Books I Read In December

Fiction
'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman
I saw that they were televising a series of this book so I thought it might be an idea to read it. Despite being a long book not much happens. The story involves Shadow, an ex-convict who is employed by Odin to aid him in rallying other gods brought to the USA by settlers down the millennia. For much of the time Shadow lives in a small village by a lake when not being employed by Odin and encounters a range of interesting people as well as being bothered by his late wife who he inadvertently raised from the dead and who kills people who threaten him. There is an interesting concept that places and activities are imbued with belief and Gaiman features local attractions which become filled with power because people come to them. The basic concept overlaps with 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul' (1988) by Douglas Adams which was published 13 years earlier but relocating to dreary backwater towns in the USA gives Gaiman a chance to add the new twist of old gods against new gods of technology and other facets of contemporary society. While the plot drifts for far too long, there is a decent twist and above all, Gaiman writes interesting characters and portrays unexciting US settings well. Thus, despite the fantastical element there is a real lack of urgency about this book and it is, ironically, best read as a 'slice of life' novel. I cannot imagine this would make exciting watching unless you are a fan of Mike Leigh movies, but I see they are on to the third season of the TV series so I can only imagine they have long ago diverged from the novel.

'Now is the Time' by Melvyn Bragg
I once read an interview with Bragg in which he wished his novels were just a little more successful. He seems to get long listed for awards but very rarely wins. Having read this novel I can understand why. The novel is around the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Bragg shows it from various perspectives on both sides of the conflict and certainly you can learn a lot about what went on and who was involved. I particularly found the descriptions of London at the time very interesting. However, it is all written in an unsophisticated way with lots of telling rather than showing and somehow detached from the characters. Even when Wat Tyler's daughter is raped by London criminals released during the revolt, you do not feel the way you should about this. In many ways the book reminded me of novels by Henry Treece (1911-66) who wrote numerous historical novels for children. Thus, though there are points of interest, there is a lack of genuine drama in the novel and at the end you feel like you have read a lesson rather than a novel. Bragg should look to the work of Bernard Cornwell in how to add that dramatic element to scrupulously researched fiction.

'Aqua Alta' by Donna Leon
In this fifth book in the Guido Brunetti series, Leon returns to two characters from the first novel, 'Death at La Fenice' (1992), opera singer Flavia Petrelli and her female partner, archaeologist Brett Lynch. When Lynch is beaten up, Brunetti involves himself in the case which soon turns into one involving murder and faked archaeological artefacts. It is set against the backdrop of both the 'aqua alta', the flooding of Venice caused by high tides and heavy rain and the sense that those in privileged positions continue to get away with their crimes. This applies to Lynch as much as the antique collector. As noted with the previous novel, Leon appears to have got into her stride with these novels and they rise far about the first couple. The book is brisk, provides interesting details about both Venice and archaeology in China as well as setting the story in the amoral context of contemporary Italy that appears so attractive for crime novelists even those writing in English. I have five more of these novels to read. Leon continues churning them out and the 29th comes out in 2020.

'Counting Up, Counting Down' by Harry Turtledove
Around the time this book came out in 2002, I had been thinking of writing a short story about a man who travels back in time to try to improve his own life. Then I heard of the two stories at the start and end of this book, which in fact are the same story seen from the older and younger versions of the same man, Justin Kloster travelling from 2018 to 1999. The ending of these stories turns out was far more positive than the one I planned which would have ended up rather like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) movie. It brought home to me that especially if writing in a particular genre it is easy for authors to come up with similar stories of their own accord. The two stories are reasonable if a little frustrating. One interesting things are what Turtledove (originally writing this as a magazine story in the 1990s) got wrong about 2018, i.e. The Rolling Stones are still touring, 'South Park' is still very well known even by teenagers and the fad for body piercing has not waned in the slightest, in fact it has increased.

The rest of the stories in this collection are quite a mixed bag.  Despite what I have been told about my alternate history short story anthologies, there is demand for such collections. Not all of the stories are alternate history, there is some science fiction and fantasy too. There is far more sex than I had expected from reading other books by Turtledove and with religion this is a key theme through the collection. 'Vermin' about a Christian community struggling as settlers on an alien planet is well done and highlights the grave consequences of seeking comfort just for yourself or your community. Other science fiction ones are oddities, 'The Deconstruction Gang' about philosophers discussing breaking up a road, 'The Green Buffalo' about cowboys slipping through a rift in time to kill a triceratops for food and 'The Maltese Elephant', a pastiche of 'The Maltese Falcon' (novel 1930; movie 1941) are alright but not hugely engaging.

'Ils Ne Passeront Pas' conjures up the Verdun front in 1916 very well, but then, for no clear reason, throws creatures from the Biblical apocalypse at French and German soldiers, ultimately without much changing. This like 'In This Season' a magical realist story about a small number of Jews escaping Poland following the German occupation in 1939 with the aid of a golem, again has religious elements that I probably miss out on. 'After the Last Elf is Dead' is more fantastical, but equally grim, seeing a world where the evil Dark Brother has been victorious and showing the challenges even for his loyal staff which reminded me of Stalin's regime and has a very unsettling conclusion which, though, does show the likely outcome if evil does win in a fantasy setting.

Seemingly more light-hearted than those grim stories is 'Honeymouth', a fantasy story about a disreputable rider of a unicorn and while sex features in the other stories it is right at the front in this fantasy one as the title might suggest. 'Miss Manner's Guide to Greek Missology #1: Andromeda and Perseus' is interesting in reversing the roles in the stories, but I always find attempts at humour in these situations is laboured and dates poorly. 'Goddess for a Day' despite sounding like a story title set to primary school children is the best of the fantasy stories, showing the challenges of a woman employed to act as Athena, in an actual event which occurred in the 6th Century CE.

Two reasonable stories focused on religion are set in Turtledove's Videssos fantasy setting, similar to the Byzantine Empire on which he was a scholar. The first, 'The Decoy Duck' about a missionary to a nordic style land will remind readers of a very similar sub-plot in the TV series, 'Vikings' (2013-20) and given it was written long before that may have been an inspiration for it. The second, 'The Seventh Chapter' is unexciting, largely a procedural that primarily tells us more about the world Turtledove has created and religion within it.

Of the alternate histories, 'Must and Shall' set in 1942 but one in which the Union was far harsher on the Confederate States following the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, is well done as detectives seek the German weapons being sent to southern states to trigger an uprising. 'Ready for the Fatherland' is set in 1979 in Croatia in a world where Field Marshal Manstein assassinated Hitler in 1943, held back the Soviet counter-attacks and crushed the Anglo-American landing in France so a stalemate developed across Europe with the Germans and their puppet states persisting. There is a nice reference to a scene from 'The Guns of Navarone' (1961) movie and a passing one to 'Force 10 from Navarone' (1978). 'The Phantom Tolbutkin' features another similar scenario but with Ukrainian resistance fighters in the occupied USSR and turns a good twist.

Non-Fiction
'Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War' by Nigel West [Rupert Allason]

This book is probably unnecessary now, but when it came out in 1984 it proved a good corrective to the numerous books that had been appearing in the 1970s and early 1980s about spying during the Second World War. It showed me that 'Bodyguard of Lies' (1975) which I have on my shelf is riddled with errors. It also shows how without care historians can perpetuate mistakes through successive books. West looks at a number of claims in books of the time, among others, that a German spy in Orkney Islands allowed the sinking of HMS 'Royal Oak' when berthed there, that Admiral Canaris, head of German military intelligence provided material to the Allies but had also met Mata Hari, who was behind the Soviet spy ring in Switzerland during the war and whether Churchill had foreknowledge of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Most of the cases prove to be less dramatic than historians have made out and often came down to a combination of human, signals and codebreaking intelligence. As time had passed since the war, more identities of spies came out, also allowing corrections of misapprehensions. 

This is another book which would have been better for me to have read when I bought it 30+ years ago. M.R.D. Foot, the historian of S.O.E. (who I met once) was rather sniffy about this book, in part I think because West highlights some mistakes Foot made. Thus, you rather feel this book is a bit of revenge by West against authors who have too easily accepted certain stories without doing the necessary cross-checking. Allason himself is now 68 and Foot died in 2012 at the age of 92, so that element is largely irrelevant now. What I would suggest is that this short book (166 pages) should be given to people starting History degrees to alert them to how easily it is not simply to make errors, especially when based on assumptions, but to perpetuate them. If like me you are working your way through old books on the Second World War, it is also useful to have this as an accompanying corrective especially to the more exciting claims made in those books.

