Books I Listened To/Read In June

 Fiction

'Wastelands. Stories of the Apocalypse' edited by John Joseph Adams

This is an anthology of short stories written by US science fiction authors, 1973-2008 covering post-apocalyptic settings, it seems just set in the current borders of the USA. The quality varies considerably. 'Salvage' by Orson Scott Card is a dull piece of Mormon propaganda. Better ones include 'The End of the Whole Mess' by Stephen King, one of a number of stories which looks at ways to reduce violence by humans but that go wrong triggering an apocalypse. In contrast, 'Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers' by John Langan is better than the title suggests and is far more action-filled than King's story. Others with that kind of drive include  'How We Got into Town and Out Again' by Jonathan Lethem which is a well realised post-apocalyptic setting of the standard kind but with a nice cyberpunk element added. Neal Barrett Jr.'s 'Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus' has a similar vibe, but works well and shows how when so many characters are focused on the big themes of apocalypse, personal revenge remains. Among stories which seek to have that effect, 'The Last of the O Forms' by James Van Pelt is actually chilling, because the apocalypse is biological rather than say, a nuclear war. It also hooks back into traditional US behaviour in seeing a freak show of mutants travelling around the country and unlike a number of the short stories in this collection, rather than peter out, it has a sensible conclusion.

'Artie's Angels' by Catherine Wells, has a dieselpunk feel to it, though emphasises the use of bicycles. It works well as a story of how people could work post-apocalypse without entirely descending into a neo-feudal society. 'A Song Before Sunset' by David Grigg is a traditional one of someone seeking to sustain or revive culture when society has crumbled. It does not really say anything new, but back in 1976 when it was published it was probably fresh enough.

'Killers' by Carol Emshwiller could almost be contemporary rather than post-apocalyptic. It sees US fighting in the Middle East having an impact in terms of terrorism, but also returning veterans, and could have been about a man returning from Vietnam as much as from any future war. For all that, though, it works reasonably well. 'Inertia' by Nancy Kress is less disrupted society, focused on a ghetto for people with a particular disfiguring disease, though it is the violent society outside which seems to face the greater challenge. This is well handled. Similar is 'Speech Sounds' by Octavia E. Butler, about the loss of various human abilities such as speech, as a result of some biological catastrophe and people picking their way through while concealing the abilities they have retained as these are no longer the norm. It reminds me of a short story, I think by Ursula Le Guin in which most people are deaf and they see a boy who can hear as having unnatural abilities that need to be ceased. 

'Also-rans' include 'Never Despair' by Jack McDevitt which goes nowhere and seems to expect us to be excited by the appearance of a hologram of Winston Churchill. Maybe that excites US readers more than British ones. 'When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth' by Cory Doctorow is as thrilling as the title suggests. Americans seem to love stories of clerical staff somehow battling tirelessly to prop up the capitalist status quo and this one reminded me very much of accounts of those men dealing with the Wall Street Crash with about the same level of success. 'Mute' by Gene Wolfe and 'Bread and Bombs' by M. Rickert, are almost like fables and have a mid-20th Century feel that could be associated with the Second World War rather than the future.

I was disappointed that in 'The People of Sand and Slag', Paolo Bacigalupi did not range further in his location, but at least he got off mainland USA; his is a more standard science fiction story. 'Dark, Dark were the Tunnels' by George R.R. Martin now better known for fantasy is also in this kind of category and reminded me of  'When the New Zealander Comes' (2011). Another more straight science fiction story, though with typical American obsession with the spiritual is 'Judgment [sic] Passed' by Jerry Oliton in which people returning from a space mission find everyone else on Earth has been taken off to the afterlife. Fortunately it deals more with how these remainers cope in the deserted world.

'And the Deep Blue Sea' by Elizabeth Bear starts off as a decent story of a courier in a post-apocalyptic California/Nevada, but is spoilt when it introduces the Devil who can teleport the protagonist to a range of times and places. I get the idea that there have been a lot of local apocalypses, but it wrecks the dynamic of the story about dealing with a specific one and whether the heroine can actually win through. 'The End of the World as We Know It' is a rather weak satire on the whole post-apocalyptic genre. It is interesting enough but would have been better as an essay than attempting to be a story.

Overall I came away from this book feeling rather riled given the inability of some many of the authors to look beyond very narrow assumptions. Some I expected better from. I know to steer clear of Card's work. However, a number of the authors who produced good stuff, despite its restrictions, are ones I would now pick up if I see them, which I would not have done if I had not read this collection. I do think Americans would find this collection far more palatable than English-language readers from other countries.

'Let the Old Dreams Die' by John Ajvide Lindqvist

I often see people asking on social media whether anyone buys short stories these days. Then ironically I find that in a single month I am reading two short story collections simply edited/written by men named 'John', so I do think that short stories have a place and are doing pretty well in these times. While I had seen the Swedish version of 'Låt den rätte komma in' (2008; from the 2004 novel of the same name) ['Let the Right One In'] though not the 2010 English language remake, I had not realised Lindqvist was primarily about horror, so had come to this collection as I might to one by Julian Barnes, expecting a range of quirky, contemporary-set stories. 

There is some Swedish normality in the stories, such a urban blocks of flats and summer holiday homes by the water, and they are magic realism rather than full-on 'horror'.  Various creatures turn up, that are not really traditional ones. The type of vampires seen in  'Låt den rätte komma in' reappear, but there is tentacled monster penetrating the sewers; another that lures people to their death by showing them what they desire; an irate zombie; otherworldly people who sort of fill in the gaps in our world; the embodiment of death by drowning and the creatures of the movie 'Gräns' (2018) ['Border'] which features in the short story of the same name in this collection. The longest story, 'The Final Processing' about a young couple dealing with people who have been re-lifed could easily be a movie.

What is interesting though is the responses of the characters to their unnatural threats is down-to-Earth, almost mundane rather than high-powered action. There is a quietness in them that I guess helps the reader feel a greater affinity with them than they might with action heroes. In addition, the approach works well in making you think what you or people you know would do in such a situation. Even if you do not live in a Swedish context, there is sufficient overlap with other examples of Western society to allow such consideration without difficulty. Not all of the characters are able to cope and some end up with horrendous fates, so this affinity means those outcomes hit home harder. While this was certainly not the book I had expected when I bought it, I would not say I enjoyed it, but I certainly felt interested by it and engaged with it.

'The Last Coyote' by Michael Connelly

This is the fourth book in the Harry Bosch sequence and for the entirety of it, Bosch is suspended from the police for assaulting his boss. He decides to investigate the murder of his mother, a prostitute, in 1961, some 34 years before the novel is set. The novel reminded me very much of the movie 'Slam Dance' (1987) not simply for the Hollywood setting but because of the bisection between 'call girls' and influential people, and though I did not realise it to the end, genuine affection creeping into sexual transactions. Bosch's hard boiled manner at times can get tiring, but genuinely this flows along pretty well, with the protagonist compelled to scam his way into getting the information he needs and struggling to oppose men who while old remain powerful. There is a lot of introspection not simply because of Bosch's personal connection to the case and his reassessment of his mother's life and motives but because of the counselling he is receiving for his violence towards his superior. However, when Bosch's actions result in the death of people, I did not feel convinced by his guilt over his actions. Perhaps his world weariness sustained across the novels, makes that hard to now sell to the readers. Overall, this works well as a standalone novel. The gathering together of the various elements of evidence not just in Los Angeles but also Florida and Nevada works well. The twist at the end might now seem almost a hackneyed one but works in the context and probably when this was written 26 years ago seemed fresher. However, the abrupt departure of Bosch's girlfriend of the previous two books before this one begins and the appearance so quickly of a replacement, though she is very important to the plot, do feel like that, i.e. plot devices, rather than genuine developments.

Non-Fiction

'Chronicles of Dissent' by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

This is a collection of interviews of US linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky conducted by David Barsamian, 1984-91. He speaks a lot about US politics and especially foreign policy. His commentary on control of the media and how atrocities committed by the USA's friends are passed over while nationalist behaviour by those deemed as 'other' are portrayed as horrific. He shows how attitudes, e.g. to the Hussein regime in Iraq and the Noriega regime in Panama can change in a matter of days and countries that were receiving military aid are abruptly attacked. Much of his commentary on these things feels as if it could have been written during the Trump administration, especially in terms of US use of Israel and the portrayal of existential threats, rather than 30 years earlier, which highlights how little things have changed in the USA. While Chomsky nails these aspects he keeps on saying the same things again and again. Presented this way with the transcripts of interviews, you soon get tired. Yes, he highlights important things such as how the USA effectively primarily attacked the people of South Vietnam in US-Vietnam War and the lack of attention that has been paid to massacres in East Timor by Indonesia. However, when you read these things for the third or fourth time, you begin to get riled.

