Books I Read In April

Fiction

‘Skin Tight’ by Carl Hiaasen

This was the last of the three books in the Hiaasen anthology I have been reading.  It features a former public attorney’s investigator, Stranahan being drawn into attempts to stop the uncovering of the true story of a 4-year old disappearance of a young woman following a visit to a cosmetic surgeon.  As with Hiaasen’s other novels it features a whole host of, at times grotesque, characters running around southern Florida.  There is an assassin who has a strimmer installed in place of his hand when it is eaten by a barracuda.  In some ways, by this stage in his writing, Hiaasen was coming to spoof his own work.  In this story Stranahan has, not one, but five former wives all bent on doing harm to him. Yet again a new woman on the scene becomes the hero’s love interest.  The novel drags on far too long and could have been 100 pages shorter.  Too many of the characters are caricatures and this one lacks the redeeming features of the other two Hiaasen novels I read.  It is not helped by me presumably missing the satirical elements about Florida/US society of the late 1980s.  Overall, an annoying book. 

‘Hitler Triumphant: Alternate Decisions of World War II’ ed. by Peter G. Tsouras

As it suggests in the title, this is a collection of counter-factual essays.  Some, such as ‘May Day the Premiership of Lord Halifax’ by Nigel Jones are quite expected, seeing Churchill’s replacement leading to a peace treaty with Hitler.  Charles Vasey’s ‘Peace in Our Time’ seeing Hitler dying in 1943 and replaced by victorious Goering is a story rather than an essay and not bad.

There is an interesting focus in the book on the Mediterranean theatre with John Prados looking at Operation Felix to capture Gibraltar from the British; Wade G. Dudley considering more effective use of the Italian Navy and David C. Isby seeing Italy being bought off by the USA from participating in the war.

Some of the essays fall victim to the over-detail which is an issue with some of Tsouras’s own books.  It can be bewildering trying to follow descriptions of individual units going different places on the battlefield to in our world.   After all the detail it is difficult to appreciate the differences of ‘To the Last Drop of Blood: The Fall of Moscow’ by Kim H. Campbell until Stalin is assassinated.  This is only a little less of a problem with ‘The Stalingrad Breakout’ by Tsouras himself.  John D. Burt’s minor alteration of the loss of Malta after one convoy fails to reach it, illustrates minimal changes leading simply to a different emphasis in the war.  It is followed by ‘Ike’s Cockade’ envisaging an Allied invasion of the Cotentin Peninsula in 1943, and proposes some similar developments to Birt's chapter.  In contrast, more fantastical are David D. Keithly’s ‘Black Cross, Green Crescent, Black Gold: The Drive to the Indus’ which has interesting stuff on Hitler’s view of Islam and ‘Wings over the Caucasus’ which sees German paratroop raids far behind Soviet lines in order to secure oil supplies. 

As so many reviewers note with books these days, especially e-books, but also printed ones like this, there are grammar errors in the book. I guess we simply have to swallow that, even in a book written as far back as 2006.  They jar with the reader, though, given how common they are in published writing, perhaps not as much as two glaring geographical errors which Tsouras, if he was genuinely editing, should have noticed.  The Cotentin Peninsula, the area of northern France which is the hinterland of Cherbourg is not in the Bay of Biscay; it extends into the English Channel. the Dodecanese Islands are in the Aegean Sea rather than the Adriatic Sea as stated in this book, the former being between Greece and Turkey; the latter between Italy and Slovenia/Croatia/Albania. 

Non-Fiction

‘The Faber Book of Espionage’ ed. by Nigel West

This book was a disappointment.  It is an anthology of extracts of books of all kinds written by men and a few women who happened to be spies for the UK in the 20^th century.  Some of what is included is fictional, a lot of it autobiographical, some of it having no relevance to spying, simply written by a spy as if that made it important.  Falling into that third category, the piece from Kim Philby is particularly weak.  Some of the extracts are exciting and some informative, though of the latter there are simply too many about the original C of MI6 and his labyrinthine headquarters.  The one thing the book shows is how inter-tangled all the British espionage operatives of the 20^th century were.  They drew from a small circle and all seem to have known or even been related to each other.  In many ways this is really a book that gives a flavour of a kind of British social class sub-set.  It shows their rather debased attitudes even when they were supposed to be guarding the UK’s security at home and overseas.  Perhaps, in many ways this was what made the deception by traitors to that cause so easy for them to pull off.  A book simply including biographies of the various characters and even family trees might have been better than this collection of extracts that only occasionally are of genuine interest.

Books I Read In March

Fiction
'Double Whammy' by Carl Hiaasen
There is something about Hiaasen's books that I do not like but as yet cannot identify.  This story is set among the competition bass fishing community of southern Florida and the scandals and murders involved around the big prize competitions.  After 'Tourist Season' I have learnt the tropes of Hiaasen's work and too many appear in this story too.  There is a former journalist who now works as a private detective.  He has an ex-wife who he is still in contact with and there is an additional woman that the detective sleeps with.  The role of the two women in aiding or hindering the investigator is switched from 'Tourist Season'.  Another ongoing aspect is some muted criticism of the  destruction of the environment of southern Florida, its over-development and the idiotic people this attracts.  As with 'Tourist Season' Hiaasen draws thorough if eccentric characters and has an overly complex plot, as before involving a scene shift, this time as far as Louisiana.  Perhaps it is all simply too American for me, perhaps I feel the attempts at satire or black humour out-dated so incomprehensible or simply just laboured.  Something stops me liking these novels as much as the character portrayal might warrant.