Books I Read In November

Fiction
'Clockwork Angel' by Cassandra Clare
Having read this book and given how little satisfaction I have received from much I have read this year, I have begun thinking I should simply read Young Adult steampunk/fantasy books. I had not connected this book with the Mortal Instruments series also by Clare, of which I have seen the movie, 'The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones' (2013) and this has many similar tropes, but set in 1878 London rather than contemporary USA. There is a secret organisation fighting the manifestation of demons in our world and having an ambivalent relationship with various vampires, werewolves and other supernaturals. There are eldritch and steampunk weapons and some combine both elements. It focuses on Tessa Gray, an orphan from the USA with the ability to slip into the form of another person, a skill highly valued by many of working in this demi-monde of London.

Though there are standard elements of kidnap, treachery, the poverty and dark streets of Victorian London and some very large battles, Clare handles it very well and you are really swept along by the narrative. While there is a plethora of tropes present, I also think her character building is pretty good and this really helps. As a mature reader, the honesty of Tessa's feelings, particularly towards potential love interests, plus her struggling to determine her identity, does come over in a very teenage way. However, this is largely counter-balanced by the politics of the underworld and the twists in the plot which lift it above other books in this kind of category. I am not certain if I would rush out and buy the two other books in this Infernal Devices series, but would be tempted to pick them up if they appeared in a charity shop.

'Potsdam Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the Station series and jumps from 1941 in the predecessor, 'Stettin Station' (2009) to the closing days of the Second World War in 1945. One of my complaints bout the previous books in the series is that the main character John Russell, a British-born American journalist based in Berlin, spends a lot of time simply travelling around. This shows off Downing's knowledge of Berlin and some other cities at the time, but really deadens the action rather than heighten it. This book takes that to the extreme. The point of view jumps between Russell, brought back to Berlin by Soviet authorities to find German atomic secrets, his girlfriend Effi Koenen who he left behind in 1941 and has become involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany and his teenaged German son, Paul, who has been conscripted into an artillery unit on the Eastern Front but is steadily driven back to Berlin. At times, the jump between the different points of view is abrupt and it can take some sentences to realise which character is being focused upon especially when they are all in different parts of Berlin.

Very little happens. The spy element is killed off very quickly and so you are left simply watching these three people wandering around ruined Berlin largely trying to stay alive. Russell tries to find the other two as well as people he knew four years earlier. There are points of tension especially when Effi is arrested as a Jew, but as in the previous novels, Downing is poor at communicating real jeopardy and I see this is something other reviewers have criticised him for. Ultimately this is really just an erratic guided tour of Berlin in the last days of the war. If you find that detail interesting then you might engage with this book, but otherwise it lacks the necessary elements even of a family wartime story let alone the (spy) thriller aspects which I once believed this series was supposed to be about.

'The Water Room' by Christopher Fowler
Despite what it says on the cover of my copy of this novel, it is in fact the second book in the Bryant and May series and the plot follows on from elements featured in the first, 'Full Dark House' (2004) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html  The fact they were published in the same year may have led to some confusion. Initially I felt happier with this novel than its predecessor. It is set in the 2000s in a part of North London in a typically odd street left over from the chopping and changing down the decades. As you expect from Fowler there is a peculiar murder, an elderly Asian woman has been drowned in river water in her own home. It is followed by a number of murders which increasingly seem to be linked to the four ancient elements and to the various rivers of London which have been covered over down the centuries but still exist. The truncated close gives a set number of suspects and Fowler is good at developing these characters well.

We get more on Bryant and May, the octogenarian detectives, their assorted colleagues and eccentric helpers. The motive for the murder and a range of secrets is played out well, being both exotic but also credible. The prime problem is, especially after about the halfway point is that the book becomes slack. As with Downing, there is simply far too much going from place to place. Adding in the viewpoints of the two detectives' colleagues adds bulk without increasing tension. As a result by the resolution, which is interested, you are simply glad it is over. I have commented how these days with editing even by publishing houses, being less common some authors are allowed to simply drone on in quite a repetitive way and I feel Fowler has been allowed to do this. This novel could have shed 100 pages (it had 429 pages in the edition I read) and have been better for it. I have hope for the series because of Fowler's character development and detail on London. Do I ask too much in expecting my thrillers whether crime or spy to have tension and pace in them? Perhaps in the 21st Century where size for the sake of size in a novel seems more important that such elements, I am.

Non-Fiction
'The Old Country' by Jack Hargreaves
This book followed the success of 'Out of Town' (1987) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html and was similarly Jack Hargreaves outlining lost crafts and behaviours from rural England with quite a lot of reference to his own life. A lot of this book is about fish and angling techniques and even some of the ones he mentions as being contemporary in the late 1980s, have become obsolete due to new materials. He also speaks about wild birds, which of course have become rarer still with the loss of so many in the UK and odd things such as appreciation of time, accents and various travelling traders such as wool packers. It is a light easy read with some jarring moments when the conservatism of an old man breaks through with politically incorrect statements on race, though he is more sympathetic to Roma than many of his generation would be and in turn very dismissive of New Age Travellers. This is a good resource book if you want to set stories in rural England in the 19th and 20th centuries and draws your attention to facts that you might have overlooked or never realised. It is very much an old man telling you stories by the fire and as such I can understand why it is still in print, though sold at garden centres rather than in bookshops.

Books I Listened To/Read In October

Fiction
'Full Dark House' by Christopher Fowler
I realised once I had started this novel, that almost twenty years ago I had read three magic realist books by Fowler: 'Spanky' (1994) - far less lurid than the title and cover make out; 'Soho Black' (1998) and the best of these, 'Calabash' (2000). I was given a lot of the books from his Bryant and May series (I have no idea how he got to use the name of a match company). This one, published in 2004, was the first in the series which up to 2018 has so run through 15 novels and a short story anthology. I was disappointed by even the premise of the book. It features Arthur Bryant and John May part of the Peculiar Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police and madly employed from 1940 until 2004 when they are in their 80s. However, that is as far as the fantastical goes. The crime they investigate is at a theatre during wartime, with May looking back on the crime from some seventy years later. I have no idea why crime authors feel readers like to have so many mysteries set in theatres. I guess it is somewhat to do with the confined space in which to operate. However, it is now such a common trope, and especially with me having recently read Donna Leon's very similar 'Death At La Fenice' (1992), I found this pretty uninspiring.

There is mystery and conspiracy. However, a lot of it feels very laboured even when confined to the wartime. The abrupt jumps back and forth from the 2000s are confusing as it will often take a few sentences to know what time period the narrative has flitted onto. Too much simply seems odd but without adding spark. Both Bryant and decades later, May make use of mediums, but this adds little. In many ways it is too peculiar to be acceptable as a straight forward crime story and yet insufficiently uncanny to fit with what one would have expected from Fowler. I would have liked an outcome closer to 'Calabash'. I do have a lot of these books to read and can only hope, as with Leon, 3-4 books into the series Fowler will have found his feet with the characters and settings resulting in a step up to something with more life than this first entry in the series.

'The Windup Girl' by Paolo Bacigarlupi
This book reminded me of the books by Ian McDonald set in a cyberpunk future India: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html  Bacigarlupi's novel is also a kind of cyberpunk but set in Thailand in mid-21st Century. Through genetic modification by various mega-companies a lot of the world's food plants have been destroyed by subsequently released diseases many of which have proven fatal to humans as well. The climate crisis has continued despite the running out of oil, with sea levels rising and the return of sailing ships and some vehicles run on liquefied coal that remains. There has been mass migrations and conflicts.  There has also been genetic modification of humans and animals to create the vast megodont elephants and the hazardous cheshire cats. The 'windup' girl of the title is a Japanese bred personal assistant modified to resemble a clockwork doll in her skin and her motions, largely for sexual purposes.

Like McDonald, Bacigarlupi has a pretty frantic story seen from a number of perspectives, though fortunately he kills a few off along the way to reduce the complexity which was a real difficulty with McDonald's novels. Like McDonald he puts in both local language words and future jargon, but I feel, for most of the time he keeps a better control of these so you are not left with something which is incomprehensible to an English-language reader of today. Much of the story revolves around different parts of the Thai government trying to gain power and either keep out or welcome in neo-colonial efforts notably by US corporations.

The book balances all the different pretty well, though it need not have been so long. The coup at the end seems to over-long. However, throughout, there are interesting ideas and believable characters in a future version of the world that seems feasible. This is a good step in the 21st Century move from the US-centric cyberpunk of the 1980s and buries it in South Asian culture without this seeming, to me at least, as cultural appropriation. Notably the behaviour of the characters, influenced by Buddhism and to some extent Islam, is different to if they had all been American or European characters, so this shows us how the different culture would react to this changed world. I have no idea how accurate Bacigarlupi's details are but he seems to have taken a lot of appropriate guidance. While on the same lines as McDonald, Bacigarlupi is more in control of his novel and so while challenging readers it is no surprise it has been multi-award winning.