Chomsky is very US focused. He says nothing about China and little about Russia. His views of Europe are scant, Britain and France only get touched on at the time of the First Gulf War. He also seems to subscribe to the view that all terrorism is state-directed. He gives good examples of this, but he is dismissive of 'retail' terrorism which the USA had not experienced at the time, so neglects the terrorism of the IRA, ETA, RAF, Red Brigades, etc. as if it never existed. It does seem common even among US commentators who are that bit more alert to developments in the world to think terrorism was not really 'discovered' until the September 2001 attacks in the USA and unfortunately Chomsky falls into this trap.

Overall Chomsky says interesting things about US behaviour in the world and the problems it causes. His views remain relevant today as the methods he outlines have been applied again and again and reached a height during the Trump years. However, the nature of this book makes it really repetitive and once you have read the first few interviews, you have largely got his message and those that follow just say it again and again.

Audio Books - Fiction

'Dissolution' by C.J. Sansom; radio play

I was so annoyed by Sansom's novel, Dominion (2012): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-books-i-read-in-september.html that I had stayed away from all of his books until I came across both audio books and radio plays on CD of his Shardlake books, detective stories set in the reign of King Henry VIII. These are much better than his alternate history. This is the first in the series, though the character Matthew Shardlake, a commissioner for Thomas Cromwell and his assistant come fully formed with back stories which are revealed as the tale continues. Most of the story takes place at the fictional Scarnsea Abbey on the southern coast of England which is on the verge of being dissolved along with all monasteries across the country, when a King's commissioner is murdered there. Shardlake is sent to investigate. There are more than a few parallels to 'The Name of the Rose' (1980) not least with the range of eccentric monks and their various moral failings. However, it is well handled and provides good details on the developments in the country at the time without providing a series of history lectures. He really communicates how Henrician rule at this time was like being under a one-party state of the 20th Century.  Some readers complain about the absence of female characters, but it is a monastery and Sansom actually works to bring more women in to the story than some might have done. There are some unexpected twists most notably with the fate of Shardlake's assistant.

With the very busy Jason Watkins as Shardlake in the lead and a string of familiar voices, this production is of the high quality you would expect from a BBC radio drama with all the various sound effects to give a real feel to the time and place. I thoroughly enjoyed it and have another lined up to listen to.

'Octopussy and The Living Daylights (and Other Stories)' by Ian Fleming; read by Tom Hiddleston and Lucy Fleming

This is the final James Bond book by Ian Fleming, well, in fact an anthology of various short stories. In many ways as seen with 'For Your Eyes Only' (1960), Fleming is better at short stories than sometimes the longer novels. This collection holds four. 'Octopussy' is seen from the perspective of a retired British army major who looted Nazi gold bars at the end of the Second World War and is now living in Jamaica. It allows Fleming to indulge in his knowledge of Jamaica, sea life and central Europe during and just after the Second World War. Bond only appears as the man sent to arrest the protagonist and carry out personal revenge. 'The Living Daylights' is also well handled. It is set at a very precise time and place, i.e. Berlin in 1960 before the Berlin Wall went up the following year. A British agent has to get from the Soviet Zone of the city into the British Zone and Bond is sent to take out the assassin who has been assigned to kill the escaping man. Again, though a very different setting, Fleming is great at the context not just of this frontier area but West Berlin at the time and the people in it. 'Property of a Lady' is a simple short story about using auctioning of a Faberge egg to trace a KGB operative, but it is interesting to see the workings of an auction house in the early 1960s. The final story, read by Lucy Fleming, Ian Fleming's niece, '007 in New York' only references the actual story at the end. Instead it is a usual list of complaints about all the failings in the USA at the time, a country Fleming clearly disapproved of in so many ways.

Hiddleston and Fleming both do the voices pretty well for the various characters and communicate the intensity which can be found in what are generally straight forward stories. Aside from '007 in New York' they show Ian Fleming's writing at its best. Given the cultural impact of the James Bond stories, even today, I am glad I have now listened to them all, and aside perhaps from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963) which the movie kept very close to, to see how much more jaded and at times bitter the writing is. Bond is often far from being a superhero and his decay across the novels makes them somehow more human and closer to the spy novels of Len Deighton than is popularly recognised. It is also clear that the movies thoroughly reduced the roles of important female characters from the novels, probably most, Gala Brand from 'Moonraker' (1955) to accessories for so long. Bond might be a man of his time in terms of misogyny but Fleming seems to diverge from that character in how he portrays the women.

Books I Listened To/Read in May

 Fiction

'The Rituals of Infinity' by Michael Moorcock

This was a Moorcock novel that I had not encountered before. It was first serialised in the 'New Worlds' magazine, 1965-6 before being released as a novel in 1971. I do miss the days of the slim science fiction novels. My edition of this book is only 192 pages long. There is something crisp and to the point of this kind of novel which seems absent these days. The central concept of the novel is that the hero Professor Faustaff is part of a team travelling between a number of alternative Earths that have been created and discovered but are being rather erratically destroyed. Yet another Earth appears and people from other versions are drawn there to re-enact various scenes from Earth's history, the rituals of the title. Fighting back against the demolitions mutates the planets further. For a short novel it covers the idea quickly and yet manages to get in ambivalent characters and complex twists before the true antagonists are revealed. Faustaff is a robust character, unlike many of those Moorcock subsequently wrote. The 1960s background is apparent in that sex is never far from anyone's minds and a young woman simply drops into having sex with Faustaff and waits around while he adventures so they can have more. Though very much of its time, it does show the inventiveness of Moorcock at a time before some of his writing became so esoteric as to easily lose readers.

'Rome. The Emperor's Spy' by M.C. [Manda] Scott

Manda Scott is a very accessible author and she wrote a nice email in response to one I sent her via her website. I was particularly interested in the short story which is included at the end of this novel, 'The Roman in Britain' which is a 'what if?' story about Boudica being victorious and driving the Romans out of Britain, a topic which featured in my chapter, 'From these Shores' in my 'what if?' anthology 'Route Diverted: What If? Stories of the British' (2015). It was great to see someone who has written a lot on the Roman period tackle this topic.

This is the first book in the second tetralogy from Scott, bringing over characters from her successful Boudica tetralogy, 2003-2006. She has also written spy fiction and this book combines the two genres. It is around a team of chariot racers and their support staff in the reign of Emperor Nero leading up to the Great Fire of Rome in 64. This provides the context for seeking out a prophesy which says that if Rome and Jerusalem are burnt then there will be the Second Coming. A heavily scarred and crippled spy, Sebastos Pantera accompanies the team from their starting point near what is modern-day Cherbourg in northern France to a training camp in Alexandria, Egypt and on to Rome itself. This is a novel which is unafraid to feature a number of LGB characters, in line with the cultures of the time.

One challenge of the book is the multiple viewpoints as Scott has brought in Math, a male prostitute and trainee charioteer, son of a British warrior, 'Ajax' the prime charioteer of the team concealing a past in the Middle East and his sometime lover, healer, Hannah alert not just to the Sibylline Oracles but also the factions forming early Christianity. This can make it complex for the reader and there are some scenes such as a fire at the town in France and later during the torture by the prime antagonist when Scott goes through what is happening a number of times from different perspectives. The fragmentation between the three sites, though adding background interest, also complicates and lengthens the novel, reducing some of its dynamism.

I did find the discussion of just two of the different factions that followed in the wake of Jesus (or indeed Judas as he may have been named) interesting. It seems ironic this was the third book in two months I had read/listened to which looked at how people did not believe Jesus was divine until much later, centuries after his death. The portrayal by modern-day Christians of the Bible being written during or immediately after Jesus's lifetime and that there is a simple path from the early churches to the modern one, is mistaken. In an essay at the end, Scott highlights that there were perhaps 30 factions that might have become the Christian Church and the one led by St. Peter easily might not have won out.

The conspiracy, the spying elements, the races and fighting against the final fire, are the highlights of the book and where Scott shows her ability with the tension and action. She certainly grounds her novel in detailed research but sensibly uses that as rich colouring while saving the historical debate to the essay at the end. Overall this is not a bad book. If the multiple viewpoints on particular incidents is reduced in subsequent books then I would be happy to read more in the series. I certainly welcome that someone has brought the spy novel to a very different era to the Cold War.

