Books I Read In September

Fiction

'Vagabond' by Bernard Cornwell

This is the second book after 'Harlequin' (2000) which I read in July: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html in the Holy Grail series. That book built up nicely seeing the hero, archer, Thomas of Hookton drawn into English campaigns in France and Brittany in the opening stages of the Hundred Years' War climaxing with the Battle of Crécy in August 1346. This book is much messier. Moved on by the very nebulous quest for the Holy Grail seems to really be simply a tool to get Thomas as part of two battles, many hundreds of miles apart, the Battle of Neville's Cross outside Durham and the defence of La Roche Derrien in Brittany. Unlike in many of Cornwell's stories, the women that Thomas encounters seem pretty disposable. So far he has got two women pregnant who have either been killed or abducted. He has returned to the third, Jeanette Dowager Countess of Amorica, who had previously abandoned him but now is back in La Roche Derrien. Thomas encounters various English and French lords who want to eliminate him or torture him to find out where the Grail is. There is a horrendous torture scene in this book. However, they are so pretty similar in nature that it is often difficult to tell them from their equivalents in the first book.

Cornwell is always good on the battle scenes, no matter the era. He manages to make use of the actual history and weave in his fictional characters among the historical ones. The two battles in the book went the opposite way to what would have been predicted so do make gripping scenes. The trouble with this book, though, is the 'workings' are rather to visible; what motivates Thomas to be in various locations at particular times seems much  more forced than, say, in the Sharpe novels. The women and Thomas's opponents, similarly are more obviously part of the story telling mechanism than they were in the first book and in most of Cornwell's other novels. The Grail quest is thin and while I accept that in the mid-14th Century it did drive people on irrationally, the main characters seem able to take it or leave it as their mood takes them, so it seems more of a device than it otherwise might have been. I do have the third book, 'Heretic' (2003) but not the fourth, '1356' (2012) to read and only hope it at least gets back to the quality of  'Harlequin', if not to the level of Cornwell's best books.

'The Dead Can Wait' by Robert Ryan

This is the second book in Ryan's Dr. Watson series set during the First World War. I read the first, 'Dead Man's Land' (2012) back in July: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html This one is set in 1916 and sees Watson back in Britain having recovered from the damage he sustained especially in no man's land during the first novel. He is once again employed by Winston Churchill. Georgina Gregson, former suffragette and VAD and finally Sherlock Holmes are also involved. Having promoted blood transfusions in the previous book, Watson is now working on the 'talking cure' what we would now term counselling, to help soldiers recover from shell shock. From May 1916, Churchill was back in Britain after the merging of his unit and was simply a backbench MP. However, his earlier involvement with 'landships', i.e. tanks, when First Lord of the Admiralty means he continues and interest in their development and he sends Watson to dig into deaths at Elveden in Suffolk where they are being hurriedly tested.

The book is far less a murder mystery than spy novel. Ryan is a bit better in control of what he is covering than in the first book. However, he does leap point of view very regularly, sometimes in the middle of a piece of action only to return to it later. A new author would certainly be chastised for doing that. In addition, as a reader we are constantly lied to about the identity of characters, even those whose eyes we are seeing through. Yes, the revelations are a climax, but Ryan uses this technique three times in the book which is over-working it. Added to that there seem to be German spies all over Britain, far more successful than was the case in reality.

Ryan is a little better than in the previous book in jamming in all the history he wants to include, but his frustration, shared by specialists at the time, that tanks were not used more effectively, comes through rather as preaching. I have seen one review that likens this book to a Bulldog Drummond novels by H.C. McNeile ('Sapper') or indeed the Chandos books of Cecil William Mercer ('Dornford Yates'). I know some of the Sherlock Holmes stories were spy orientated, but this one especially the action scenes, despite the age of the protagonists, owes more to those thrillers of the 1920s and 1930s. If that is what you are looking for, then that is fine. However, Ryan needs to refine his art in writing this style of books. Unlike his unwieldy novels, those were tight and brisk. You have to admire his research, but it does tend to weigh down the books when he could leave much more to reader. I know however, that modern readers welcome, even insist on 'info dumps' than those of the past. It is not a bad book, but with serious editing and improved structuring it could have been a lot better.

'The Long Utopia' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Given that this book, published in 2015, fourth in the 'Long' series, suffers from many of the same problems as 'The Dead Can Wait' (2014), I am wondering if unwieldy books, dumping loads of ideas and information without properly digging into them and hurtling around between lots of character points of view is not the style that publishers are looking for. Perhaps I am too old to deal with this approach but to me it seems unfinished as if readers are being given perhaps the second draft and not a book that has been edited to the final point. All the 'Long' books are bursting with ideas, all most too many for even two authors to control.

The reader is bombarded by these, flitting from one view to another and then having the characters jumping across almost infinite worlds. In amongst all of this are some interesting stories, but this novel is like two books put into one with a lot of extras around the outside. We see many of the characters from the previous books like Joshua and Sally, natural 'steppers' between worlds and Lobsang and Agnes, now consciousnesses in robotic bodies. There is reference to the Next, the arrogant super-intelligent people who left our Earth and the nearby ones, in the previous book.