'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini
I usually try to avoid this kind of novel. The closest thing I came to it was 'The Bridge Across Forever' (1984) by Richard Bach which a friend urged on me and I read over 30 years ago. I had two friends who read particularly pretentious books and it was a challenge to try to dodge what they pressed on me. I am not sure how much of this book is based on Hosseini's life and how much is fictional. There are some scenes, especially the way he escapes so easily from the Taliban, which seems unfeasible. In that situation he would have simply been shot and dumped by the road. Despite the fictional elements, overall this comes off like a 'misery memoir'. There is so much misery in this book from mothers dying in childbirth to childlessness to crippling illnesses to child sexual abuse to brutal executions; even the kite flying cuts the children's fingers on the glass-coated wires. Erratically it covers the first person narrator's life in 1970s Afghanistan and his interaction with his father's servant and that man's son. This is reasonably interesting, showing a society richly, including the eponymous kite running.

The narrator flees the country on the invasion of the Soviets and then the book jumps decades ahead showing him living in the USA and doing very little to advance the story before returning to Afghanistan to rescue the son of the servant's son in Afghanistan now controlled and terrorised by the Taliban. Not only do we get long tracts of misery throughout the latter part of the book including executions by stoning; even in the supposed 'golden age' sections of earlier in the book, the narrator witnesses the homosexual rape of his friend and for much of the book perceives himself as a terrible being, even decades later, for not having intervened. Even minor characters like a friend of the narrator's father and the narrator's wife are compelled to suffer. The book is fragmented and very laboured. Even among the grim scenes portrayed the narrator keeps on flogging himself mentally about his failings. The book is interesting in the insights it gives to Afghanistan over two decades and what it experienced. However, the book is so fragmentary as at times to be incoherent and is too contrived to even be convincing as realistic fiction let alone as semi-autobiographical. I will certainly take more care to stay away from such books in future as twice in 30 years is too frequent to have to wade through such material.

'A Venetian Reckoning' by Donna Leon
This is the fourth book in Leon's Brunetti series and as I noted with the previous one, 'The Anonymous Venetian' (1994) the author appears to have got into her stride. The novel revolves around the killing of three leading businessmen in various locales out from Venice. The reader, though not the detectives, from the start know this is connected with the death of women being trafficked in a Romanian lorry. While she has referenced how corruption inhibits investigations in Italy and how the privileged are protected, that aspect comes to the fore in this novel and it is actually an exploration of how an individual seeking some kind of justice may act in that context and how even the compromised may have certain standards of their own. This novel feels tighter than the first two books and while Leon still slips in references to the geography of Venice and various locations, there is less of the detailed description of Brunetti making his way down various alleys, on particular boats and stopping at bars for coffees and drinks. Leon seems able now to be in control of her material while still providing the flavour of the places she sets the stories that I imagine that some readers really relish. I found myself pleased to recall places around the Rialto Bridge that Brunetti passes near where I stayed in Venice in 2003. I got through this book quickly and while it has very brutal scenes, I found it a satisfying read and thought the reveal was both unexpected and handled well. I have less apprehension about reading the other books in this series that I have been given compared to when I read the first in the series 'Death at La Fenice' (1992) back in March of this year.

Non-Fiction
'Out of Town' by Jack Hargreaves
Hargreaves was a former vet who presented a television programme called 'Out of Town' on ITV 1965-81. I remember seeing episodes of it on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s. It was a nostalgic look at rural life. He was a popular celebrity and so well known in British culture that 'The Fast Show' (1994-7; 2000; 2014) gently spoofed the series with their character Bob Fleming and his programme 'Country Matters', you had to be of my generation or older to know what they were ridiculing.

This book covering Hargreaves's childhood on a dairy farm in Yorkshire up to 1929 and referring back to memories of his parents and grandparents. Each chapter takes a different aspect whether it be horses or dogs going to market or hunting. The text meanders between memories and is a very gentle read. It brings up names for things and skills that have often been forgotten and is a fascinating read. Only occasionally does the modern world intrude. Hargreaves though from a richer family than his neighbours and going on to study at veterinary school, was very dismissive of social class and indeed, ironically, social mobility. His attitudes to race are painfully dated. He adheres very much to the concept of 'station' and people remaining in what they had been born to. Writing the book in 1987 he believed that there would never be a Labour government in Britain ever again. He is very supportive of the Roma community but scathing of New Age Travellers. He seems ambivalent towards fox hunting seeing it as ineffective way of controlling foxes but wanting it to continue as part of country culture.

Aside from these jarring moments, I enjoyed the book and found it both an easy read and informative. It is certainly a useful resource if you want to set a novel in late 19th century/early 20th century rural England, especially as he compares what he knew in Yorkshire with examples from other regions that he learned of through presenting his programme. If you have right-wing attitudes to British society then even what intruded for me will probably be unnoticed by you as anything wrong.

Audio Book - Fiction
'You Only Live Twice' by Ian Fleming; read by Martin Jarvis
In sharp contrast to the movie version of the previous James Bond book I listened to back in July, 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963), the movie for this one was utterly different. It would actually be hard/tedious to make a movie close to the book as for much of the story, James Bond is primarily a tourist in Japan and the action is contained entirely in the last fifth or sixth of the book. Unlike his movie persona, but building on the troubles he has suffered in preceding books, Bond is depressed following the murder of his wife at the end of the previous book and is contemplating resignation. He is sent on a supposedly hard mission to Japan to win co-operation of the Japanese intelligence services so that they will provide Soviet messages broken by their Magic 44 decryption system to Britain directly rather than via the CIA. Bond spends much time with 'Tiger' Tanaka, head of the Japanese intelligence service, trying to prove the British are worthy of such provision.

Fleming never conceals his feelings about countries in his books. He loves Jamaica and is very scathing of the bloated, tawdry nature of the USA. With Japan, he much prefers the samurai and Second World War kamikaze traditions over Japanese society and culture as they were in 1964 when the book is set; the year of the Tokyo Olympics. In part, this is because he is highly conscious of how much the US occupation has impacted on Japan. It is an alternate 1964 because USA President John F. Kennedy is still alive with the publication of the book in March 1964, Fleming presumably having delivered the manuscript ahead of his assassination in December 1963. As Jarvis outlines in the interview that follows his reading, Japan in 1964 would be a fascinating place for British readers. Fleming does not hold back from his criticisms of an enfeebled Britain, a problem he lays at the feet of the trade unions who he sees as demanding ever rising pay for lowering productivity, though he has Bond emphasise some positive points. Given Fleming's social background it is perhaps no surprise and you can imagine him shuddering in October 1964 when the first Labour government for 13 years came to power.

We see Bond going around various traditional Japanese locations in Tokyo and on the Kyushu. Ninja are introduced, a novelty for English-speaking readers of the time. While Bond at times ridicules Japanese manners, there is a respect for the old ways. Finally he is dispatched to eliminate Dr. Guntram Shatterhand who has set up a castle on Kyushu with grounds full of poisonous plants and deadly creatures as well as making use of volcanic fumaroles, to provide a location for those Japanese wishing to do so, to commit suicide. Despite the Japanese view of suicide the government is becoming concerned about the numbers making use of the facilities and in return for Magic 44 decrypts ask Bond to kill Shatterhand, who turns out to be Ernst Blofeld, the man who murdered Bond's wife in the previous novel. This all seems a little contrived. However, the closing section of the book is brisk and while successful Bond is left injured and without more than fragmentary memory of his previous life. This is not really an action book, it is more a travelogue giving a conservative writer of the mid-1960s a chance to reflect on various countries and how the modern world was erasing the values he felt were important, if bloody, to cling to.

At first, realising Jarvis would be providing Japanese accents I worried it would be a caricature. However, he does provide voices that sound like genuine Japanese people speaking in English. He decent Australian and Swiss accented English too. As he notes in the interview in no other context than an audio book would he have the chance to play such a range of male and female characters and I think his acting experience shows through.

Against the Devil's Men: 'What If?' Novel of Greater Success of the Mongols in Europe in the 13th Century

 

This is my first book published via Sea Lion Press: https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ I approached them in the summer of 2017 with 'Eve of the Globe's War' (2017): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2017/09/eve-of-globes-war-what-if-novel-of.html but very foolishly pulled out of the arrangement, I am not certain now why I did that. However, I was glad that Tom Black, head of Sea Lion, gave me a second chance with this book. I had always been interested in having a story about what if, in 1242, the Mongols had not simply turned back from Europe following the death of their great khan, Ögedei Khan. This had been stimulated, as had the title, by the non-fiction book, 'The Devil's Horsemen' (1979; revised 2003) by James Chambers. I had picked up a copy remaindered in the mid-1980s though it was not until many years later that I read it, as is often the case with non-fiction books I buy.