'The Tinner's Corpse' by Bernard Knight

I welcomed the fact that this novel eschewed the action-adventure stuff of the previous two. Instead it focuses on one and then a second quite mundane murders among the tin panning industry of Dartmoor. Knight has done a lot of research and shows how the industry at the time outstripped that of Cornwall and was the second most profitable export from England. Consequently, tinners were permitted their own kind of parliament and bar for crimes of physical harm, had their own laws and prison. Knight also moves on with his protagonist, Sir John De Wolfe's life. A second coroner is appointed to North Devon and De Wolfe's relationship with his tavern landlady mistress comes to an end. There is a lot of trekking around Dartmoor but this is handled without it being tedious and giving a real feel for the locales which differ so much from Exeter where De Wolfe is based and its surrounding countryside.

The book lines up a number of suspects and has the classic situation of a contested will with various precepts. However, just as you feel you are building to a satisfying conclusion, the book stops. I have always been supportive of crime stories in which the criminal is not brought to justice and it is to be expected with stories set in the 12th Century when power and status meant much more than actual guilt and torture was habitually used in investigations. However, it seems in this case that Knight reached a certain page (330 in my edition) and was told to stop. There are no arrests, no resolution, not even De Wolfe being certain who the guilty individual(s) was/were. It just crashes to an end. I do not know if Knight finishes off the story in a subsequent novel or we simply have to put up with this. After his need for action to round off the previous two novels, it seems he was at a loss as to how to end this one. However, whatever the cause, whether he had no idea how to end it or publishers told him to cease, this makes it probably the most disappointing of the series. As I have a number of the subsequent books, I can only hope he handled them better or I will have to abandon reading them.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Latin America' by George Pendle

This book was first published in 1963 but was updated to 1976, the year before Pendle's death. It continued to be reprinted and my edition is from 1987. Thus, you should not expect to find any recent history of the countries covered. However, this is a good introduction to the region and Pendle is excellent in showing how long-term factors such as the geography, the various ethnicities, the relationship with Europe, the beliefs and the economic factors have shaped the diverse countries in the region throughout the centuries right into the 20th Century. He manages to summarise events from the civilisations in place before Europeans arrived, the conquistadors, the break away from the colonial countries, the various wars and revolutions then caudillo regimes very well. This is a quick way to get an engaging description of the various countries set in context, perhaps as a basis for reading newer works. I found it easy to read and full of details of which I had been ignorant before, despite having even studied Latin American history for a period in the 1980s when I bought this book.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes I' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; read by David Timson

This is one of the Naxos audio book versions of the stories. This volume contains 'The Speckled Band', 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches', 'The Stock-Broker’s Clerk' and 'The Red-Headed League'. These stories effectively break into two pairs with the first two about young women put under pressure by nefarious men and the second two about honest urban workers tricked for the purposes of a crime. Hearing them in this collection really highlighted to me what Conan Doyle did well in detailing late Victorian society. Here we see women mixed up in legal and inheritance situations as the result of deaths and remarriage. The step-family is far from being a late 20th Century invention too many people pretend.

In addition, there is a sense of vulnerability, that many in an age without social welfare were at the mercy of relatives and employers. Conan Doyle does seem to chide, in turn the stock-broker's clerk and the pawn broker, for not being more suspicious of overly well-paid positions they are offered; double pay for a job is a trait in a number of the Holmes stories. However, he also shows that at a time without even labour exchanges, let alone Jobseeker's Allowance, how people had to accept what was offered, no matter how dubious, or face penury. Thus, though I was familiar with the stories, having them this way, I found something more in them. Timson is excellent with the range of voices covered, both male and female, but especially Holmes and really brings to life the details of the text. Particularly memorable was a line from 'The Red-Headed League': 'He is as brave as bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster'!

Books I Listened To/Read In April

Non-Fiction

'The Awful Secret' by Bernard Knight

This is the fourth book in the Crowner John series set a few months after the melodramatic trial by tournament that ended 'Crowner's Quest' (1999). Sir John De Wolfe has largely recovered from the broken leg he received at the tournament and is back investigating. There are two main stories, one about the murder of a man washed up on the northern shore of Devon and then him being pressured to help a former Templar he knew in Palestine, who himself is murdered. One might expect that whenever Templars are mentioned these days there will also be something about the Holy Grail and the descendants of Jesus Christ. 

Though this book was published in 2000, ahead of 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003) it shows people holding the same views on Jesus's bloodline as in that book. However, unlike in most books of this kind, De Wolfe being a good Catholic of the late 12th Century sees the entire idea as blasphemous. This brings in interesting tensions as to how far a man will go to aid old army comrades, ones he did not know particularly well. While he assists the first former templar, even concealing him at his family's home, he feels obliged to aid the second, despite ultimately despising the line that he preaches. In many ways, De Wolfe is tricked and this makes him seem that much more human than all the laboured philandering which fill so much of these books. There is tension as he tries to help the second templar get away from Dorset.

There is an additional sub-plot with an invasion of the island of Lundy held by pirates though promised to the Templars and in subduing another village on the mainland coast indulging in piracy. These provide action scenes that Knight seems to have felt were necessary now in each of these books. Some modern commentators feel the secret is 'dull' though I think that is because some twenty years on these speculations about Jesus are very well known and not as surprising as was the case even back in 2000. I feel, though, that despite some flaws, this is a good book. De Wolfe does blunder and holds to attitudes which are appropriate for his time and background, rather than being a sudden convert to some radical new belief. I still have quite a few of these books to read. I hope Knight kept to the more realistic approach rather than making his protagonist an action hero and also toning down the unnecessarily high number of sexual encounters.

'City of Glass' by Cassandra Clare

While there are further two books after this one in Clare's Mortal Instruments series, this one does feel like the closing of a trilogy. It comes to a big climax with the antagonist, Valentine and a lot seems to resolved. Starting in New York like the previous two books, this one soon moves to the fantastical world of Idris (capital Alicante, but not the Alicante of our world) which has a kind of Victorian bucolic setting as if envisaged by William Morris. All the main characters from the previous books end up there. Given this context it does feel, even more than the previous two books, as a branching-off from the Harry Potter series. The various debates among the shadowhunters of Idris are reminiscent of the conflicting  views around dealing with Lord Voldemort. Again it is teenagers who settle the situation and also work to bring an alliance between the shadowhunters and the 'downworlders', i.e. vampires, werewolves and fairies. There is the same kind of mixture of political debates and teenage relationship crises.

I have commented how unsettling the underage sex (the main character is 14, rather than 18 as shown in the television series) and the incestuous thoughts between a brother and sister, which though, fortunately, is revealed to untrue. I do not know why Clare felt a need to include these elements. The incest in this book is part of a very well done subterfuge by one character, but it was unnecessary and I wonder why the publishers accepted it for a book aimed at the 'young adult' audience. There is some decent writing in this book and aspects which stand above the rather derivative ones. However, it is not a book I can like due to what I feel are inappropriate foci for it. Ironically I feel curious to see where Clare went with the remaining two books since she killed the incest and effectively had the prime antagonist vanquished.

'The Concrete Blonde' by Michael Connelly

This book was published in 1994 and is the third in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. I think it is the best of those that I have read so far which seems to confirm what for me seems to be increasingly true: that you need to give a crime novelist at least 3 books for them to get into their stride with a character. The book with video cassettes, pagers and US Vietnam veterans in early middle age, feels very of its time. What is galling, though, is the highlighting of black suspects being choked to death and unarmed suspects being shot dead by police feels like elements taken from the current US news, even 27 years later. Some things never seem to change in the USA.

Unlike the previous book, 'The Black Ice' (1993), this one is very taut. In part this is because much of the action takes place in the courtroom. Harry Bosch is facing a civil case brought by the widow of an unarmed serial killer known as The Dollmaker that he shot and killed four years earlier when the man was reaching for a toupee rather than a gun. This means Bosch is kept on quite a leash at times having to rush back to court. To confuse matters it comes to light that either he killed the wrong man or there is a copycat killer who has been active at the same time. The jeopardy that Bosch faces in investigating whether he did make a mistake with his suspicions or not adds another layer to the story. There are some decent twists and it is good to see the detective as being as flawed as anyone else. There is also the extra elements of his antagonisms with both the prosecuting attorney and his own rather ineffectual lawyer. We also see the complexities that his position makes in terms of his developing relationship with Sylvia Moore, the widow of a colleague whose murder he investigated in the previous book.

Overall, the novel manages to balance having twists and various layers without losing the reader. It gives what feels like a decent picture of Los Angeles, both the upmarket and seedy sides of it and in showing how dangerous it is for citizens at risk for their lives both from criminals and the police. Unfortunately in almost three decades, that situation has not changed. However, it does mean that Connelly's book has a currency rather than beginning to feel entirely like a historical crime novel.

