The Books I Read in February

Fiction
'The Hermit of Eyton Forest' by Ellis Peters
This was one of the Brother Cadfael books that was not made into an episode of the television series, thus it was a new story to me.  It follows very much the style of the rest of the series of books.  In this case featuring a boy and two men seeking to escape from something.  One is a rather fey craftsman, Brand, who despite Peters's descriptions falls in love with the daughter of a steward of a landed estate, though he is being hunted by his former overlord.  Another is the eponymous hermit and I will not spoil the story by revealing what his background is.  The third is a boy being compelled by grandmother to marry so that his inheritance is linked to that of another family, much for her game.  The grandmother comes over as malicious but credible and you certainly feel for the boy who at 12 has no interest in marriage, especially having been raised in the monastery.  As with a number of stories in the series, this one features the politics of the Great Anarchy and how it impinges on the region around Shrewsbury.  I liked the portrayal of a number of the characters, the boy and the grandmother and the prospective fiancee were all good.  Brand and to some degree the hermit, I found less credible.  I found there was a little too much chasing around Eyton Forest, though the flight of the boy back to the sanctuary of the monastery was gripping.  Somehow though with elements of interest, I did not feel this one was as well woven as some of the others, perhaps due to the wider geographic spread than usual.

Non-Fiction
Enemy at the Gates' by William Craig
The edition of this book was strangely packaged.  From the outside it looks like a book of the movie of the same name, 'Enemy at the Gates' (2001) with the movie poster showing two of the lead actors, Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes.  The movie was reasonably good, featuring a true story of a German and a Russian sniper who went up against each other in the ruins of Stalingrad.  Rachel Weisz was badly miscast, looking, unlike Law and Fiennes, too well-fed for the role, but Bob Hoskins played a stand-out part portraying as Nikita Khrushchev.  Beyond this cover you find that in fact there is a history book, first published in 1973 about the Battle of Stalingrad.  As noted two months ago with 'Death's Men', this book really benefited from being written in the 1970s when many people from the incident were still alive.  As with Winter's book, Craig provides the story as a mosaic made up of the experiences of people who were there, many of whom he had interviewed.  This can make the text rather jerky as he leaps from one to another especially in the faster moving phases of the battle.  At times his language is overly dramatic and this jars, I put it down to him being an American author.  It is a very grim story and the discussion of cannibalism near the end is a hard section to get through.  It is a confusing story to tell and the aggregation of these different perspectives does not always improve clarity but one thing that can certainly be said about this book is that it gets across the essence, even the sensation of what the experience of participating in this conflict was like.  I do not think I could stomach reading another book on the battle, but this one might be an interesting counterbalance to Anthony Beevor's 'Stalingrad' (1998).

The Book I Read In January

Non-Fiction
'As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela' by Mark Thomas
This is another of the books that I should have read closer to the time.  It is now seven years old and given that it is about the exploits the political activist-comedian Mark Thomas got up to expose the extent of the arms trade in the UK and Ireland and to get representatives of dictatorships to confess some of their crimes, it has lost a little of the impact.  It refers to the Blair governments of the time and given their initial commitment to ethical foreign policy the critique is sharper than if he had been talking about the current coalition which utterly lacks ethics.  The book is a serious of episodes in which he embarrasses arms companies, finds out how laws are bent and how easy it is to buy and ship not only arms but also torture equipment, hence the title actually used at a trade fair.  Thomas also meets with the people who have been affected by the selling of such equipment to nefarious regimes.  Some of the best incidents such as having set up a fake PR company at an arms fair Thomas gets representatives of dictatorships to confess to human rights violations, I had seen on his television programme.

I have seen Thomas on stage twice, once when this book came out and again last November.  He produced numerous series on Channel 4 in the 1990s and 2000s.  There is no-one like him in terms of his ability and his sheer energy in producing humour but also lessons from the ways he tries to bring down the all-powerful a peg or two and indeed he seems to have garnered respect certainly from the UK police, a range of politicians and even some of those he has gone up against.  Whilst this book feels dated, its lessons remain important and the forcefulness of Thomas, not in preaching, but in simply driving through incidents which are often absurd and sometimes dangerous, carries you along.  I certainly recommend reading his work and definitely seeing him live.  As I said to him last time I had a book signed, he offers people at least some crumbs of hope that even if we cannot stop people doing these bad things, at least they will be witnessed and challenged.