homeless. Christopher Timothy (born 1940) puts in a performance as a hotel receptionist and a few years later as a junior detective. Michael Sheard (1938-2005) also appears in two episodes, though I am not clear what roles he plays and the same goes for Jim Norton (born 1938) who appeared in two episodes as different characters.

Others who appear once include Lalla Ward (born 1951), Paul Eddington (1927-95), Freddie Jones (born 1927), Patrick Troughton (1920-87), Amanda Burton (born 1956), Kenneth Cranham (born 1944), Brian Cox (born 1946), Michael Culver (born 1938), Geoffrey Palmer (born 1927), Don Henderson (1932-97), Anthony Valentine (born 1939), Bob Hoskins (born 1942) and Celia Imrie (born 1952). There is even John Rhys-Davies (born 1944) well known these days for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies who has a short role as an assassin before dying in a car crash.

There are a number of characteristics which distinguish this series from the tens of other police series of the 1970s. The first is the Van Der Valk character himself. Unlike many police officers and detectives shown in dramas, he has a happy home life. His wife features regularly and his sons appear occasionally and are referred to even more often. In the 1990s, one, Wim played terribly languidly by Richard Huw, appears regularly as an Inspecteur [Chief Inspector] on the Narcotics Division. Between the 1970s and 1990s the Van Der Valks have adopted a daughter too who has made them grandparents when Arlette is 45. The lifestyle of the Van Der Valks is prosperous.

I think one of the things that made the series attractive in the early 1970s was that it showed the Netherlands, a place not that far away from the UK and yet at the time appeared to be in an economic boom. The lifestyle of Van Der Valk would be aspirational for many British viewers with good food, wine, restaurant meals, staying in cottages and listening to classical music. Van Der Valk certainly appeared as different to the detectives based in Britain. However, the series is grittier than many British counterparts. Even watching in the 21st century, the death from drugs overdoses and the impassioned or cold-blooded murders shown on screen have an impact. The adultery, prostitution and sexual promiscuity seem pretty common these days but would have had more frisson at the time.

Van Der Valk’s character develops across the 1970s episodes. At the start he is a jolly character who is shown drinking beer and spirits and smoking cigars at almost every opportunity. The title sequence of the first series feature Van Der Valk and his Inspecteur Johnny Kroon played by Michael Latimer (1941-2011) who went on to be a successful international theatre director, standing at the top of the Westerkerk, the tallest spire in Amsterdam, unwrapping a cigar and simply chucking the wrapping off the tower. By 1978 the closing image of Van Der Valk had had the cigar removed form his mouth. He works largely by intuition aided by his ability to mix with people at all levels of Dutch society from the seedy side of Amsterdam to the wealthy. Steadily, however, the character becomes more cynical and aggressive so that by 1978 he is hitting a teenaged female suspect who has been cocky. In the 1990s, given that he has been at the same rank for twenty years, though his managerial roles are emphasised, he seems very tired.

This means the 1990s episodes lack the spark of the 1970s ones, not aided by some of the actors around Foster. Only Meg Davies really stands out but her Arlette has lost the bulk of the wits, sophistication and above all, playfulness of the previous two incarnations. It was that sparkiness that I think made ‘Van Der Valk’ ultimately successful in the 1970s. In fact watching the first episode of the 1990 series I was worried Foster had become an alcoholic or was seriously ill. There is nothing about these in his biographies and he looks healthier in later episodes. I guess it was just poor direction. The abrupt switch in mood in that episode is unsettling and Amanda Burton’s dialogue sounds like it was recorded in a public toilet. I know that they hoped the series would be a rival for the ‘Inspector Morse’ series (1987-2000) which was why they went to 2 hours. However, the stories and the characterisations were lacking. In addition, in the years since the previous series, the Netherlands had become far better known to the British and the prosperous lifestyle aspects commonplace.