My first shot at a story along these lines had been with a novella which is now encompassed as 'Facing the Devil' within 'Déviation: What If? Stories of the French' (revised 2015): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00L45ATYC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i12 That story covers events later than 'Against the Devil's Men' being set in 1272 and based in northern France. The story was not well received especially by one reviewer who is an advocate of the medieval Mongol expansion and feels that any story of the time which is shown from any perspective that is non-Mongol, must be like a project for primary school children. However, I thought, for myself, it highlighted how western European states might have dealt with the Mongols if they had continued progressing farther west. I envisaged that trying to cling on to the European enclaves in Palestine and Syria would have to be abandoned, but that the various crusading orders would have turned their focus on fighting the Mongols. I also saw that the Papacy, under threat in northern Italy and with southern France at risk too, would have withdrawn to the Iberian Peninsula. Given that the threat would have involved numerous Christian states, and indeed Muslim ones too, I imagined that the Papacy would have 'weaponised' much of western European society with both religious and military orders focused on repelling the existential threat.

Thus, from these ideas, I began to decide how I could make a full novel. I settled on three characters to enable me to give different perspectives on what was happening. I wanted to emphasis just how cruel the Mongols were and how unlike other enemies European soldiers had faced, were so destructive no matter whether their victims were Christian, Muslim or Pagan. Thus, I came to include a Cuman horseman, Captain Braçayda 'Barc' Ulas. The Cumans are interesting people who were pushed westwards by the Mongols and received somewhat of a warm reception in Hungary. The Magyars themselves had been a similar nomadic people who had previously settled on the Hungarian plains and become what we know as Hungarians. I also wanted someone who could fight to give action for the story. I also wanted to show the impact of the Mongols on the people in the areas in which they settled, so this led to Sister Aurea of the Mercedarians. She is a half-Mongol, half-Italian woman born as a result of rape who fled into 'France' from Mongol held northern 'Italy'. The Mercedarians were a bold order that were willing to risk their lives for imprisoned Christians; she also provided a way in for what I saw as an undercover mission among the Mongols. Then, finally, to represent how the weaponised clergy was used, I included Brother Cataldo, a Trinitarian friar originally from Venice. The states of Venice and Genoa were known to be flexible in relations with the Mongols and I saw that as liable to grow as the invaders' power extended.

All that remained was to determine what these Papal agents would do and this led to lots of exploration of diseases among horses and how these could be spread. With all these factors in place, my trio - though the story is primarily seen through the eyes of Cataldo - were ready along with a band of soldiers and later some sickening horses to go on their mission. Their journey allowed me to show the complexity of society at the time, especially the multiple states in what is now southern France. There is room for jealousies of both secular and clerical authorities and to look at some of the stunning towns in the region though those in northern Italy, as happened elsewhere the Mongols went, have been reduced to ruins. Along the way the characters encounter people showing what impact the grim threat of people many genuinely believed to be demonic, would have, so there are heretics and millennial cults arising. The Cathars were strong in the region even in our version of the history and have continued when an even greater threat to Christendom has taken priority.

I hope readers appreciate all the details, of food, clothing, weapons, horses, towns and different groups. I was pleased with what I felt was a rich experience with numerous points of tension and scenes of action as well as reflections on the political and religious developments of the time. Some pressed me to include things like sex between Cataldo and Aurea, despite an 18 year age difference between them and both being sworn to chastity. However, I am glad I resisted this and that one reviewer has picked up on the fact that I have been careful to show characters following the views of the time rather than me including anachronistic attitudes from my own. This includes showing people, whether in religious orders or following a heresy or simply fearful of the Mongols, sincerely believing the views of the time; accepting the supernatural and the reality of the Devil and his agents. As such, I hope that while providing an interesting exercise in alternate history story-telling, readers can also enjoy exploring a rich historical context based on extensive research. Of course, if you spot some error, please let me know first before emblazoning them across Amazon reviews.

Books I Listened To/Read In September

Fiction
'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova
The title sums up this novel pretty well, because while it is actually a vampire story, tracking down Dracula across south-eastern Europe and Turkey, much of 'action' takes place in a series of archives. Having spent much of my youth researching in archives, I know how unexciting places they can be even when fellow readers are discussing how they would kill the pro-Nazi historian who has started attending. You have to admire Kostova's willingness to challenge what readers now seem to demand in terms of narrative structure. She has the narrative running in three parallel time periods: 1931, 1954 and 1972. Much information is provided through letters and accounts and it is typical that you are following what is happening in one of these phases but primarily gathering what has happened in an earlier one. To some degree this renders telling the three stories unnecessary and she could have simply gone with found resources. She portrays the various locations very well and is adept at showing the different social mores of the time she is showing, aided by two romances and the fact that a lot of events occur in Communist-era Romania and Bulgaria.

There is some fun with young people having to sneak around in the various locales, searching out lost relatives and enlisting the aid of a Turkish secret society but the book is far too long (704 pages in my edition) and too much is simply about working in archives. Even with secrets about vampires to be found, this cannot, as I know from personal experience, inject excitement into archival research. The final denouement ironically is far too terse. Overall it is a good idea but it has been taken to the extreme so deadening what could have been distinctive about this novel. If it had been 400 pages shorter it would have been crisp and with a greater degree of excitement but still able to contain the non-linear narrative and a different approach to vampire hunting.

'Stettin Station' by David Downing
This is the third book in the 'Station Series' featuring British/American journalist John Russell and German movie star Effi Koenen. It is set late in 1941 with the lead up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which shuts off Russell's last chance to remain in Berlin as a neutral American. The fact that I thought this was the fourth book in the series, I think highlights some of the problems with it. The book follows the pattern of the previous two. Russell spends a lot of time travelling back and forth to places whether around Berlin or, as in this book, back to Prague.

This allows Downing to show great research and knowledge of Central Europe at this time. He is good on the food shortages Germany was already facing two years into the war. However, too often these books are rather like the old Usborne Time Traveller books of the 1970s (the 1990s anthologies of them are now very collectable) in that simply showing what life was like back in the time visited is deemed enough. A spy novel needs more. Russell does lots of things with a kind of half-hearted nature. He gains information and statistics of the trains of Jews already being sent to Eastern Europe for their execution but really does nothing with what he has found. He works for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, in making links to US intelligence, but it falls through. He makes contact with the remnants of the German Communist organisation in Germany, aided very much at arm's length by the Soviets and he eats, drinks, goes to press conferences and travels around, occasionally picking up secrets or finding out the fate of someone.

The best bit of the novel is when Russell knows he has to escape Germany and is aided to get all the way to Riga and then on to a neutral Swedish ship, at much cost along the way. However, even then we do not feel invested in the people he meets. They are gone, arrested, tortured and executed almost as quickly as we have been introduced to them. Downing had excellent resources with which to work, but there is a spark missing in these novels. Russell is very prepared; Koenen even more so and somehow you never feel they are at real jeopardy and Downing fails to connect you to those who end up victims of the machine. To some degree the immense detail deadens the plots and we see far more of Russell on public transport or in cafes than we need to if the novel was to be gripping. The novel is not uninteresting, but it lacks the edge one would expect from a spy novel whatever time period it is set in.

Non-Fiction
'Worktown' by David Hall
This book is about one part of the first years of Mass-Observation an amateur social research project that later developed into working for the government and then became a company. This book focuses primarily on the work done in Bolton 1937-39, i.e. 'Worktown'. It was led by an anthropologist Tom Harrisson [sic] who developed a kind of cult of individuals, typically middle class young men, but some women and some local people who went round observing and interacting with the people of Bolton whether in the workplace, particularly the cotton mills of Bolton or social settings, notably the pub, churches, the cinema and dance halls, often noting obscure things like how long they took to drink a pint of beer or how long people spent buying something. Harrisson was oblivious to sociology and its practices, continuing to believe that he was creating something very new but lacking structure to what was done, a lot of effort achieved nothing.

There was a second branch in Blackfriars, London headed by Charles Madge which used a panel of people noting down their own activities. At times artists and a photographer also became involved. Harrisson was incredibly self-centred and certainly behaved like a cult leader, being lazy in himself but expecting volunteers to labour for long hours; raising some money for the project but leaving the volunteers short of food and running up unpaid bills with local suppliers while gallivanting off to Paris at great expense and using telegrammes when letters would do. As a result of his character, much of the mass of information gathered was never processed and the books promised especially to Gollancz, never appeared. The archive fortunately was saved and transferred to the University of Sussex but much of it remains unanalysed.

