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.