Non-Fiction

'My Favourite People and Me, 1978-1988' by Alan Davies

I saw the documentary programme, 'Alan Davies' Teenage Rebellion' (2010) in which Davies went back to where he grew up in Essex and met with people he had known in his youth as well as celebrities he had followed, notably Paul Weller. I imagine a lot of that is based on this book published the previous year. It is a kind of free-flowing autobiography in sections concerning a single year in this period, but with chapters using people that Davies was interested in as the hook. Often, though, he does not really come to the individual until the end of the relevant chapter. 

Davies is less than two years older than me. He went to a private school, his mother died when he was young, he was abused by his father (the focus of his most recent biography but there are shadows of that in this book) who remarried a neighbour and they were much richer than my family, e.g. having fly-drive 3-week holidays in the USA; he was bought both a motor scooter and a car as soon as he could have them; I did not have a car until I was in my mid-30s. Davies was far more successful with women than me and far more into sport, especially football, but also tennis and motorbike racing, so those celebrities mean little to me. However, pop stars, the people in the news and what he thought about them, campaigns of the time, such as around nuclear weapons and animal rights, are things I know about. He tells his involvement in these things and what he thought about these people I can understand them. Though we were poorer than his family, we still felt ourselves in the middle class milieu and I knew people like him.

As you would expect from his TV performances, Davies recounts the topics he focuses on with wry humour than made me laugh out loud occasionally.  If you are interested in him as a person this is a good read and is very accessible. It would particularly appeal if you remember the era yourself or if you are interested in how (relatively well off) young people survived in an era before smart phones and social media and what issues concerned many of them, some of which now seem pretty forgotten. It would be nice to see more autobiographies using this approach which I find very refreshing and engaging.

'The Spanish Civil War' by Hugh Thomas

I was advised that as the years progressed from the first publication of this book in 1961, that Thomas revised it to move increasingly towards sympathy to the Nationalist side in the civil war. The edition I read was published in 1965 and though he had corrected some errors from the previous two, it did seem that his sympathies while supportive of the Republican government side are actually pretty balanced. He does not hold back from criticism of the Republicans' multifarious divisions that so weakened them and the vacillating attitude of the Moscow-backing Communists. 

Thomas really benefited from the fact that he was writing when many of those who had been involved in the war from both sides, let alone eye-witnesses, were still alive. He is very good at balancing up the different perspectives, especially when it is difficult to know the truth and giving the reader a fair impression of what happened.

This is a comprehensive book, my edition was 911 pages long. Thomas gives background going back into the 19th Century and making it clear that the violence of the 1930s was part of a long history of such occurrences in Spanish history. He also shows how the fact that Spain had not been involved in the First World War had left many in the country ill-informed of the nature of war. Coming at the end of the 1930s, it was to experience all the horrors of the latest military technology, especially in terms of the aerial bombing of civilians. Before discussing the war itself, Thomas goes through the different political groupings. While the divisions on the Republican side are well known, he shows those among the Nationalists too, given the range of groups which joined what had been primarily a military uprising.

The book is good on the social and economic aspects of the war, yet also provides detailed accounts of the various battles, aided by dome simple but informative line-drawn maps. It makes clear that those who somehow pretend that General Franco, progressed slowly to avoid damaging so much of Spain are mistaken. He stated this but it is clear that even with massive support from Italy and Germany, his soldiers were often struggling to make advances but when they entered towns they carried out massacres which Spain had long become accustomed to. I had not realised how close the Nationalists came to grinding to a halt. Even in 1938 if the supply of German war materiel had dried up then, the war most likely would have come to a stalemate.

Thomas is good on all the various individuals who were involved and highlights things such as Irishmen fighting on both sides and the black American soldiers and commanders who fought in the Republican International Brigades, fighting alongside white comrades when the US Army was still segregated. Someone needs to make a movie about ex-Corporal Oliver Law, the black commander of the Washington Battalion. The age of the book is shown up by how Thomas feels to seem physical details such as how fat someone was or whether they had a lot of sex, are important for ascertaining their character.

The British come out of the story very poorly. I know some wanted the Nationalists to win, on the basis that while democracy was fine for Britain other countries were better under dictators. However, a lot of the British policy, blocking the elected government from buying arms and yet introducing a non-intervention policy so poor that tens of thousands of Italian troops fought for the Nationalists, just seems to be incompetence. It is only in the light of Neville Chamberlain's utter failings as prime minister that his predecessor Stanley Baldwin could seem even mildly competent. In many ways Britain's actions ensured that the Nationalists won, especially in the context of how close the fight was throughout, contrary to what now tends to be the popular view of it.

Overall, despite its age, this is a very good book if you want to really get into seeing what happened in the Spanish Civil War in detail. It remains a good counter-balance to rather lazy assumptions about the war which have slipped into popular history portrayals. It certainly shows that there are many more stories to the story of the war than is commonly recognised. Americans in particular seem to be missing out on the role which their nationals played in the conflict, at a time when, in other historical aspects, the role played by black people is being highlighted.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown; read by Jeff Harding

It is ironic that I ended up listening to this at some of the same time as I was reading 'The Awful Secret' (2000) as they feature the same theory about Jesus Christ being married and having children. When this novel came out in 2003, I was irritated at the efforts that people went to prove how 'wrong' Brown was, down to minute details about where a particular stone is in a corridor at the Louvre gallery in Paris as this somehow 'proved' he was something - lazy, misguided, trying to trick people - I am not sure. They seemed to forget that he had written a work of fiction and if they had dug into the details in a Jack Reacher novel, let alone a James Bond one, they would have found much the same. Listening to the book - having seen the 2006 movie years ago, in part, I realised why they felt compelled to set up such 'uncovering' of the book.

While there is chasing around Paris, London and parts of Scotland, the book is less an adventure and more a lecture. There are huge sections of exposition by one or more of the main characters to others. Fortunately, at least it is not all mansplaining as Sophie Neveu, police cryptoanalyst, is knowledgeable in her field and about Paris. However, what tends to happen is the characters go to a location, decipher what they find there and then talk at length about how the story of Jesus's wife, Mary Magdalene was suppressed, especially after the Council of Nicea which decided that Jesus had been a son of God and not entirely mortal. Added to that, down the centuries, the Christian churches, in this case primarily the Catholic Church saw benefit in underplaying or even dismissing the role of women in early Christianity so ensuring an entirely male Christian priesthood until recent changes in some Protestant churches.

There are some reasonable set pieces of action, escaping from the authorities. The role of Opus Dei looms large with a monk-assassin, Silas, aided in hunting down the protagonists and an Opus Dei member, Captain Fache, leading the French police investigation and granted great powers in doing it. There are a couple of twists with people not being who they seem which are fine. However, I would not say that the book gripped me. The exposition is interesting enough but in the years since the book was published, it has become common knowledge so it probably a lot less surprising than it might have been back then. I had always thought it a surprise that Jesus, as a 34-year old Jewish workman of the 1st Century CE, had not married. I did wonder if he was a widower, so the fact that he had a wife at some stage or another was never really a surprise to me. The fact that he was supposed to have come from a Jewish royal family as Brown states, seems more surprising as, surely, then he would not have spent his life working as a Nazarene carpenter. Anyway, overall the book is not bad, it is more that it is an adventure story used as a basis for delivering a series of lectures.

Jeff Harding is an American and has that rather breathless narration that seems so common with US audio book readers. His French accents do rather sound as if they are from the comedy series, ''Allo, 'Allo', but maybe that is what a lot of listeners expect. He does the female voices surprisingly well.

Books I Read In March

Fiction

 'Chasing Embers' by James Bennett

Somehow I managed to get a review copy of this book, second hand. Consequently some of the issues like repetition of words may not have turned up in the finally published version of the book. It is not a bad book. It is the first in the Ben Garston series about the only dragon permitted to survive outside of a sleep following a deal between humans and various magical beings in 1215. At times it reminds me of the books by Cassandra Clare, especially the opening scenes in New York and Garston's questions about relations with a human. (Why do authors assume we all have an encyclopaedic knowledge of New York's districts, bridges, etc. in our heads?) Witches, fairies and knightly families turn up. Ben fortunately can morph into a human and or a kind of humanoid dragon, is very strong and armoured and can fly. Being given clothes half-way through the book which adjust to his changes does make him a little like a superhero. There are cliches, not just around New York but a confrontation smashing up the British Museum. The poor place is overused in fantasy stories.