Hall's book is fascinating. Despite his focus on the Bolton end, he does give a history of the movement as a whole. However, the book itself is almost a reflection of the chaos of the Worktown project. Particularly in terms of assertions, such as this being an encounter with working class life for middle class participants, Hall repeats not just points, sometimes more than once, but even the same phrases. Even on a single page he flits between topics, going back and forth between telling the story of Harrisson's group and their findings. The chapters are titled as if they are going to cover specific themes but in fact have a very bumpy passage through the material. The book could have been much better organised either simply telling the story first and then looking at the findings in thematic sections of having distinct chapters about the lives of interesting people involved kept distinct from the findings. The group proved to be largely bohemian, drinking heavily and being very promiscuous.

The best bits of the book are the quotations from the observers' reports on a wide range of topics from behaviour in churches, pubs and factories to doing the football pools or attending all-in wrestling, a popular pastime in Bolton. These remind us that while some of the viewpoints seem dated, others are of the kind we would expect now - breast feeding in public being a notable one - and the struggles of working people to afford all the costs of living are familiar today. This is an interesting book, but it could have been a whole lot better with serious editing, but that increasingly seems to be absent in published books, including non-fiction, properly referenced history books like this one.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Trick of the Dark' by Val McDermid; read by Haydn Gwynne
McDermid is a strong crime writer who happens to be a lesbian. This novel features three lesbian and one bisexual characters, but what she has done successfully is make that not matter. This is not a novel making a point, it is one simply featuring some lesbians. Though there are murders involved, the focus of the book is really a psychological investigation when Charlie Flint is called upon by a former tutor to investigate the woman her daughter is seeing who may or may not have been involved in a number of deaths. Flint is able to call on police contacts, but goes about the investigation in an intellectual way rather than like the police. Her lust for one of the suspects, despite being married to another woman, complicates matters. This story could have been set up on a heterosexual basis, it just happens to be that it is not. It is a taut read and generally feels modern. I do wish, though, that McDermid had had a different university to Oxford to be the setting. The UK has 132 universities but too many authors come back just to Oxford (and not even Oxford Brookes). I guess it sells better internationally, but it would be nice to see characters with a university experience not subjected to the oddities of Oxford and Cambridge. This is a one-off story and proved to be well-written and satisfying.  Haydn Gwynne had a wide range of people to voice but did the accents pretty well and was very suited to the Oxford ones, even those of an American lecturer.

'A Killing Kindness' by Reignald Hill; read by Anonymous
So far I have been unable to find the name of the man who read this audio book. It is the sixth of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels set in Yorkshire and was published in 1980. You can feel the age of it in the text; Pascoe is very generous in giving 50p pieces to children who feature in the book and the technology with which we are now familiar is absent or primitive, in the case of the computers.  Even the use of linguists and psychologists by the police, a graduate in sociology as a detective and a gay detective, all something common now, are seen as innovative/distinctive. It is a traditional crime drama about the murder of various young women, not mutilated but left as respectfully arranged corpses. An added element of gypsies, a flying club and a clairvoyant confuse matters and the looting of a corpse complicates matters. Superintendent Andy Dalziel plays a rather stereotypical gruff Yorkshireman still willing to use intimidation in investigations counterbalanced by the modern, liberal Inspector Peter Pascoe with his feminist wife Ellie, member of various women's organisations; she has a baby during this novel. The aged nature of the novel gives it some charm and it is sufficiently complex to engage without bewildering; the explanations at the end do seem overlong.  The anonymous reader does well with a diverse cast and handles the various Yorkshire voices well, as far as I know, living far from the county.

 'The Creeper' by Tania Carver [Martyn & Linda Waites]; read by Martyn Waites
I know that publishing houses now cannot afford to employ editors to work thoroughly on novels with the result that you see grammar errors let alone weaknesses in styling and structuring. However, I find it difficult to understand how any publisher let this novel through. It is the second in the series of eight books published 2009-16 featuring Inspector Phil Brennan and his wife, psychologist Marina Esposito. The premise is fine. There is a stalker who penetrates women's houses and unnerves them with 'gifts' before abducting them, holding them and ultimately murdering them. As is common for crime novels now we see through the perpetrator's eyes and get to understand motivations well ahead of the detectives. In this novel there is an added element that the main perpetrator does not work alone. So far, so good.

To start with, one flaw is that, despite Brennan and his pregnant wife supposedly being the leads, we see the story through a wide range of people's eyes. Many of the police have very strong motives themselves; some of those involved are almost comically incompetent and there are whole sub-plots that are pretty petty in nature about police disadvantaging colleagues. Many of them behave in a very over-exaggerated manner in how they speak and act, not aided by Martyn Waites's own narration of the novel he has co-authored. The breathlessness of the text is taken further by Waites's reading of it and simply wears you down. Genuine tension is actually decreased by the insistence that it is a tense scene. The exposition at the end of the book goes on for far too long, sapping any of the tension that remains.

The greatest problem with the book, however, is the language. It really sounds what you might get from an undergraduate who has not studied a creative writing degree. It is chock full of clichés which is bad enough, but then the authors repeat them. I counted two 'heads will roll', two 'heart skipped a beat' and two 'heart hammered' and lost track of how often many others came around. Adjectives are piled on, sometimes four to a single noun. A joke about 'Finding Nemo' referencing the children's movie and a make of van, dates the story very quickly and is repeated, adding to the sense that the characters are poor at their jobs and obsessed with the trivial rather than what should be at the heart of the story. All of this, I understand, is supposed to make the book seem contemporary and gritty like the best of current US crime thrillers, but has the opposite effect, making it seem very amateurish, with language and styling that would be criticised at a writers' group and should have been stopped by the publishers. It is frustrating when there is so much great crime fiction out there which does not get highlighted that a book of such poor quality could have been accepted instead by a publisher and the authors encouraged to continue working in this low standard way.

Books I Listened To/Read In August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Books I Listened To/Read In July

Fiction
'The Mammoth Book of SteamPunk' ed. by Sean Wallace
There was a recent debate on the Never Was online journal about whether you could be steampunk and right-wing: https://neverwasmag.com/2019/06/can-you-be-right-wing-and-steampunk/  I had said that it was not that simple and there are elements of the genre such as the excitement of heavy industry and portrayal of Victorian social structures that could be seen as favoured by right-wing commentators.  However, reading this anthology which came out in 2012, I realised that my reading in the genre was dated.  Almost every protagonist in the 30 stories of this collection is either disabled or gay or from a black, Asian or other group in a minority in Western Europe. Indeed Ekaterina Sedia has written an opening essay that emphasises what she feels is the prime purpose of steampunk to paint a better picture of the alternatives available in the past as this can be the only basis of a brighter future.  Though a number of the stories connect more clearly to the fantasy genre, Sedia links them explicitly to science fiction, bouncing from the past into the future.

If this was your first contact with steampunk (or SteamPunk as Wallace has it) you would assume that these were necessary parts of the genre and perhaps, in the late 2000s they had already become and are this firmly in the late 2010s. In many ways by emphasising all the bad that steampunk has kept concealed beneath its bluster, this collection showed me that the genre is effectively dead or, at best, a very gloomy type of writing. It has turned me away from the genre completely to the extent there seems no point in me ever writing in it again.  I guess for the authors featured in this book, that would be a victory because it is apparent my kind of steampunk has no place in their universe.  I am sure the authors would tell you that as a white, middle-aged, formerly middle class man from Western Europe, I have no place in the genre anyway given the views that I must hold given that background.

All the stories collected are certainly informed by feminism.  This becomes anti-man in James Morrow's 'Lady Witherspoon's Solution'.  I do not know why editors of steampunk anthologies feel obliged to include horrific stories that really, despite their steampunk trappings, belong in the horror genre. I still shudder when I think of 'The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down' by Joe R. Lansdale in 'Steampunk' (2008) by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer which is effectively torture porn; 'Victoria' by Paul Di Filippo in the same collection features bestiality.  Morrow's story featuring the reduction of men to beasts and their castration and the collection of testes as entertainment for Victorian ladies, is of the same ilk.  The men are portrayed as the worst of their kind, but even the USA, parts of which tolerate the death penalty would not permit such abuse of prisoners let alone lionise it the way Morrow does.  Simply putting something into a steampunk setting does not excuse authors from churning out such vile work.  If they feel obliged to include such 'stories', editors should include a warning.  The inclusion of the story undermines the feminist approach adopted elsewhere in the book by suggesting it is no better than male chauvinism.  Imagine if Morrow had written a story in which women were injected with chemicals that reduced them to beasts that were then compelled to fight to the death and then the victors were mutilated; he would have been roundly condemned.

