Books I Read In December

Well, this year I managed to read 53 books which averages out at just over one per week. However, the pattern across the year has been imbalanced due to the varying length of what I read. This month I read, at 704 pages, the second longest book I read this year so did not get through much else.

Fiction

'Fleshmarket Close' by Ian Rankin

This was the last of the Rebus books I had been given. It is the 15th in the series and 9 others follow it. However, I am unlikely to rush out and buy those. As has been clear in terms of the Rebus books I have reviewed this year, they are not bad, but they are far from gripping. You do feel rather as if you are slipping into an episode of the 'The Bill' (broadcast 1983-2010). Rebus goes about his business as does Siobhan Clarke who by this stage was overdue for equal billing with John Rebus. The book has three components which reflect issues of the time (2005) and indeed now. One is the murder of an immigrant living on a sink estate; there is also human trafficking and modern slavery involved. The attitudes towards immigrants seems unchanged even 18 years on and indeed much of this book, bar some aspects of technology, could be set right now. The other is the disappearance of a young woman depressed at the death of her sister who may be mixed up in prostitution and the other is the finding of skeletons in a pub basement. Rebus and Clarke go through the motions to solve what soon proves to be a tangling of these elements and Rebus might be starting a relationship with another middle aged liberal, artistic woman pretty much a replica for those who have crossed his path in previous novels.

'The Plot Against America' by Philip Roth

This book is probably even more impactful now than when it was published in 2004. It is effectively a fictional memoir written by a Jewish American boy also called Philip Roth who is growing up in New York City in the late 1930s and 1940s. It is an alternate history in that rather than Franklin Roosevelt being re-elected for a third term in 1940, the aviator Charles Lindbergh wins the Presidency and follows the policy of the America First movement. This means that the USA does not enter the Second World War and curtails aid to the Allies. In addition Nazi German and Imperialist Japanese politicians are welcomed at the White House. Anti-Semitism which was an element of the America First approach grows in strength with moves to relocate Jewish people from the cities out to rural areas of the USA.

Roth holds to the style of the boy's perspective, so at times he jumps up and down the chronology rather than progressing neatly. Philip's concerns about his friends, relations with his brother and cousin and with his parents feature as much as concerns about where the USA is going. His cousin joins the Canadian Army and fights in France; his brother becomes part of the Just Folks movement which sends Jewish children to US farms to be apparently more integrated into WASP US society. Given policies that have been adopted at state and federal level in the past decade, it is very educative to see and think about how such discrimination can be advanced subtly but steadily.

The book succeeds in showing how easily it could have been (and remains especially now) for the USA to slide into an authoritarian state. It also reminds us that Germany did this too, not abruptly, but step-by-step eliminating the rights of Jews until within nine years it had reached extermination. The novel is successful in capturing that kind of 'Cider with Rosie' (1959) perspective of a boy recalling his life. I am sure there are US equivalents, though more Scottish and Irish ones pop up in terms of searches.

I think my two main criticisms are that it seems almost entirely to leave out the black population of the USA from the alternative. The black population of Germany was smaller but it did face discrimination under the Nazis. It seems that, at least, Lindbergh would have adopted apartheid policies towards blacks as well as Jews, especially given there was segregation in the military anyway and many states already had segregated buses, schools, cafes, etc. very much like what was coming in South Africa. 

The other thing is that the book has too much of a pat ending. Lindbergh who flies himself around the USA campaigning simply disappears on a flight back to Washington DC. While oppressive policies follow in the wake of his disappearance, including declaration of war on Canada, soon Roosevelt is re-elected as President and the timeline is 'corrected'. It would seem more realistic is some of Lindbergh's coterie would have remained in power and using the the conspiracies that soon develop around the President's disappearance, use it for negative integration, i.e., using it as 'proof' of the threats the USA faces and so ramp up authoritarian policy. A post-war world world with a (semi-)Fascist USA, the USSR in control of an larger slice of Europe and no Marshall Aid to assist post-war recovery in the remaining democracies would be a bleak picture to hint at even if Roth did not paint it.

