Books I Read In December

Just to say that while I slowed up towards the end of the year, actually having a bedroom of my own rather than having to sleep in the living room has boosted my reading and despite having some very poorly written, heavy going and long books, I have managed to get through 48 this year, 21 of which have been over 400 pages long and 2 have been more than 900 pages. Driving very little during the Covid period has meant audio books falling away for me.

Fiction

'Gridlinked' by Neal Asher

I was not surprised to find that this book had been published in 2000 (though Wikipedia says 2001). Where it had been sitting unread before it was taken to my local charity shop, I do not know. What betrayed its age was that from the outset it has a real 1980s/90s cyberpunk feel to it. It features a 'hero', Ian Cormac, so emotionless that he is mistaken for an android at the start of the novel. He is a government counter-terrorist officer. Ironically, having been gridlinked, i.e. connected to the Polity, the controlling computer system of the regime controlling multiple solar systems for thirty years, he soon disconnects and has to find his way using more traditional approaches. In theory his antagonist is Arian Pelter a terrorist whose sister Cormac kills brutally early in the book. Pelter keeps loading himself up with more cyberpunk augmentations and makes use of a heavy duty android. So far, so cyberpunk as Cormac pursues Pelter rather half-heartedly, guided by a perhaps immortal Oriental guru. However, Asher is not satisfied with simply a cyberpunk revenge plot filled with so much violence that at times it is difficult to see the characters as much more than psychopaths both on a rampage across the galaxy.

There is a second strand to this book which feels like a different novel has been levered into the first one. It is more classically science fiction and might have been written by Iain M. Banks and is around Cormac's relationship with a super-powerful being known as Dragon and its own attempts to explore mysterious artefacts on a planet that belong to an ultra-powerful being, Maker. Either of these storylines would have been sufficient in itself. There is sufficient drama in either the hunt/revenge or the handling the super-beings to fill a novel. By having both in the same book draws tension out of each.

A further challenge is that having two main characters who are both very cold and ruthless means that the reader feels very much like they are looking in, perhaps watching two predators killing other creatures until they come face-to-face to inflict violence on the other and his small army. Asher seems to realise this and towards the end the fixer Stanton and the pilot/smuggler Jarvellis are raised from being minor characters to being much more of a secondary storyline and their interactions 'softened' to give the reader something they might feel affinity with.

Though this book is very flawed, it clearly did nothing to harm Asher's career and he has gone on to have 18 more books published, including 4 more featuring Cormac. I do not know if he improved or if he was better advised/edited. I was a fan of cyberpunk, especially the work of Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams and George Alec Effinger. However, Asher's book lacks something. It is almost as if he had a list of tropes not simply from cyberpunk but many from classic science fiction too, and felt he had not succeeded until he had squeezed every one of them in. I think even he realised that having too many characters lacking humanity makes it hard to human readers to engage with them. I know many people like action, I do myself, but it can become numbing when it is incessant and especially when scenes seemed to be set up just to allow Pelter and his current team to slaughter them as happens when they find they are being followed on Huma. As you can imagine I am not in a rush to seek out Asher's other novels and feel I could find much of the same, executed more skilfully, by others.

'Empire of Dragons' by Valerio Massimo Manfredi; translated by Christine Feddersen-Manfredi

Though he has written 24 novels, some of which are available in English, Manfredi was an archaeology academic. Much of what he researched about the ancient world has formed a basis for his fiction. Perhaps in the UK his fictional work is best known as the basis of the 2007 movie, 'The Last Legion'. Like that movie and the novel it was based on, Manfredi is willing to mix in the fantastical with the historical. This novel features a group of 11 Roman legionaries, led by Legate Marcus Metellus Aquila of the II Legion are captured by Persian troops while trying to defend the Emperor Valerian during the siege of Edessa (in what is now Syria) in 260 CE. Sent to a mine, they manage to escape and in league with a Chinese prince and a merchant end up travelling to China at the time of the Three Kingdoms. Ironically, as Manfredi outlines at the end of the book not only such contact was possible, some was actually likely.

Despite Manfredi's background this is very similar in style to the epic Roman military style to many books out there, I would just pick on Simon Scarrow, Ben Kane and J. Clifton Slater as three among very many. There is a load of machismo throughout with the required quantity of brotherly bonding between the soldiers and tragic deaths. Manfredi also has room for some romance along the way and unlike some authors of historical military fiction does feature the occasional woman.

I think I have probably now read too many books of this kind and so my palate was jaded for any more. The other thing, is despite all the grounding in historical fact, Manfredi cannot let go of the fantastical. Thus, the Chinese the Romans meet often have very mystical powers enabling them to achieve phenomenal acrobatic feats and sustain themselves with minimal sustenance. This portrayal of Chinese monks and their philosophy as providing magical abilities is very tired and probably was even when this book was published in 2006.

Manfredi had published 14 books by the time this one came out. However, the text in the early parts of the novel is very lifeless despite the dramatic scenes being portrayed. It improves in the latter half of the book. I am not sure, not reading Italian, if this reflects the original text or was a result of the translation. However, it adds to that sense that this is all rather a tired premise that has been done so many times before and since. Perhaps if Manfredi is the first author of Roman military epics you come to, this would seem fine. For me, though, despite the author's credentials and an interesting premise, the book is weighed down by too many tropes to really sparkle for me.

Non-Fiction

'Europe in the Eighteenth Century 1713/1783' by M.S. [Matthew Smith] Anderson

This another of those general survey history books of the A General History of Europe series overseen by Professor Denis Hay in the 1960s-80s, that at some time, probably in the late 1980s, I bought quite a lot of second hand and they have sat in storage ever since. Sometimes such books can be laboured. Sometimes, as in the similar series I read in September: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/09/books-i-read-in-september.html you find an author like J.R. Hale who really makes the text lively and engaging. Anderson proves to be somewhere in the middle. The period is a complex one, and explaining the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, let alone the Seven Years' War, the first global conflict and colonial rivalries of the various powers is not an easy task in a survey history book. Where Anderson does best is in looking at specific countries and their development in this period.

Probably aware that France in the lead-up to the revolution which broke out six years after this book ends, gets a lot of coverage, he focuses a good deal on Russia, Poland, Prussia and the Habsburg lands. I found his explanation of the development of these countries and how they impacted on the rest of the continent well handled. He also includes Sweden, the Ottoman Empire and Spain, which again can get lost on the periphery, even when looking at a period such as this when they were important in the balance of power in Europe.

While I have launched into the geo-political aspects, it is right to note that in fact these come after he h as explored the societies of Europe and shown how this period was one of developing but incomplete steps forward in terms of administering societies and beginning to shape them in a way which we would see as modern. He also does not neglect the cultural aspects and draws out distinctions in what we might see very broadly as culture of the time especially in terms of architecture and music. Indeed, much of this book whether political, administrative or cultural, emphasises just how complexly diverse Europe was at the time. To do that while largely not drowning the reader in masses of detail is quite an achievement. This might not be an impressive book, but for the large part, it is an effective book and I came away from it with a far greater sense of being an era of substantial transition these seventy years were.