'Machine Maid' by Margo Lanagan, is almost as bad. It sees a skilled woman left largely deserted in a house in the wilds of Australia, altering a clockwork 'sex robot' to mutilate her husband. Fortunately Lanagan uses implied outcomes more than Morrow. However, it does alarm me how we have come to such a bad situation in relations between the sexes that it is seen as alright to have a 'mild' little story having men mutilated and this not been deemed to be horror if not a form of sick pornography. Apparently if an uncaring man, let alone a malicious one, is the victim then it is acceptable. Even the USA has a law against 'cruel and unusual punishment' of the kinds apparently happily shown by the authors in these stories. Such porn has no place in true steampunk.

Aside from Morrow and Lanagan's chapters, there is a mixed bag of stories.  Interestingly, a number of them shade from strict steampunk into fantasy. 'Clockwork Fairies' by Cat Rambo is set in Ireland and features real fairies countering the ones of the title. 'Icebreaker' by E. Catherine Tobler, concerning a dwarf widow of a scientist taking his remains to bury at the South Pole has fantastical creatures at the pole too.  'Tom Edison and His Amazing Telegraphic Harpoon' shows North America fragmented as the Mormons have summoned forth demonic flying creatures to defend Deseret. In both cases, the steampunk technology helps the protagonists win through. 'Prayers of Forges and Furnaces' by Ailette de Bodard combines her use of South American contexts with both a post-apocalyptic setting and a vampire. 'Numismatics in the Age in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu' by Alex Dally MacFarlane, is one of the stories that uses 'artefacts' as the basis of the story rather than telling the story in a straight forward way. It is a feminist story in a fantasy setting and shows how a queen went off to form her own realm, via the coins that she and her followers produce. It is an interesting idea but a bit lifeless.

'To Follow the Waves' by Amal El-Mohtar is one of a number of Middle Eastern set stories, a context unusual for steampunk stories; one of the lesbian romances in the book and features a woman who can craft dreams into jewellery that reminded me a lot of crafting in 'Humility Garden' (1995) and 'Delta City' (1996) by Felicity Savage.  'The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jula-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar' by Shweta Narayan is told by a clockwork bird and straddles not only those stories which seem to be more from mainstream fantasy than steampunk, but also come over as morality tales.  'The Clockwork Chickadee' by Mary Robinette Kowal is another of these, set among clockwork toys with a rather nasty revenge story. 'The Ballard of the Last Human' by Lavie Tidhar is in a similar vein though even less realistic as the heroes are a clockwork dog and a clockwork spider. 'Clockmaker's Requiem' by Barth Anderson is a surreal story about a world shifting from personal time to clock-based time, something which happened in our world, but not in a context as bizarre as this. As a result it is one of the philosophical stories of the book rather than one with real action. The clearest of the morality tales is 'The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi' by Peter M. Ball in which very little happens and it is really a parable than a standard short story.

Less fantastical, but with the same philosophical questioning at its heart is 'To Seek Her Fortune' by Nicole Kornher-Stace which features a single mother travelling the world with airship gypsies seeking a true prediction of her death. It is really about how she raises her son and is better on the context than the story. 'Fixing Hanover' despite being by Jeff VanderMeer a writer I have come to strongly disapprove of, is rather a parable too, about fixing a humanoid robot that washes up in a seaside town where a technician has fled. However, like the best short stories it hints at a far larger world that could easily fill a novel. It has a feel a bit like the settings of the 'Dishonored' (2012-16) computer games.  Perhaps similar if 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' by Caitlin R. Kiernan is like the warnings seen in the 'Terminator' movies (1984-2019) about robots becoming aggressive and/or dominant. It also highlights how much more sophisticated machinery is now portrayed in steampunk.

'Arbeitkraft' by Nick Mamatas is similar in seeing clockwork cyborgs to do dangerous jobs. It combines a robot takeover story with a Marxist critique as Friedrich Engels is the hero of the story.  It is easily assumed in these stories that with steam and clockwork technology robots with the intelligence of machines we see in science fiction would be possible, further ensuring that link to the genre I highlighted above. To me, though, this is really breaking down steampunk as having a level of rational limits and so making it simply a science fiction or indeed fantasy sub-set. 'Dr Lash Remembers' by Jeffery Ford, straddles such 'warning' stories with a fantastical element in which steam has been made into the carrier of a disease that leads to loss of control among humans so wrecking the steampunk world.  'Reluctance' is a steampunk zombie story with a disabled airship postman fighting against zombies in a remote USA town in order to refuel and escape. It is fast moving but very much as I have described it.

In my view the best story in the book is around a lesbian romance. This is 'The Effluent Engine' by N.K. Jemisin and sees an alternate history in which the uprising on Haiti has led to a black sovereign nation seeking help to defend its position by making use of the by-products of rum manufacture. Though a short story it is a great little adventure with a romancing of a female engineer at its heart and certainly hinting at a far greater 'world' that could feature in a novel.  Another one, though with an tragic lesbian theme, is' Hands that Feed' featuring a Jewish female engineer and people in a city that she encounters, one a young female thief. Again, it is set in a rich context that you want to find out more about. You hope for a happy outcome but I guess with the tone of much of this collection a tragic one should be predicted from the oppression of the setting.   Similarly mournful in tone is 'The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois' by Megan Arkenberg.  A ghost hunter is brought to the house of the former lesbian lover of the late margravine but finds that really all that is happening is all the clockwork devices she built are decaying on her death; melancholy and little more.

I wonder if it is the alternate history facet that attracts me, but I feel another strong story is 'The People's Machine' by Tobias S. Buckell, not only in a steampunk context but one in which the Aztec Empire, rather as Japan did in the 19th Century, has persisted and the geography of North America is different with New Amsterdam having persisted and the British having won two American Wars of Independence have kept the independent USA no greater than the Thirteen Colonies. It is a murder mystery with a computer at the heart of it, like 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' addressing concerns that many science fiction stories look at.

'A Serpent in the Gears' by Margaret Ronald is a strange story about a robot protecting his master while they are approaching a cut-off settlement which has sophisticated technology combined with biology, it is a kind of steam version of cyberpunk, though it is unclear where this is located even though the story is in theory set on Earth. It is not bad but rather unsatisfactory. I found I mixed it up easily with 'Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum' which is by Benjamin Rosenbaum who in a conceited way has put himself into this alternative world.  This story sees a steampunk world in which India has become the dominant force in the world and its culture supreme.  In the book while avoiding airborne assassins he considering writing an alternate history novel in which Western philosophical approaches are used and aeroplanes rather than airships predominate. The background rather stymies the action presented, though jumping between airships after the assassin is well done.

'The Zeppelin Conductors' Society Annual Gentlemen's Ball' by Genevieve Valentine is not really a story but one of these 'artefact' chapters, in this case a series of fragments outlining how men working in airship envelopes become physically distorted, so effectively it is another story featuring disability as well as highlighting the detrimental impact of steampunk developments.  However, it is really a series of notes for a setting rather than a developed story. 'The Anachronist's Cookbook' by Catherynne M. Valente is another artefact one. It has a bit more of a story but it is largely outlined in flyers that the heroine carries calling on revolution against what a lot see as traits, certainly pre-2000s, of steampunk in being socially oppressive and misogynistic.  It is an interesting approach but basically you are reading bombastic political leaflets for a fictional setting, so it is imagined propaganda rather a real story. Not an artefact story but one in which very, very little happens is 'The Armature of Flight' by Sharon Mock which is about a male gay couple splitting up as one goes to be fitted with mechanical wings and the other marries a woman. It is more like ideas for a story, rather than an actual story.

'Zeppelin City' by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick is a fast moving story in a city ruled by brains in glass tanks where aerial bombing has become a sport. It has interesting ideas and is adventurous with a couple of engaging heroines. However, it is clearly dieselpunk, even with 1950s US slang, rather than steampunk and it belongs in a different collection to this one. 'Cinderella Suicide' by Samantha Henderson which seems to be set in Australia is so full of slang from that context that it is very, very difficult to work out what is going on. I do not know if Australian readers could make any sense of it. It seems to be about an exploration to where a spaceship has crash landed on the interior of Australia. It might be more mainstream science fiction than steampunk, it is hard to tell.