Whilst the actors speak English, everything written is in Dutch. Naturally they could not alter the street furniture, but even letters and messages are shown in Dutch adding to that flavour. Amsterdam is an additional character and often Van Der Valk drives down streets and goes to picturesque houses in the city or outside or to barges to chase down criminals. Trams and bicycles; glass-roofed river boats and lift bridges are often in view. Some complain this leads to us seeing too much ‘fill’ of the character driving. However, it was important to establish this difference to a series set in London, which one episode is. Unfortunately the sun rarely shines in any of the series making Amsterdam and even some of the Dutch countryside appear permanently dull. I realised that at the time the 1990s episodes were being made that I was visiting the Netherlands quite regularly and that the series bar a few episodes tends to make Amsterdam feel much smaller than it is reality. I guess this came from often filming particular locations.

The highlight of the 1990s episodes are the series of Inspecteurs and their teams that Van Der Valk, apparently in a more managerial role, works with. Notable are Kenneth Cranham as Inspecteur Dirk Boutsen and his team including Gary Olsen (1957-2000) as Sergeant Brouwer. Brian Cox as the philandering and bereaved Inspecteur Stefan Szabo was another notable character. Hoofdinspecteur [Superintendant] Toni Vishnu played by Angela Bruce (born 1951) could have developed but was under-directed in her episode so seemed rather to be going through the motions. I recognise that these actors in demand for series and movies might not have wanted to commit to being on the series weekly. However, having a strong actor to bounce off as had worked well with Inspecteur Kroon could have added to the dimensions of the rather anaemic 1990s episodes.

The one thing that many people remember about the series even if they have not seen it is the theme tune. This was composed by the Dutch composer Jan Stoeckart (born 1927) writing under the name Jack Trombey. The tune is called ‘Eye Level’ and was notable as an instrumental tune played by an orchestra which reached No. 1 in the UK charts in 1973. The tune is very orchestral with a really upbeat tempo which seemed to characterise the spirit of the programme. By the second series the programme opened with Van Der Valk driving through Amsterdam seeming to emphasise the vibrancy of the city. It remains a stirring tune.

I certainly recommend watching the 1970s series of ‘Van Der Valk’; you can buy a complete box set with all episodes in or series-by-series. The stories are engaging and feature more than simply murders with blackmailing, drugs dealing, extortion, intimidation, art and currency fraud, youth delinquency and kidnapping are also there. Naturally they will seem dated but in that accurately conjure up a historical period and a certain kind of attitude that has since died. They tell us something about how Britain viewed the Netherlands and what it appeared to represent, something more common in the UK these days. Foster in the 1970s is an interesting performer in the role which develops well over the period 1972-8. Poor direction, some weaker actors and lacklustre stories mean the revival in the 1990s should have been avoided.

The Book I Read In January

Fiction
‘The Killing Spirit. An Anthology of Assassins’ ed. by Jay Hopler
Clearly I need to stop buying thematic short story collections. This one was produced by Canongate Books which appears to have been a Scottish publishing house particularly interested in urban and black writing. Under their Payback Press imprint they sought to publish US black authors neglected in the UK. I have no idea if Jay Hopler was black but certainly many of the stories in this collection have an urban setting and are very American. This book was first published in the USA and reprinted by Canongate for the UK where I bought it.

Like a lot of collection editors, Hopler had very strict criteria for what can be included. He argues there are only two types of assassin stories, those about professional assassins and those about amateurs pressured or bribed into being assassins. Bar in one case, all the assassins are male and most are amateur and operating in an urban setting largely in the USA. The argot of the characters soon becomes tiresome as a result.

The nature of what is included here is a real mish-mash. The poetry like ‘Screen Image: (Royal Emerald Hotel, Nassau)’ by Mark Rudman and ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’ by Robert Lowell are the poorest and even for poetry are incoherent. ‘The Hit Man’ by T. Coraghessan Boyle is a series of fragments that are again irritating and do not do much. There are book extracts, from ‘This Gun For Hire’ by Graham Greene and ‘Ripley’s Game’ by Patricia Highsmith. These are distinctive, the first being set in Britain; the latter in France and Germany. There is also an extract from ‘The Butcher’s Boy’ by Thomas Perry which looks as if it is going to shape up to be a kind of a CSI story, but is curtailed too quickly. The story is engaging as far as it goes, probably one of the best written in the whole collection. These extracts are unsatisfactory because they are incomplete. You know the story is going to run out and so you are irritated rather than engaged with the characters and not necessarily at the most interesting parts of these books.