Aside from Garston's hang-ups, the release of another older dragon in Somaliland breaks all the agreements between the different beings. Furthermore in turns out this dragon is being used as a portal to permit an evil priest/would-be god back into the world. The action goes from the USA to Britain to the Alps and on to Egypt. While as others have commentated, Bennett seems to throw absolutely everything from fantasy into the novel, there are reasonable set-piece scenes such as Garston escaping the witches in New York and battling the other dragon in the Alps. The climax at a power station south of Cairo, suffers from the same problems as some of these scenes in fantasy stories, that it drags on far too long. By the end of it, you are not really concerned who is trying to achieve what power or who has been defeated. Trimming down that section would have helped maintain the momentum of what was a fast-paced novel up until then. While Bennett uses mounds of tropes from fantasy, I am glad he tried some things a little different and brought in, carefully, myths from Egypt and Somaliland, to give a slightly different perspective. While I would not rush out to buy the next Garston book, if I saw it in my local charity shop, I would pick it up.

'Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates' by Tom Robbins

This is the prime reason why I have read so few books this month. It was 416 pages long in the edition I had but the print was so small that in a normal print it would probably be 2-300 pages longer; it certainly felt it. While I am often disappointed by what I read, there are few occasions when I really regret buying a book. I think 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth and 'Ostland' (2013) by Tom Cain have been the two up until now that I would have put in that category. This book by Robbins has become the third. This was his seventh book at the time (2000), but I cannot really understand how he ever got published in the first place, let alone repeatedly. Robbins uses a sentence where a word would do. His writing is incredibly laboured with incessant feeble attempts to make humour. It is actually quite painful to read while he pfaffs around with silly narrative and diversions.

The title comes from a line by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud and has some tangential relevance to the story. This book is about a CIA agent simply known as Switters who is blackmailed by his hacker grandmother in taking her aged parrot to the Amazon jungle in Peru. While there he is persuaded to meet with a tribal leader whose head has been distorted into a pyramid shape. This man then curses Switters that if he ever sets his feet on the ground again he will die instantly. Switters spends almost all the rest of the book in a wheelchair or on stilts. He is then sent by the CIA (in his wheelchair) to Syria to work with a Kurdish group. Returning from that mission he encounters a small group of nuns in a convent built around an oasis and aids them in seeing off intruders and trying to get their order reinstated. The book sounds ridiculous and lives up to that. It is a massive conceit by Robbins who seems to believe he is witty, even, perhaps funny.

These problems would be bad enough, but there is an unpleasant sexual element in there too. Switters who is in his mid-thirties obsesses over his teenaged step-sister. She is only 12 when he first sees her naked and while 16 by the time of the novel, he keeps wanting to have sex with her and effectively browbeats her into offering her virginity to him. He also lusts after any girl he encounters in South America and the Middle East, making this book really be about a paedophile. Later, in the convent, Switters falls for one of the nuns, ten years his senior. Through a miracle, despite having sex as a young woman, her hymen has regrown and she will only have anal sex with him. The willingness of these women to comply with such a misogynistic, paedophilic man for some unknown reason, stretches credulity to breaking point. Robbins finally tires of the whole project and abruptly ends it. The book looks interesting and has good reviews on the cover (though I should have suspected something was wrong when I saw one was written by Thomas Pynchon). However, I really feel dirtied by buying and reading this book. While I do not believe in censorship, I would certainly encourage you to stay away from anything by Robbins.

Non-Fiction

'Ten Days that Shook the World' by John Reed

I have been very poor in selecting what to read this month. While not as offensive as the Robbins book, I was very frustrated by this one too. Reed was an American Communist who was in Russia at the time of the revolutions of 1917. While he witnessed a great deal of what happened during the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, his ardent support from them makes this a highly unreliable book. I bought it second hand when studying modern history more than thirty years ago and did not read the warnings on the cover about how poor it was. The book is useful in some respects. Reed identifies the multiple parties active in Petrograd [St. Petersburg] during 1917 and includes transcripts of speeches, various regulations that were passed, articles and propaganda from them. He hared around all the various locations of the different groups and later went to Tsarskoye Selo which the revolutionary forces opposed to the Bolshevik coup d'etat were able to briefly hold and to Moscow where the fighting between different factions was fiercer than in the capital, Petrograd.

What is so infuriating about this book is how Reed's zealotry blinds him even to things that he reports. Like the Bolsheviks himself, he lumps all of the other parties, no matter whether they were revolutionary parties like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs) in with the Tsar and his military; landowners and other rich people. This is despite the fact that the Bolsheviks took the land reform policies of the SRs as their own and even saw value in continuing the education body that the coalition Provisional Government had established after the February/March revolution which had seen the removal of the Tsar. Thus, even these Socialist and revolutionary groups are portrayed as being traitors to the ordinary people, whereas in fact they had worked hard to try to sort out the situation in Russia for them.

Reed's view is that anyone apart from the Bolsheviks (and when even that party began to split, just Lenin's faction of it) is complicit with the old regime. He sees conspiracies everywhere to a ridiculous degree. The maddest of these is his insistence that Russia went to war in 1914 so that it could be defeated and the Germans occupy large areas of the country. He believes that there were no genuine shortages despite the dysfunctional nature of Russia's agriculture and the exhaustion of peasants and of the transport system. No, for Reed, any shortages must be because everyone in Russia, aside from the Bolsheviks, was deliberately hoarding and sabotaging the country to starve and freeze the Russian people. Despite apparently supporting self-determination, any national groupings that appeared are condemned as simply tools of the landowners. He will not accept any other view than narrow Bolshevism interpreted by Lenin as legitimate.

Reed keeps on insisting that the Bolsheviks had some miraculous support right across Russia from the 'decent' working people. However, even the documents he includes shows how narrow their support and how unwilling so many even workers and soldiers were to support the Bolsheviks. Quite rightly after the partially successful coup in early November 1917, they accuse the Bolsheviks of stealing the revolution. Yet, for Reed, overnight things magically changed and with the Bolsheviks setting up their own government, things like crime abruptly stopped and people though cold and starving are marching around the city in ecstasy at the change which in fact did nothing to improve their circumstances. Support for the Bolsheviks largely stemmed from a wish to end the war, but as the Bolsheviks' revolutionary opponents highlighted, they continued the war and opened the gates to the Germans to occupy vast areas of the country.

People forget that Russia lost the First World War as was made clear by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Naively the Bolsheviks felt that somehow if they declared peace every other country was cease fighting and their workers would rise up. This delusion meant that rather than end the fighting Russia was plagued by wars, a civil war then a war against Poland, lasting into 1921. Reed had died of typhus in 1920 so missed how accurate many of the predictions of an enduring conflict he includes in his book, actually came true. He ridicules them but is really shown to be the fool.

The book does show how many people tried to prevent a civil war and to have a democratic or Socialist government deal with the country. Important examples are the powerful railway workers trade union which refused to move any soldiers going to fight any other Russians. The peasants too, neglected by the Bolsheviks sought a coalition government and to bring about measured reform. However, as they did throughout the Bolsheviks removed all these more sober representatives. What we see is a criminal clique establishing itself, referring to some fantasy of a workers' and later peasants' movement supporting them and shutting down anyone not whole heartedly supporting their very specific line.

It is galling to read how Reed perpetuated so many myths to the English-speaking world about the Bolshevik seizure of power. It is horrendous that those who genuinely sought to improve Russia and keep it from further years of war were outmanoeuvred through violence and terror, even before the civil war had properly begun. Reed ignoring the evidence he provides himself shows he was no genuine eyewitness, instead he just produced a piece of propaganda which is so pathetic as to invite ridicule. There are some useful details in this book if you are looking at the Bolshevik seizure of power, but the narrative around it, simply illustrates how a man can let himself be so led astray by fanaticism that he misrepresents even the information he might include in a book.

Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction

'Life of Pi' by Yann Martell

I do not really know why I bought this book. I realised, however, that I had been misled by the images associated with it and the movie based on it, showing a boy and a tiger in a small, otherwise empty lifeboat. In fact they are aboard a lifeboat with room to hold 32 people and with sufficient supplies to feed them for months and equipment to, for example, purify sea water and catch fish. While the book does play around with what is fact and what is fiction, in reality, the set-up that dominates the book is less fantastical than the images make it appear. Much of the narrative is about practical steps that the protagonist takes not only to survive months at sea but also to control the tiger on the large boat with him.

The book focuses on Piscine Molitor 'Pi' Patel born in the early 1960s to a zoo owner and his wife in Pondicherry in India. The first part of the book seems very detached from the bulk of the novel and details Pi's childhood and how he ended up following Christianity, Islam and Hinduism simultaneously. Though the book tells the reader it is about God, aside from some mention of prayers, this element is forgotten as the book moves into its main part. More important are the lessons in animal psychology that Pi gains from his father.