Overall, how tiresome I have found reviewing this anthology has brought home to me that I was largely unimpressed by the stories. Aside from the horrific, many lecture the reader as if we are all ignorant of various essential lessons and readers.  Others drown the reader in the authors' conceits. You read a novel or short story for entertainment rather than to be harangued as happens so often in this collection.  There are some good and interesting stories but in a large anthology they are quickly lost amongst the bulk of the others.  In the future I will certainly avoid any steampunk anthologies, even if, as with this one, I find them cheap at a carboot sale.

'Silesian Station' by David Downing
This is the second book in Downing's 'Station' series set in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s.  This one begins in the summer of 1939 and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe that September. His hero, John Russell returns from the USA where he has visited with his son and has been given a US passport in place of his British one. He now also writes for a San Francisco newspaper.  As in the first book, 'Zoo Station' (2007), Russell spends a lot of time simply travelling around, whether in parts of Berlin or out to various countries. In this one he manages to go to Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia and Poland as well as visiting the Silesian region of Germany.  There are various motives for his journeys. In Berlin he socialises with his girlfriend and takes his son by his divorced German wife to various locations. Ridiculously he is working not only for US intelligence, but also the German SD counter-intelligence organisation and the Soviet foreign intelligence body at the time, INO.  Russell is also given personal missions, to help track down a missing Jewish woman from Silesia and help another Jewish woman who is the mistress of a high-ranking SS officer to escape Germany.  This web detracts rather than adds to the tension of the novel. There is far too much about where Russell is going with his girlfriend, a film star, or his son, where he parks, where he has lunch, what he has for dinner and so on.  Downing gives us loads of detail about Prague and Bratislava and other locales Russell visits, but largely to show off his research than truly add to the story. There is tension but only right at the end of the novel when Russell seeks to rescue Jewish women from an SS brothel and get a friend who has committed a murder, out of Germany.  Downing simply has too much going on for his main character and insists on so much detail, for the novel to really work. It is all very interesting but there are only brief moments when he snares you as a reader of a work of fiction rather than a book of popular history.

'Sherlock Holmes and The Hentzau Affair' by David Stuart Davies
As you might guess from the title this is a double pastiche, on both the Sherlock Holmes novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Ruritania novels of Sir Anthony Hope.  It is written as the Holmes stories were from the perspective of Dr. Watson.  It is very much in the style of one of those stories and Davies only makes a few slips, most jarringly when he uses to the term 'surrealistic tableau' to describe when two men masquerading as King Rudolf V of Ruritania encounter each other on a platform of Streslau station.  The story is set in 1894 and supposedly written in 1919, five years before the first meeting of the Surrealist group.  He might have got away with it if he had said 'Dadaist'. Overall, however, it is a brisk action story with sword fighting, abductions and numerous deaths.  It is a pleasure to read if you enjoy either Doyle's or Hope's work and can avoid trying to spot where Davies erred.

Non-Fiction
'Creative Editing' by Mary Mackie
I bought this book when it was published in 1995. I have dipped into it periodically since then but have never before read it cover-to-cover. While it shows its age, wordprocessors were only really coming into common use when it was published; it suggests you go to a library to do research because there were no internet searches and novels were still submitted on paper rather than via email, it has many principles that remain useful today. I should have read this book sooner because it has become apparent recently that with my school's strange aversion to direct speech, at times insisting on only reported speech in creative writing, what I learned about it was wrong. I was depressed to realise that I had not noticed my errors from reading hundreds of books since then. This added to the sense of despair that I will come back to at the end.

I did find Mackie's guidance on handling points of view much better than other commentators who insist on just one. I do disagree with her on the passive voice as she seems oblivious, like many people, to how it can distort the intended meaning and lead to highly contorted sentences. One compensatory thing is that Mackie, while highlighting various aspects to consider, keeps emphasising that it is down to the author themselves to decide how to apply them, rather than insisting that the author follows her prescriptions to the letter the way that some other help books on authoring do.  Added to that, including exercises, the book in the edition I read is only 208 pages long and is broken up into easy to access sections.  Thus, while I would recommend reading the book right through, it can be dipped into in the way I foolishly did over the past 24 years.  Having read the book in its entirety, I now recognise that even from this 'light touch' rather than dictatorial book, there are just so many things that you must get perfectly right to just get your book to a level at which a publisher might consider it, that it is an impossibility and that I should have abandoned my fantasy of ever getting a book published, decades ago.

Audio Books - Fiction
'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' by Ian Fleming; read by David Tennant
Unlike for most James Bond books, the movie of this one stuck very close to the original novel.  As a consequence, if you have ever seen the movie, you will have a very good idea of what happens and even individual lines from the book feature in it.  At the start of the novel, Bond is back in Royale-les-Eaux a fictional town between Étaples and Montreuil-sur-Mer that featured in 'Casino Royale' (1953), following Teresa 'Tracy' di Vicenzo who had beaten him racing recklessly through neighbouring towns. Paying her gambling debt he is then abducted by Tracy's father, Marc-Ange Draco who happens to be head of the Union Corse organised crime group. He tries to bribe Bond into marrying his daughter.  Draco puts Bond on to the trail of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. he has been pursuing since the end of 'Thunderball' (1961).  Bond goes undercover as a member of the College of Arms to Piz Gloria, a mountain top base in Switzerland where Blofeld is hypnotising British and Irish women to spread agricultural pests and diseases to wreck the British economy.

This novel actually feels like a James Bond movie, with the chases and the final climactic explosions.  While lining up to marry Tracy who is murdered at the end by Blofeld and his accomplice Irma Bund, he still sleeps with one of the hypnotised women.  While Bond is ambivalent about marrying Tracy until very late on, he seems to have less self-doubt than in the previous novels, though he wearies of chasing Blofeld with so little outcome. His relationship with Tracy is almost accidental but he feels that he has found someone of his nature who is as equally reckless as himself driving and gambling.  Bond does not, however, have any qualms dealing with Draco despite him being a major criminal engaging in smuggling and prostitution.  In fact the burgeoning relationship between the two men develops more steadily than that between Bond and Tracy and is reminiscent of the relationship between Bond and Felix Leiter which features in a number of the novels.  For Fleming to have continued the series Tracy had to be killed to free up the agent once more.  As a result, perhaps you come to expect it and it is less cutting when she dies than you might expect.

There are longeurs when Bond is undercover at Piz Gloria. He seems very dim in failing to work out what Blofeld is up to.  This leads to an extended section of Bond being at M's house working with various ministers over the Christmas period, which as it is laboured, fortunately does not feature in the movie.  For some reason Fleming felt compelled to replicate large tracts of a US government document on biological warfare as if he feared readers would not believe the basis of the plot featured in the story, but at times it is just a list, slowing the story unnecessarily.  The action scenes are well handled but interspersed at times with too much 'info dump' sections.

Tennant does pretty well and seems to have been brought in for this book because his natural accent is Scottish which Bond uses when pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray while undercover at Piz Gloria.  He is generally good on all of the voices, though, as he outlines in the interview at the end of my edition of the book, he struggled with the French and German names.  Overall, this is perhaps the book in the series which we would see as being most clearly 'James Bond' as it is understood in  popular culture and it does that job pretty well, but could have been tauter.  Perhaps by this stage of his career, Fleming was not being edited as thoroughly as in the past.

The Books I Listened To/Read In June

Fiction
'Prince of Legend' by Jack Ludlow
This is the final book in Ludlow's Crusades trilogy and features events during the 1st Crusade from soon after the capture of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem.  I have long been interested in the Crusader States set up from what is now southern Turkey through modern Syria and Lebanon to Palestine/Israel, so was interested to read this book.  Ludlow is a successful historical fiction author with a number of trilogies set in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe.  This novel showed me why I have had complaints about my own (alternate) history books if Ludlow's approach is what is expected.  Aspiring authors are repeatedly told 'show, don't tell'.  In other words events should be seen through the eyes of the characters rather than simply narrated by the author.  Ludlow totally throws aside that expectation.  Much of the book is not a novel, it is a popular-level history book.  At times it was as if I was re-reading 'The First Crusade' (1980) by Steven Runciman that I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/12/books-i-listened-toread-in-december.html

The 'action' features the leaders of the Crusade and every time one is introduced there is extensive background on him, his relatives and their rivalries back in Europe.  Dialogue is minimal and was described to me as being like television documentaries in which they have some actors going through the motions to give a feel for a particular meeting.  There are no female characters and we hear from no-one outside the inner circle of leaders.  There is tension and rivalry between them, but it is handled in a clinical way.  If the minimal dialogue was stripped out, then this could simply be presented as a history book.