‘Gentlemen, the King!’ is a silly comic piece by Damon Runyon about mafia assassins going to a fantastical state in Europe to kill a king. I have seen people reading Runyon’s work before, but this story difficult to follow through the mafia argot has certainly dissuaded me from mimicking them. The same goes for ‘The Killers’ by Ernest Hemingway. The back-chat dialogue in both these stories seems to be considered more important than the story or the characters themselves. It is as if Runyon and Hemingway are saying ‘look at how clever I am, I can write dialogue like mafia men use’. Perhaps given all the mafia movies this is no longer any kind of revelation to us. The same problem applies to ‘Hit Man’ by Charles Bukowski, though its greater difficulty is that it is far too brief to be of any point.

‘The Death of Mrs Sheer’ by Joyce Carol Oates, is almost the opposite of an urban novel, featuring a pair of incompetent backwoods gunmen as they go about failing to kill their targets. ‘When This Man Dies’ by Lawrence Block is not bad. It is more like a story from the ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ collection by Roald Dahl, as much a morality tale as one about assassins. ‘Shelter. An Original Screenplay’ by David Kost, is also not bad. It is a script again featuring a mafia assassin in this case seeking refuge from a hit that has gone wrong, at the house of an old girlfriend during family dinner. It works in this short format and I do not know if it could stand expansion. Written as a short story it could have been one of the best in this collection, though again hampered by this obsession with mafia argot.

The better pieces include ‘Loose Ends’ by Bharati Mukherjee which like too many of the stories features the assassin wandering around cheap motels in the USA, though in this case featuring US Asians. It has some very irritating, very trashy characters. ‘The Same Only Different’ by Jiri Kajanё is translated and is as much about Balkans politics as assassination. It features a female assassin, though we do not see through her eyes. The generic names for things makes it feel rather abstract as if it is a fable. However, this may derive from the translation. It is still better than a great deal of the stories included. Perhaps the best is ‘In the Beginning: A Novel in Progress’ by Ian McEwan. I have heard McKewan’s short novels criticised for very little happening in them. However, this is the best crafted story in the book and works as a short story very well. I do not know what it subsequently grew into.

Hopler has a lengthy introduction in which he gives rather weak analysis of the elements going into assassin stories and then is very prescriptive of what they must include. He ends the book with a series of reviews of assassin movies 1942-94 with a paragraph for each; the book was published in 1996. This is done reasonably well. I might have also included ‘The Green Man’ (1956) starring Alastair Sim and even ‘The Ladykillers’ (1955) with Alec Guinness mimicking Sim. There is also ‘My Learned Friend’ (1943) featuring Will Hay.  'The Assassination Bureau' (1969) is a 19th century set story about a company of assassins. However, all of these may have felt to be too light to be included. All three versions of ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’ (1935, 1959, 1978) feature an amateur seeking to thwart professional assassins.

The more serious gaps are two French movies, ‘Le Samouraï’ (1967) which alongside ‘The Day of the Jackal’ is the archetypal study of a professional assassin, yet much more explores many of the themes of loneliness and morality touched on in some of the stories featured in this book. The other is ‘La Femme Nikita’ (1990), which Hopler only mentions in the introduction in reference to Luc Besson’s later ‘Léon’ (1994), known in the USA as ‘The Professional’. ‘La Femme Nikita’ has spawned two US television series. It crosses Hopler’s two types of assassin story featuring an amateur bullied into becoming a professional assassin. Hopler does not even feature ‘The Assassin’ (1993), the very reasonable US remake of ‘La Femme Nikita’ which actually resolves some of the confusions of the original.

‘Assassins’ (1995), though not a good movie, probably was released too late to feature in this book. Similarly ‘Nick of Time’ (1995) the real-time movie featuring Johnny Depp seems to fit perfectly Hopler’s category of an ordinary man compelled to be an assassin but was probably too late for inclusion.

Hopler argues that he was spoilt for choice in terms of stories he could have included in this collection which is why he had to adopt such strict criteria. However, if this was the best he could find, I can hardly believe that statement. This book is a mess, featuring often meaningless chunks of stuff. It also wallows in a restricted perspective, primarily highlighting mafia hit man stories. This is another book I regret having bought.