The main part of the story begins when Pi is 16 and is emigrating with his family from Pondicherry to Canada, in response to the regime of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Pi's father owned a zoo in Pondicherry and with them are many of the animals which have been sold to zoos in North America. The ship sinks and Pi is the only human survivor ending up in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and the tiger which eats them all. The main part of the book is how Pi stays alive and it is very much a 'Robinson Crusoe' style narrative with him learning by trial and error how to get water and food, while working out how to deal with the tiger. His body suffers and he becomes blind at one stage, meeting another castaway. He arrives on an island built of algae. These latter phases the book becomes less credible, in contrast to the more gripping and sharply practical elements earlier. However, they add to the sense that Pi's ordeal has scrambled his thoughts or has led to hallucinations.

I can accept the slippage of chronology, but I think after the battle for survival the more fantastical elements towards the end made me feel a little betrayed. I guess Martell was aiming to sow doubt in our minds and undermine what was a reasonably credible story. Even then the Japanese officials who interview Pi disbelieve the whole thing and he makes up a completely different account for them. Thus, we see that Martell's intention was not really a survival story at all, but rather seeing how far he could push something with us still feeling it might be true. Though I guess I would have welcomed a more straightforward survival story and this toying with the reader is irritating, fortunately, I accepted the book more than if it had been the highly philosophical, metaphysical text I had expected from all the images.

'The Black Ice' by Michael Connelly

This is the second book in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. It is set some months after the first one, 'The Black Echo' (1992): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-i-read-in-january.html so some of the same characters in the police force feature. It is a bit more deft than the previous book and Bosch does not seem obliged to sleep with every professional woman he comes across. Mexican women seem out of bounds to him, but that is not really a surprise in the context of this book. Much of the action happens in or on the border with Mexico. The country is portrayed incredibly negatively with almost everyone in the police corrupt, the towns shabby and stinking and the people, at best, disingenuous if not outright hostile. At times it feels very much like a stereotype portrayal which might have been tolerable in 1993, but will rile readers these days.

The story starts with an apparent suicide of a narcotics officer who has left a case for Bosch, though as before he struggles to get assigned not just to that but to any case. Another officer involved seeks quickly to leave the police and there seems to be a connection to a dead Mexican labourer who it appears has been brought from the border. The black ice of the title is a McGuffin, a mix of heroin, cocaine and PCP and initially, especially with references to Hawaii, is a bit of a distraction. The plot is complex enough with the mixing up of drug smugglers, a company producing sterile mayflies and a number of police officers who may be corrupt or just scared.

The action is handled reasonably well. As before, it is clear that Connelly was aiming for a modern version of the hard-boiled detective novels of the mid-20th Century, there is even an explicit reference to 'The Long Goodbye' (1953) by Raymond Chandler. There are various set-piece scenes, though at times Connelly goes too far. The involvement of bull fighting at various stages, seems part of his stereotype of Mexico and then seems levered in, especially when the champion bull attacks the helicopter Bosch is in. I guess Connelly felt he knew his immediate market, but at times it seems he is trying to be Chandler and Ernest Hemingway all wrapped into one, rather than Michael Connelly. As a result he ends up with what is now cliched when he does show that he can do better when subtler. There are interesting ideas with questions of identity and the fact that US Caucasians see Hispanics as a different race, even if they are US citizens, let alone of they come from Latin America, but Connelly while engaging with these a little, does not seem willing to press these issues.

Overall it is a reasonable thriller with some nice twists. However, you get a sense that somewhere in there is a better author who is being weighed down by feeling obliged to pay tribute to his heroes and to comply very much with US readers' expectations of how Mexico and Mexicans should, in their eyes, be portrayed. Added to these, especially in the early stages there are too many dead ends, which burden the book without adding genuine mystery. At times a better Connelly flashes out from beneath all this accretion and I can only hope that this version of him wins out in the subsequent books of his that I have been given.

Non-Fiction

'Bodyguard of Lies' by Anthony Cave Brown

This book at 947 pages long is the reason why I have read few other books this month. The book is supposed to be about the various deception techniques used by the British and Americans to aid them in fighting in Europe and North Africa. There are good sections on these issues, whether decoy activities such as Operation Mincemeat or tricks played with wireless signals or physical ones such as inflatable tanks and parachutist dolls to mislead enemy reconnaissance. There is good analysis of the 'weather war' aiming to keep the Germans ignorant of developing conditions and Operation Starkey the 1943 deception plan to keep the Germans thinking an invasion was imminent but which costs many lives among the French Resistance.

These elements are lost, however, in large swathes of text which is at best tangential to the story and often is irrelevant and covered better in other books with a different focus. Yes, the breaking of Enigma was important for showing the governments whether their deception schemes were working, but he gives far too much general information on the decrypting. The same goes for the German resistance to Hitler. He sees a single thread of groups among the German commanders and especially Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr. However, again, though the information they fed to the Allies confirmed whether the deceptions had worked, there was no need for the immense detail on these groups or their plots to arrest or kill Hitler, all covered better in other books. The same goes for the information about Field Marshal Rommel throughout and then the Normandy landings. Yes, deception played a big role in misleading Rommel and in aiding the landings, but we do not need to then read immense detail about Rommel's life, the landings and the advance into Normandy. By shovelling in all this general information on the war, Brown very much weakens the points he is trying to make.

I was rather cautious about it having read 'Unreliable Witnesses' by Nigel West back in December 2019: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html which critiqued some of the claims that Brown makes in this book. In the end though, given how much Brown covers, those flaws were minor. Brown does write in a very populist style with sweeping, almost tabloid text at times. He also does nothing to hide his prejudices. He is very anti-French and says little good about any French leader and very few of the French resistance. He sees as 'crazed', Georg Elser the man who only failed to assassinate Adolf Hitler in November 1939 because due to bad weather, the dictator left the building a matter of minutes early; the explosion killed 3 'old fighters' of the Nazi Party. No-one else came this close to killing Hitler until July 1944 and Elser was only caught on the Swiss border.

The book is written very much for an American audience, so in contrast American commanders get a sympathetic hearing. There is sloppiness at points. Paul von Hindenburg did not become President of Germany until 1925 and never governed from Weimar. Part of his problem is that he started the book in 1965 and published in 1976. As he details in a chapter at the end, when he begun the book almost everything about his topic was still secret. It was not until 1974 that anything was said publicly about the breaking of Enigma or Bletchley Park, let alone many of the deception schemes, in part because there was worry that this would weaken the position in regards to the USSR during the Cold War. It seems that Brown already had one very generalised book ready and then in the mid-1970s when some details on his actual topic came to light, he rushed that into the book.

Given the timing of the publication, gaps in Brown's knowledge remain. He is oblivious to the difficulties Bletchley Park had in breaking the Shark variant of Enigma in 1943 and in fact portrays the Battle of the Atlantic in that phase contrary to what happened. He seems oblivious to Alan Turing's conviction for indecency in 1952, due to a homosexual relationship, at the time something illegal. Consequently he does not know about the medication Turing was compelled to then take which began shifting the traits of his gender. As a result, Turing's suicide by poisoning is a mystery to Brown which he simply puts down to the wartime stress the man faced.

For all these flaws, this could have been a good book if it had been reduced to 400 pages or so and Brown had focused on his supposed actual topic. There are aspects in here which are interesting and still do not turn up elsewhere. His questioning of how far Allied agents and resistance fighters were sacrificed to give credence to the deception plans is good. How the manipulation of wireless traffic and the use of double agents are also strong points. He does show how deception, especially Fortitude South which long convinced the Germans, even after D-Day, that there would be an Allied landing in the Pas-de-Calais reduced the German response to the Normandy invasion and so spared Allied lives. However, these are points you have to sift through all the general stuff, which while interesting, simply detracts from what should have been much more clearly the focus of this book.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest' by Stieg Larsson; read by Martin Wenner

This is the final book in Larsson's immensely popular Millennium trilogy which it has taken me over a year to get through, largely because the books provide diminishing returns. See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/05/books-i-listened-toread-in-may.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html for my reviews of the audio books of the previous two. While 'The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo' (2005) was an old fashioned murder mystery with sexual violence layered on top and 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' (2006) a clearer action-adventure, this third book is really a legal story. I would not say 'thriller' because though there is some conspiracy - a sub-section of the Swedish secret police trying to keep secrets around a Soviet defector - and some violence, most of the book is stodgy legal wrangling. Lisbeth Salander, the protagonist spends much of the novel in a hospital bed just two doors from her abusive father who had her sectioned and she tried to kill in the previous book. The proximity of the two seems ridiculous.