The most interesting part was the stories of the natural steppers in the mid to late 19th Century and while this provides background to the characters we see in the mid-21st Century settings. The other main story is about sinister aliens who have interceded in one of the idyllic forested versions of Earth to essentially rip it apart in order to power their expanding empire which is at war with another species. The problems with this book as with the others, is that Pratchett and Baxter take a lot of time to build up the potential jeopardy only to veer away or report the outcome from a distance. You almost feel that there are actually alternate versions of these books in which the characters deal with the various crises that we miss out on. The constant jolting may be to instil pace but spread over 400+ page books any momentum is lost. At least in this book we see the cataclysmic climax, but the decisions of certain individuals to sacrifice themselves there to save the rest of the Long Earth is really skimped over rather than providing tension.

Added to these issues, there is the ongoing problem that you struggle to find any sympathetic characters. There are a couple like Rocky, the friend of Stan a Next who is effectively setting himself up as a messiah and Nelson Azikiwe, a priest from South Africa who is employed by Lobsang, and these are minor characters. Everyone else is terse, arrogant and patronises everyone else as much as possible. There are still lingering elements of the US frontier self-righteousness of the earlier books and this time we see nothing outside the American perspective, bar references to parts of Europe where the climate has changed by the volcanic winter brought about by the Yellowstone eruption on our version of Earth. Maybe in the age of social media when everyone insists that they are right and all must acknowledge how right they are and commend them for enlightening us, these are the sort of characters young readers want. However, as a mature reader, it is a slog wading through yet another character that treats everyone else as if they are scum that need to be lectured at length about how wrong they are in everything.

I am beginning to think, maybe I need to only read books written before the 2010s when authors were unafraid to write characters we could feel some affinity with and while flawed were willing to acknowledge that rather than blame someone else. Fiction does reflect the society we live in and unfortunately, while looking at lots of alternate Earths, Pratchett and Baxter show very painfully how twisted our society is with unlikeable people to the fore.

Non-Fiction

'The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain' by Tony Bunyan

This is an edition of the book produced in 1976 and it is another of those I should have got around to reading some decades ago. My untouched new copy had sat in storage for many years. The book does pretty much what it says on the label. It outlines the background and development of all those British agencies that could be considered the political police of Britain, primarily Special Branch and MI5. At times it is tedious in going on about all the structure and the numbers of different departments; it is quite repetitive too. The book also looks at how law across the UK, especially conspiracy law, has developed to counter domestic unrest and to monitor and detain those seen as a threat to the capitalist status quo of the country. For a modern reader, the explicitly Marxist angle that Bunyan brings to what he is writing would probably seem quite unusual. I attended university at a time when some lecturers would identify themselves as Marxists but even then, I find Bunyan's dogmatism distorts what he writes. Of course, it is easy for people now to look back with hindsight, but even in 1976, I feel he could have been challenged in some of his assumptions, even by those on the Left.

Though Bunyan was writing at a time when industrial unrest had come out of a period of great turbulence of the early to mid-1970s, he keeps on insisting that British capitalism has been in crisis for almost the entirety of the post-war period. This is despite the prosperity especially during the 1950s and 1960s, which despite the industrial unrest and the oil price 'shocks' actually continued into the 1970s, with, for example, 1975 marking a new peak in car sales. Ignoring this means that he can only see Conservative governments as a result of them holding on to power through nefarious means, especially through control of the police and military. He makes passing reference to consumerism and to how a few working class people felt benefit from policing, but is unwilling to shake his view that the police are primarily there to protect property and suppress the working class, ethnic minorities and drug users, especially in terms of political activity. However, he makes the crude assumption that all workers have a left-wing class consciousness without seeing that many were instead ardent supporters of consumerism and anything that would be done to protect that.

In Bunyan's world, there are no working class Conservatives at all, when in fact they were to sweep Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 and keep her the Conservatives there for 18 years. He makes lazy assumptions on the numbers who would volunteer to aid the state in the case of a crisis, somehow assuming 300,000 would volunteer simply from the property-owning classes without seeing that there would be ardent working class volunteers too, though in smaller numbers than he expected. Political apathy is absent from Bunyan's thinking too, despite its prevalence in Britain at the time even if simply showing by turn-out at elections, when, say, compared to France, Italy and West Germany. Despite his faith in the strength of the left-wing working class and their uniform consciousness, in fact the trade unions had unleashed their power most against a Labour government in the winter of 1978/79, though I guess Bunyan would have argued that Callaghan who replaced Wilson as prime minister in 1976, was hardly a real Labourite, given his personal closeness to the police and his willingness to move towards monetarist polices.

There are some things on which Bunyan did make accurate predictions. He saw the importance of computerisation which was beginning to develop in the mid-1970s. He also foresaw how the police would monitor and control political protest as they did in the 1980s, especially during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85, for example stopping people suspected of travelling to demonstrations when even hundreds of miles away. However, the cause of these things was less his anticipated crisis in capitalism and more the New Right economics which while begun in 1976 were adopted in full force in the 1979-83 period.

The greatest use for this book now is that it is good if you are setting a drama in the 1960s or 1970s featuring Special Branch or MI5. It is also a reminder of various trials and political campaigns, such as the Stop The 70 Tour and against the visit of Portuguese Prime Minister, Marcello Caetano, which had generally been forgotten from the popular consciousness. The recent focus back on the Mangrove 9 of 1970, shows, though that there is something to learned still from the incidents of that era. This could have been a better book if Bunyan had been able to write it without feeling he had to squeeze everything into his very dogmatic view of British society, which objectively did not fit his story of it. As a result he leaves out things that would have explained situations he was surprised by and would have helped better contextualise the developments he highlights. Instead the reader has to add in that context themselves and see that Bunyan is blind to many trends and indeed types of people, that did not fit his world view.