My Delusions Of Being An Author

With 2013 the bad reviews of my e-books have turned from a trickle, if not to a flood, then a regular river.  I never would have expected that I would have been so savaged for my views on Finland.  I am taken to task for portraying it as an ally rather than simply a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany.  Furthermore apparently my counter-factual analysis is poorly researched and superficial.  I am naive in that I focus on single elements of change and apparently fail to grasp every logistical and political element of the implications, only mentioning some of them.  I never start with foregone conclusions, but rather through testing the ideas come to conclusion of whether the alternative was feasible and the extent of implications from it.  This is clearly an unacceptable approach.

Ironically I worried that my ideas were too sweeping.  However, clearly the style of Peter Tsouras whose writing encompasses every movement of every military unit on a day is what people want to read. I set out to write essay collections that stimulated debate.  I did not aim in 2-5,000 words to cover absolutely every aspect of a 'what if?' and so I am attacked as being incompetent and superficial.  Others feel that I put in too much actual history and looked at too many potential outcomes.  Overall there is no acceptance for the type of book that I have been producing and selling for the past year.  There is no point in setting myself up to be dismissed as foolish and sloppy.  Clearly there are loads of other writers out there who are far better than me and so I am poor in comparison.

Yes, I have made mistakes.  I have portrayed Finland in the 1940s in a way which is apparently unacceptable.  My defence of my view of its government is apparently too weak to be acceptable.  I mistyped 'John' when I meant to write 'James' Buchanan, the US president.  I also managed to mix up Rhode Island which is the size of London with Michigan which is comparable in size with the size of the UK.  My spellchecker changed 'regent' to 'region' and I failed to stop it.  Of course, in this world of the single reader as all-powerful, these errors, corrected in a matter of seconds, mark my books out as unacceptable forever more.  I cannot afford and editor.  I know no-one with sufficient knowledge to edit the books that I write covering so many countries and time periods.  Errors slip through even with leading authors, I have noted errors in books by Philip Kerr, Henning Mankel and for Jonathan Franzen the entirely wrong version of his book 'Freedom' was published.  These days, make a slip-up and that is your book condemned without chance of redemption.  I have been told that there are so many errors in my books that people have not got time to list them all.  This shows that I clearly know so little about history despite researching it and teaching it for the past twenty years, that I can never hope to write an 'accurate' book.

I used to think that I wrote English well.  I do have a tendency to write over-involved sentences with too many sub-clauses.  To some readers it is difficult to penetrate such writing.  At the same time Britons and Americans see my text as too fragmented.  Despite all my reading and re-reading and editing, apparently I end up with incomplete sentences and too much repetition of words.  I clearly lack the ability to step far enough back from my writing to see this, that is even though I spend far more time editing than I do writing.  I made a mistake in trying a 'chatty' style for my books.  Clearly what customers insist on is a very serious style with short sentences that are complete.  Though I have tried to do this I have clearly failed.  Readers find my style so offensive that they simply have to write about it in detail.  Apparently every page of my books are filled with grammatical errors, no matter how much I run the grammar checker over my text.

I have clearly been deluded from comments on this blog and from sales of my books over the past eight months that I could be an author of counter-factual books.  I thought I had found a style which was appropriate for e-books, engaging people in historical debate without drowning them in details.  However, it is clear that I was wrong in this.  My books clearly frustrate and upset people to such an extent that they have to take them to pieces and portray me as a foolish, sloppy, naive and ignorant man.  The one comment that I cannot forgive is to be told that I lack the skill of Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich is not a historian, he is an extreme right-wing propagandist who supports utterly unacceptable policies.  To have had my work even compared with his is incredibly insulting.

There is no point fighting against the strength of opinion regarding my books.  Clearly their very existence offends people and so I am removing all the counter-factual history books from sale and will eliminate all the references from this blog.  I will keep my novels active until the torrent of abuse comes about them.  In this age of indignation it is a mistake to put yourself in a position where people are able to pour vitriol on what you do.  The personal cost is high.