There were some interesting details especially about the nature of Antioch and the villages and castles around it that I was not familiar with and then about the progress of the crusaders from Antioch to Jerusalem and briefly how they interacted with the emirates they went through on the way.  However, it was not a work of fiction and there is no real story.  If this is what people who buy my books think a novel is, then they are misinformed and they would be better off seeking out popular history books, which might lack the exciting covers and bombastic rhetoric on the front, but provide the technical detail these readers are looking for.  For myself, while well informed, this did not at all feel like a novel. I found it interesting, but lacking any character development and full of historical facts rather than story, I was not engaged with it as I would have been with a work of fiction.

'Death in a Strange Country' by Donna Leon
This is the second book in the Commissario Brunetti series by Leon, featuring a police detective from Venice.  I am still waiting to read one of her books which would explain the acclaim that there is for her series.  At times Leon does not seem certain whether she is writing a 'cosy' crime novel set amongst the beauty and decay of Venice or wants to produce something more gritty. While I accept the series may improve, so far she has not approached Michael Dibdin in terms of writing crime novels set in contemporary Italy. This novel is patchy in terms of pace. When an American serviceman is found floating dead in a canal in Venice, Brunetti has to travel to Vicenza which at the time of the novel (1993) had a large US Army base.  He has to navigate between the American authorities and powerful Italian businessmen but is aided by a member of the local carabinerie.  The first two-thirds of the book are pretty slow, with Brunetti trekking back and forth between Venice and Vicenza. The pace is not aided by the fact that Leon goes into immense detail about how people have their coffees and other details which are clearly aimed to add atmosphere but really slow up the book. In contrast there are two 'info dumps' when Brunetti simply has a meeting with a person and they provide a great deal of the information he needs with no difficulty. The pace picks up towards the end of the book when corruption and environmental damage is uncovered. A side story about the theft of expensive paintings is connected in too, but again it has been a laboured affair with Brunetti taking ages to track down the supposed thief even though he knows him and he is in the constraints of Venice.  There are some interesting elements in this novel, but the execution is erratic.

Non-Fiction
'A Brief Survey of Austrian History' by Richard Rickett
I have no idea where I got this book from. First published in 1966 (I have the 1972 edition) by a Viennese publishers, it was aimed at giving English-speaking tourists to Austria a history of the country. The flow of the book is very erratic and seems largely to alight on particular topics or individuals which interest Rickett rather than giving an even picture of the country. There is quite a lot of stuff on the medieval expansion of Austria and then on various rulers, notably Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph and the failed attempts at reform. Metternich gets particular attention, but so does a lot of cultural aspects especially in the 18th Century.  The fight for Tyrol during the Napoleonic Wars was something I knew nothing about but despite being brief is covered in detail.  The period up to the assimilation by Germany, through the 1920s and 1930s also gets much attention, but almost everything after that is covered briefly. I particularly wished for more about Austria in the 1950s and 1960s which gets scant coverage.  Overall it is a odd, but perhaps charming little book, rather let down by the fact it flits from topic to topic on the basis of the author's interest rather than giving a thorough coverage no matter how brief.

Audio Books
'Death Message' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having listened to 'Lifeless' (2005) and found it refreshing, I was looking forward to this book that while two books later in the same series, featured the detective Tom Thorne.  I know that Billingham has striven for grittiness and realism in his portrayal of policing in London.  However, with this book it went too far and Thorne ends up as much a criminal as many of those he arrests.  He is drawn into a series of killings as the murderer sends him mobile phone messages, a mix of text, photos and video, of the victims.  While trying not to give away too much of what happens, Thorne begins to use the serial killer, not turning him into the police and eventually using him to exact revenge.  There are some qualms on his part, but it seems towards the end as if Billingham has lost control of the plot.

It is common these days in novels to see things from both the criminal's and the detective's perspective, even when dealing with serial killers. We also have stories featuring corrupt or vengeful police officers, but you get the sense that this is not really what the author intended for his character (though I may be wrong).  By the end you see Thorne as no better than the people he is supposed to be pursuing.  It really undermines his relationship with his girlfriend, also a police detective of the same rank and his best friend, a police pathologist.  His deceit of them removes any faith we had in Thorne. I do not know if it is the beginning of Thorne's slide into criminality; 7 books follow this one.  However, for me, I was riled feeling that the sympathy built up for Thorne was tossed aside and it was far too easy for him to become the companion and indeed user of a serial killer, with minimal doubts about his actions.

Glenister did well with all the London voices, pretty decently with the female characters.  However, my engagement with his narration was overshadowed by a novel which went right off the rails and made the 'hero' seem like it was him who should be being arrested rather than those he was meant to be going after, almost all of whom end up dead anyway, because of Thorne's negligence, and his use of a killer to carry out his own ends.

'Gallows View' by Peter Robinson; read by Neil Pearson
This book is the first book in the D(C)I Banks series of novels which have been televised in recent years.  It is set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale where Banks and his family have moved from London.  The book is set in the 1980s.  This is one of the interesting things about crime novels, is that they really show up the technology of the time.  As 'Death Message' (2007) was about mobile phones of the mid-2000s, this book, published in 1987 is about mid-1980s technology including early police computers, film cameras and even slide projectors.  I would put it in the category of 'cosy' crime books, if it was not so sordid.

It has trappings of a cosy story being set in a small town with various characters and a very limited number of suspects.  Many of the points of tension are low key as whether Banks will sleep with an attractive police psychologist and activities are old fashioned like building a dry stone wall and attending the camera club.  One of the prime crimes investigated is a 'peeping tom' which seems to precede the sophisticated stalking of today.  However, the story involves a rape and the rapist is detected through catching gonorrhea.  Given that by the end three residents have been arrested - for manslaughter, rape and voyeurism, you do worry at the crime level of the small town and how quickly Robinson would have got through much of the population.

While I cannot put my finger on why, overall, I was disappointed by the book.  Perhaps it felt too old without being period.  Perhaps it seemed contrived, though I have accepted many crime books set in small places that have been so as well.  I suppose the mix of these elements, simply did not work for me.  Pearson who voices a lot of crime audio books, did well, capturing the Yorkshire accents of a range of people and doing convincing female voices.  I was left feeling that, despite his efforts, Robinson's work is not something I will return to.

'The Winter Ghosts' by Kate Mosse; read by Julian Rhind-Tutt
This book features tropes that Mosse has built her career upon - a stranger coming to southern France and having a time-slip experience. There is also reference to the Occitan language and the Cathars, a persecuted heretical Christian-based religion prominent in the region in the 13th and 14th Centuries, the followers of which were massacred.  It is different in that the protagonist is a man rather than a woman and it is set in 1928 and 1933 rather than in modern day.  It features Freddie Watson, a young man from Sussex who has been unable to recover from the death of his elder brother, George, in June 1916, fighting on the Western Front. He has come out of a psychiatric institution but is still heavily troubled by grief.  In December 1928 on a driving holiday in southern France he crashes his car and ends up in a small village. He is invited to attend a celebration for the feast day of St. Etienne but slips through time to a 14th Century version of the event where he encounters Cathar locals and witnesses their suppression.

Mosse is great at portraying the locales, here more into the Pyrenees than in her previous books; the physicality of moving around them is well represented.  She is also good at the mystery of people from the past impacting on the present.  The challenge with this book is that it was extended from a 2009 novella and at times you felt it has been 'padded'.  In particular Freddie, despite being haunted by his brother, is slow to realise that he is interacting with more ghosts, especially the beautiful Fabrissa who he falls for and this drives on his subsequent actions. While Mosse is good on what happened in the 14th Century, I am surprised that she makes no reference to how popular spiritualism had become following the First World War. Even if Freddie did not previously subscribe to its beliefs, he certainly would have been aware of rational people (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle notable among them) who felt they could be in contact with the dead.  She does present Freddie's sustained grief well and reminds us that people do not 'get over' death easily, especially when it was on such a horrific scale as the First World War with so many very grim ends for people.

Rhind-Tutt, though best known for his comedy work, was an excellent choice to read the book, which is largely told in the first person, though jarringly at the end it switches to third person. It is not simply his voice but all the mannerisms that he puts into the portrayal of Freddie that make it very credible.  Overall, I found this an interesting book though built on a simple premise.  Mosse's descriptions are great and her sense of people is strong. She weakens the jeopardy with the looking back from 1933 so we know that not only Freddie survives the 1928 encounters despite their hazards, but mentally he is sound. I think this could have been handled differently. At times, especially given how long it takes Freddie to work out that Fabrissa is a ghost, there would have been much tighter editing, but Mosse is renowned for writing long books. If this had run for 3 hours rather than 5 hours 22 minutes as it did in my edition, it could have had a real punch. With length some of that is dissipated, but not to the extent that this is a poor book.