Non-Fiction

The Social History of Politics' ed. by Georg Iggers

This is a useful book to read alongside Hans-Ulrich Wehler's 'The German Empire, 1871-1918' (1973) which I read in August: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html Iggers brings together articles and book extracts published between 1954-1979. These look at slices of German society in the Imperial period and various social developments. It is particularly good with Hans Rosenberg in digging into the Junker class and showing that despite a continuity of interests these large landowners from eastern Germany actually changed in make-up and their sources of income in a way which is very much overlooked in general histories of Germany. There are articles on the evolution of the working and its social contexts as well as the middle classes of Germany. Karin Hausen's renowned piece on the impact of home sewing machines reminds us how easily overlooked the significance of a relatively minor innovation can have on society, especially if it is deemed to fall into the 'realm of women'. That is unfortunately still a factor in so much research even 45 years on from the publication of that article. Overall, a crisp, focused read which provides very useful penetrating background for anyone interested in German history.

'Fifty Amazing Secret Service Dramas' edited by Odhams Press Editors

Initially I thought this book, published in 1937, was a collection of fiction stories. However, in fact it is extracts from various memoirs written by 24 different authors. While some names are changed or substituted with just an initial, the bulk of what is covered if factual. Most of the extracts are about the First World War, including the outbreak of the Russian Revolutions, though some, such as the best known one from Robert Baden Powell, focus on the pre-war era; one is about countering gun-running in South Africa in the 1890s and one is about spying in the USA in 1929. There is some corroboration between different accounts for example about the female doctor who controlled the German network in occupied Belgium and the British spymaster "Evelyn" based in Folkestone.

One interesting aspect is the different perspectives. The memoirs are not simply written by British spies, but Belgians, French, Germans, Russians and Americans too. There is some brief coverage of Japanese spy activity at the time of the Russo-Japanese War 1904-05, but not much. Most of the extracts are about human intelligence, but there is interesting information on the early days of radio intelligence and the use in locating submarines. Aircraft also feature and it is interesting to see how the landing of agents in occupied territory was becoming used before the examples we are familiar with from the Second World War.

Being based on real people and events, it does not baulk from simply outlining how people were executed. Many of those featured in the book end up that way, whether male or female and of all ages. Given death rate that these spy missions were carried out against the backdrop of, I suppose readers would not be sentimental. The cover simply shows a blindfolded man standing against a wall awaiting his execution. It is interesting, however, how many blunders or oversights outlined in these accounts were to be repeated in the next world war. This book would be a really useful source for anyone thinking of writing spy or adventure stories set in the first 20 years of the Twentieth Century. 

'Keynes and After' by Michael Stewart

I read the second edition of this book, published in 1972 when the post-war boom was beginning to come to an end and the concept of floating currencies was becoming widely accepted. This book is very useful in explaining why governments behaved in the way they did during the Depressions which in Britain and to a great extent in Germany, filled the 1920s and 1930s when the problem became global. As you might expect the book gives a good summary of Keynesian principles and how his followers took them beyond what Keynes himself had argued. It also addresses monetarism, which despite President Nixon's abandonment of it, was to become the more popular economic theory of the 1970s and 1980s, even if, as Dell showed in 'The Chancellors' (1997): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/11/books-i-read-in-november.html it was never really put into full effect in Britain.

The style of the book is very much like a lecture and it makes useful of very simple examples to explain economic principles and theories. I feel it really retains value in this regard especially for people operating in an era when many monetarist assumptions have become seen as 'the truth', despite hiccoughs such as the boom of the early 1990s and the 'credit crunch'. of the late 2000s.

While retaining value, Stewart's book now seems rather naive. He states that the problem of mass unemployment, at least in industrialised countries is over. Furthermore he says more than once that UK unemployment above 2.5% would be politically unacceptable. However, by 1984 it was at 11.9%. He is accurate in his warnings of persistent balance of payment difficulties and inflation in Britain but does not see that these, rather than unemployment, would quickly come to be seen as the prime economic challenges. He does note that such unemployment would effectively smash union power and lead to a fall in wages, but did not foresee that legislation would accelerate that process.

Stewart does clearly identify the problems of regional unemployment and the need for retraining in both the UK and USA, challenges which have not been appropriately addressed in either country even 50 years on, hence the persistent unemployment from the 'mismatch' of those without work at a time of a high level of vacancies. However, he makes no reference to immigration which played such an important role in Britain and West Germany in supplying labour when demand was high in the 1950s-60s. Nor does he reference cheap oil which again aided the post-war boom while meaning that inflation, still too high in Stewart's eyes, did not reach the levels it would attain from 1973 onwards.

While of its time, this is a useful book for explaining the two main economic theories influencing governments in the late 20th Century. I found it particularly insightful for explaining why British governments were effectively intellectually paralysed to do anything to reduce the impact of the Depression.