Apparently Larsson planned ten books in the series, before his death. However, it is apparent he had used everything up before this book. What we get is long stretches of people being very smug, whether the aged secret police, detectives who oppose or support Salander and the journalists who are working to have her sectioning reversed. That latter element perhaps now has some greater currency in the light of the Britney Spears wrangling, but it hardly makes an exciting or even engaging story. Larsson also comes across as rather pathetic in two regards. One is him constantly saying what piece of technology or software everyone is using, many of which must have been out-of-date even before the books were published. His attempts to give it some edgy currency become very irritating. The second is the character of journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Blomkvist is clearly an avatar of Larsson, a journalist aged 60 at the time of his death in 2004. Blomkvist is a philanderer, who despite not really attractive traits is able to get a whole string of women, some twenty years his junior to sleep with him and not to get fussed when he moves on to another. This is somehow seen as an asset rather than a flaw in the character and is rather galling as Larsson seems to miss the fact that Blomkvist is on the same spectrum as the men who abuse Salander. Instead, even independent, courageous Salander somehow cannot resist him.

This book lumbers on even in audio form, to the extent that by the time you reach the epilogue which wraps up one character, you have actually forgotten entirely about him. While the first book could be criticised as being over-rated, this third book certainly can have that charge levelled against it. The whole thing is really simply an over-stretched epilogue to 'The Girl Who Played with Fire'. How tedious the subsequent novels would have been one can only speculate. I imagine if Larsson had lived, the publishers may have even looked at this third book with askance and have sought heavy revisions.

Wenner does reasonably well in trying to bring life to this novel. There are so many characters of both genders and various ages, that he has to engage a whole range of voices. Consequently, while some are given a Swedish accent, many end up sounding like they come from regions of the UK. As before, Salander sounds very much like a woman from a London housing estate.

'Past Secrets' by Cathy Kelly: read by Niamh Cusack

When buying bundles of audio books in the way I used to, sometimes you get unexpected books in the mix. This was one of those which I guess a few years ago would have been termed 'chick lit'. It is focused on three female neighbours and one of their daughters, living or coming to live on a street in the Republic of Ireland. As the title suggests they each have a secret from their past, an illegitimate child, an affair and self-harm. Challenging circumstances lead them to reassess them keeping these things secret. Kelly attracts very opposite opinions, with some loving her work, it does sell well, and others condemning it for being too twee and unrealistic. The fact that Amber, the daughter of Faye, one of the three gets her art work bought up by a wealthy American and that Maggie, cheated on by her lecturer partner, finds a lovely local mechanic who she almost immediately has sexual relations with are seen as unrealistic. In addition, there is scepticism that people would hold to such secrets for so long and that, for example, the husband of the third woman, Christie gets so angry about an affair she had with a Polish artist 25 years earlier that he leave her.

I guess there is a challenge with these books. Kelly presumably wanted challenges for her characters but also did not want this to be a story of misery. She could have had it go that way with failures for all of the 4 protagonists, but I guess not many people would buy that. One point that does seem to anger many readers is that she has four stories running in parallel with minimal connection between them. As I know from my own writing there is a real hostility these days, no matter the genre, to authors having parallel stories rather than sticking to one, with, at most, sub-plots. I am not really sure why there is so much hostility to the parallel story approach, but it is certainly fuelled by online commentary which is very indignant if authors, even those as well established as Kelly, 'break the rules' which readers insist upon.

For what it is, the book is fine. It may not be a genre I would normally turn to, but I was not offended by it. I found it believable based on people and their behaviour I have seen in real life. The pacing was fine. There are happy endings, but that stopped the book being a tale of misery and to some degree any book with romance in has to stretch credibility as it is incredibly rare that any relationship starts or persists the way they are shown in novels. I am always interested to see what tropes go with different genres and one thing that was striking about this one is the level of detail of description. Paintings are clearly important to Kelly and you could paint her characters from the way she describes them and indeed all the houses in the street. I think some readers would find this unnecessary or even overwhelming, but it seems to fit reasonably well with the book.

Niamh Cusack is ideally cast to read this book, with accents that sound southern Irish but not sufficiently that they are impenetrable to listeners from other parts of the English-speaking world. Her American ones are reasonable too. She is good at getting the emotions across when this is called for.

Interviewing the Alternate History Community: Alexander Rooksmoor on the Sea Lion Press Website

While I imagine anyone who regularly reads this blog will know quite a lot about me. However, if you are particularly interested in my alternate history writing and what I think about the genre, you could do worse than check out the article about me by Gary Oswald. It appears on the Sea Lion Press website: https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/  As well as being the leading publishers of alternate history books, they have regular articles including interviews with alternate history authors and other types of creators.

The article on me is based on an fascinating interview in which we ranged over how I got into the genre, the different phases that my writing has gone through, the challenges of fact in historical fiction and the potential crossovers for crime and alternate history fiction. The article can be found here: https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/post/interviewing-the-ah-community-alexander-rooksmoor

Books I Read In January

Fiction

 'The Dark Echo' by Michael Connelly

This was Connelly's first crime novel. He remains popular after almost three decades of publishing and I was given a number of his books. Published in 1992 it features Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch a police detective in Los Angeles, working in the Hollywood Division after having killed a suspected serial killer. From the outset, it is clear Connelly is seeking to reproduce the 'hard boiled' detective novels of the 1930s and 1940s with lots of tough talking and jargon. Though he lives in a fancy house in the hills there is a lot of time in seedy motels. We know Connelly was a big fan of Raymond Chandler. However, unlike Chandler and Hammett, Connelly also has a slightly different trope that he can tap into. At times this book felt like one of those glossy thriller movies of the late 1980s/early 1990s, like 'Jagged Edge' (1985) and 'Fatal Attraction' (1989). The book was published the same year that 'Basic Instinct' came out. The sex between Bosch and Eleanor Wish, the FBI agent he is partnered up with certainly seems to stem from that kind of approach rather than being necessary to the story. The third trope which shapes the book is the Vietnam War experience one. The timing of the book is important as in 1992, American men who had fought in Vietnam in their late teens/early twenties were now in their early forties. Though it might not have been intentional, the book certainly reminds us how much harm the involvement in the war did to so many in the USA, let alone Vietnam.

The driver for the plot stems from the war, with Bosch being drawn into investigating the murder of an old comrade of his from when they both fought as specialists in clearing out the tunnels used by the Vietcong to move between villages; the 'black echo' referring to the sense of being in these tunnels facing an unseen enemy. The dead man's skills link into a complicated raid on safe deposit box depositories though aimed at two cruel South Vietnamese police officers who were brought to live lives of luxury in the USA. At times, as a result you feel there is a little too much going on, and I have not even included the twists and betrayals which also feature before the end. 

I guess that Connelly needs to be commended for keeping all the 'balls in the air' while generally not allowing the book to sink into a complex mess. It feels that there were certain things Connelly felt he had to include. He was slightly too young to have served in Vietnam, turning 19 only in 1975, but I imagine there would have been men of his generation around who would have experienced it. I tend not to judge an author by the first book in their series, because often they have to 'get over' aspects that may have been hanging around for a long time and subsequent books are better reads. In many ways, though he drew on so much that had been seen elsewhere, the combination just about works. At times elements seem pretty contrived: Bosch getting assigned to the case, the Internal Affairs handling of him, the very fast relationship with Wish and the stuff in the tunnels. However, maybe that rather than subtlety was what readers of the 1990s were seeking and no-one can deny his books are popular. I am certainly not going to throw away the rest and trust they will improve as I work through the Bosch sequence.

'The Jade Man's Eyes' by Michael Moorcock

It has been a long time since I read work by Moorcock, an author whose books I used to eat up as a young man. This is a little oddity, a 75-page novella published by a small obscure press, into marijuana, in 1973. It is set in the world of the Young Kingdoms and Elric of Melniboné, Moorcock's fantasy, infirm albino anti-hero who lives in a fatalistic world that the author intended as a counterbalance to the muscle-bound fantasy heroes like Conan the Barbarian of the time; the first Elric book appeared in 1961 and Moorcock was returning to producing Elric stories as late as 2010. This story was later revised and formed the third part of 'The Sailor on the Seas of Fate' (1976). It sees Elric and his companion Moonglum enlisted to sail up a river in a jungle covered region of the south-west of the world to visit the abandoned city of R'len K'ren A'a where Elric's own people originated before leaving it for the large island of Melniboné. Unsurprisingly the novella has a kind of 'Heart of Darkness' (1899) feel to it, with numerous members of the crew being killed by the part-reptile/part-flamingo locals. Elric comes back into contact with his demonic patron Arioch who ultimately is persuaded to lift curses from the city. As is typical with the Elric stories, there is a fatalistic sense throughout added to the decay he sees. It really needs to be read in that context rather than alone. However, it does remind me that the 21st Century has seen Elric books published that I have not read yet.

'The Blood of Rome' by Simon Scarrow

Though over the last couple of decades I have been aware of the range of action novels set in Roman times, it was only when, finding this in my local charity shop and seeing it was the 17th book in Scarrow's Eagles of Empire series (the 20th book came out last year) did I realise the scale of some of these and presumably how many copies they sell. Scarrow has written a lot set in Britain, but I think I was drawn to this one featuring two officers he has followed throughout when they are despatched to help restore a Roman puppet king from Iberia (a region of the Caucasus not in southern Europe) to the throne of Armenia in eastern Anatolia as a buffer between the Roman and Parthian empires. While there is obviously a lot of back story, it was not too difficult to pick up the threads. 

It is no surprise that Bernard Cornwell feels Scarrow as a rival (or at least he says so in a quote on the cover) as he taps into that approach which worked so well for Cornwell with the Sharpe series, though Scarrow does use modern swearing which at times seems rather odd. The challenge of ordinary soldiers, often, especially in this novel, frustrated by politics and trying to keep some kind of decency in times of very brutal war, is a solid basis. I was rather frustrated by the wrangling with the puppet, Radamistus, a cruel and brutal commander, but this seems to be based on historical fact and his behaviour meant, as shown in the novel, after being put on the throne by the Romans, he was soon deposed. Otherwise the battles, with good, but not excessive, detail of how the Roman Army functioned are solid. It sweeps along briskly. While I was not left with an urge to read more, I certainly would not look away if any more books from the series came across my path in the charity shop.

'Crowner's Quest' by Bernard Knight

This is the third book in the Crowner John series and by the end, as this goes from December 1194 to January 1195, they have covered four months. Following tight after each other in this police procedural series does at times make it feel like a medieval equivalent of 'The Bill' (broadcast 1983-2010). Sir John De Wolfe the sole coroner for Devon, has just two assistants so he does feel a bit like (Chief) Inspector Morse who always seemed to be lacking staff for the tasks he needed to do. Knight is good on the historical detail and especially the legal complexities of the newly created role of coroner in relation to the existing sheriffs. The philandering nature of De Wolfe, though it brings in other characters, seems rather forced. In this story, though it is used against him when he is framed for a rape. 

There are some good elements, the finding of the hanged body of a canon reminded me of 'The Name of the Rose' (1980). However, certainly in contrast to the preceding book, 'The Poisoned Chalice' (1998), which had a tautness to it, this novel by Knight becomes rather overblown. De Wolfe becomes involved in a renewed plot to replace King Richard I with his brother Prince John and there is a rather madcap hunt for treasure buried by a Saxon lord. The book climaxes with a joust to the death. Though there have been incidents of combat in the novels, De Wolfe and his large henchman, Gwyn, being old crusaders, this rather epic tone sits rather uncomfortably with the series. I wondered if an agent or publisher had encouraged Knight to 'take it up a gear' in terms of drama. In contrast, I imagine many readers who might have come to this after Ellis Peters's Cadfael series would be looking for something more cerebral and slow-burning. However, I am conscious that Knight was writing at a time when there was a flurry of medieval detective novels, which I have not read, and so their nature may have impacted on his work. In addition, as with the philandering - two of De Wolfe's lovers feature in this book - I do feel at times as if it is the author, as an ageing man (he was 67 when the book was published) living out his fantasies through his character who is around 40, so old for the times.

It is not a bad book, but after a promising start, it went off in directions that stretched my credibility and that undermined my enjoyment of the attention to detail and the generally rich portrayal of 12th Century life, making use of real places and often actual people, of the time. I do have a number more of these books to read and hope they get back on track.

'City of Ashes' by Cassandra Clare

This second book in the Mortal Instruments pentalogy follows much the same pattern as the first, City of Bones' (2007). The heroine, Clary, while very much part of the Shadowhunter world, is still a beginner. In this book, her father, the evil Valentine, moves to seize the second of the Mortal Instruments, the Soul Sword which can compel Shadowhunters to tell the truth and can also summon and control demons. Valentine aims to carry out a ceremony to reverse the sword's alignment enabling him to create a demon army. For this he needs the blood of a werewolf, a vampire, a fae and a shadowhunter. Many of the characters from the first novel reappear, though Clary's mother is in a coma throughout the book and we are introduced to Maia a teenaged werewolf. Clary's special ability to create magic runes unavailable to most shadowhunters is also revealed. There is a lot of chasing around New York trying to recapture those Valentine has taken to sacrifice for his ritual. There is the usual bickering between the five main teenaged characters, the shadowhunters, siblings Alec and Isabelle their kind of adopted brother, Jace who is actually Clary's real brother; plus Simon her best friend and now boyfriend, who is turned into a vampire. Alec and Isabelle's mother turns up as does an Inquisitor who suspects Jace but actually muddies the water in the teenagers trying to reach Valentine.

The book moves along at a brisk pace, but you do feel it is a little formulaic. There is another climactic battle, this time in Valentine's boat on the river, full of a demon army. The most interesting character is camp warlock, Magnus Bane, who is now dating Alec. It all rather feels to have come out of the same 'factory' as the Harry Potter stories, with the young adult elements mixed in. There are unsettling references to underaged sex - Clary is only 14, much younger than show in the TV series - and there is clear signs of incest as she is deeply attracted to her newly discovered brother, Jace and is compelled to reveal these feelings by a faerie queen living under a pond in a New York park. There was enough to be going on with, with Clary being fancied by her best friend who is now a vampire and I am not sure why Clare felt compelled to add in these uncomfortable elements, though I gather from online commentary that they are kind of de rigueur these days for 'young adult' fiction, to distinguish it from children's books. The first book felt quite fresh, though it used familiar tropes. This book suggests Clare had already ran out of ideas. I have the third book and will see if she managed to pull it back or simply do yet another replica.

Non-Fiction

'African Profiles' by Ronald Segal

This book was published at the same time as 'A Short History of Africa' (1962) which I read last month; they were both part of a Penguin series of books. This one features 400 pen portraits of African male politicians which had been significant in the preceding 30-40 years. It starts with South Africa and is a good reminder of the roots of apartheid and then moves up the continent to finish with Egypt. Really only the Spanish colonies are neglected. Some countries are dealt with alone, others grouped with those ruled by the same colonial power or in other groupings. What is fascinating is, despite the diversity of countries, how many stories are so similar. So many of these men rose up through religious schools, a mix of Protestant, Catholic or Islamic. They often studied abroad and many became teachers or worked in civil service roles such as with the railways or post office and journalism was often a route for them to come to prominence.

While very dated, the book is a good reminder of elements of African history which have often been forgotten. I had not been aware of the extent of 'compelled labour' a modern form of slavery, in the Portuguese colonies or the fact that at various times South Africa had considered annexing many of its neighbouring states. The obsession with the federation of states, seen as a way to overcome the arbitrary borders imposed by colonisation, keeps coming out. Segal certainly seems to feel it is the only way for economic success, despite the failure of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria, let alone the federation, failing at the time of North and South Rhodesia [Zambia and Zimbabwe] and Nyasaland [Malawi]. There are even fantastical schemes mentioned such as the Rhodesias combining with Kenya, Uganda, Tanganiyka [part of Tanzania] and even Somalia. There is even belief of an entire continental federation. Yet, Segal highlights cannot fail to discuss the issues around tribalism and regionalism and is good on the break away of Katanga from the Congo and of course the Biafran crisis still lay ahead, though he highlights the challenges of regionalism in Nigeria.

Segal admits at the start of the book that he is partisan and his analysis of different leaders is very erratic as a result. He is certainly opposed to monarchs as in Ethiopia, Tunisia and Morocco. He seems unable to see, despite the evidence, how easily many nations were moving towards being one-party states with their leader of the time or a subsequent one, becoming leader for life, often over decades. Similarly he seems to even see potential in Nasser's military coup in Egypt without suspecting the military would end up running many countries across Africa for decades to come. He anticipates that apartheid would be short-lived and end in a violent uprising in South Africa.

Obviously we have hindsight and it is easy to see the author as naïve, yet his book itself provides clear evidence of the roots of these trends repeated in various manifestations right across Africa. He does seem unnecessarily apologist for some leaders, especially Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, perhaps because despite their rather ambivalent attachment to democracy they seemed to subscribe to his visions for Africa. The book is useful in reminding us of African leaders often now forgotten, at least in English, such as Holden Roberto, Ntsu Mokhehle, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Habib Bourguiba, Léopold Sédar Senghour, Sékou Touré and William Tubman. The book is an interesting reminder of Africa's development in the 1930s-50s and the people important in that process, though I imagine a book on this subject written today would not entirely leave out women as Segal does.