'Disaster At D-Day.  The Germans Defeat The Allies, June 1944' by Peter Tsouras
Tsouras is very capable at writing counter-factual books around wars and their consequences.  This is one of those very detailed books which if you did not know it was not truthful you could read as if it were simply a historical account.  This will not appeal to some details as you have to keep track of numerous companies, platoons, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, armies and army groups and numerous individuals on both sides.  Even having cycled through many of the towns and villages mentioned I found it difficult to follow.  In addition, I quickly found it difficult to distinguish where Tsouras's book diverged from what actually happened; a typical complaint against counter-factual novels let alone more historical style books like this.  The main difference seems to be that the landings of US troops at the Omaha beach, i.e. between Pointe du Hoc and Port en Bessin to the western end of Normandy was completely repelled rather than mauled as in our world.  This distorted the front opened up by the Allies and made it shorter.  How other battles between units differ I do not know and I certainly would have welcomed something like a parallel text to show the differences.  This book might be fascinating but it is really only full understandable to someone who knows the history of the D-Day landings and follow-up battles in immense detail.


Another thing that spoilt my enjoyment of the book was a serious publishing error.  The version I have is the D-Day 60th Anniversary Edition.  In my copy and I assume many others, you get pages 1-32 then you get pages 1-32 again; pages 33-74 are missing and so after the second page 32 you jump to page 75.  This means you miss the whole section about the Utah and Omaha landings which leaves you not seeing the greatest divergence from our history.  I bought this book a few years back and it is a shame that I did not check it as I would have sent it back to the publishers, Greenhill Books in London and Stackpole Books in Pennsylvania and demanded a refund.

Non-Fiction
'The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes.  The Story of George Scovell' by Mark Urban
I bought this book new in 2001 as a spare one to carry in my car in case I found myself in a situation without anything to read.  Having taken two days' leave I had foolishly brought only one book along with me which I finished while watching an hour-long Karate lesson and so turned to this emergency volume.  As the title suggests it is a biography of George Scovell, an officer in the Quartermaster's section of the British Army in the Peninsular War who became an intelligence officer and a cryptographer.  His story shows the hazards of snobbery in the army not least when Lieutenant-General Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) refused to meet with the Portuguese Commandant of Braga on the grounds that he felt he was too socially inferior.  This man, a senior Portuguese officer (and Portugal was Britain's ally) had vital information of the routes along which Marshal Soult was escaping from Portugal so letting tens of thousands of French troops escape.

The story is a good coverage of the Peninsular War not always showing Wellington in the best light, though highlighting his French counterparts as a lot worse.  It is interesting in terms of looking at the relationships between different members of the staff on the British side and the relationship between the theatre of war and London.  It is thoroughly supported by a wide range of British and French sources.  As well as engaging descriptions of the battles it is also fascinating in showing how the Grand Paris Cipher was worn down.  All round a well written book which draws you in, in the way the best history particularly for mainstream consumption, always should.

'Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?.  More Puzzles in Classic Fiction' by John Sutherland
This is the sequel to 'Is Heathcliff A Murderer?' produced in 1996.  Like the previous book it looks at issues in classic fiction in a series of short essays that are great for dipping into.  This volume goes back into the 18th century and forward into the 20th century but again primarily focuses on Victorian literature.  Sutherland writes in such a way that even if you are unfamiliar with the original book you can engage quickly with the point he is discussing.  As in 'Is Heathcliff A Murderer?' the essays cover errors in the authors' writing but also things that modern readers will see as errors but were in fact deliberate.  Some errors shown include 'Lemon or Ladle' referencing George Eliot's 'Felix Holt, the Radical' and 'Wanted: Deaf-and-Dumb Dog Feeder' in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'.  This highlights the difficulty of keeping consistency in a long narrative in the days before wordprocessors and especially when authors were under pressure to write serials as they went along, with no ability to go back and change what had already been published.

It is clear that often 19th century authors liked to play around with chronology and in particular have contemporary characters operating in a context which preceded their own time, particularly the era of the railways in rural areas of Britain, an example is the chapter 'The Barchester Towers that Never Was'.  The book also highlights aspects of British society we have forgotten such as 'Pug: dog or bitch?' referring to 'Mansfield Park' and 'How Vulgar is Mrs Elton?' from 'Emma' both by Jane Austen.  'How Good a Swimmer is Magwitch' from Charles Dickens's 'Great Expectations' and 'Clarissa's Invisible Taxi' from Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway' remind us not to patronise authors of the past for making mistakes when their perceptions and what was worth mentioning from among them, were shaped by their times, not ours.  I will have to look out for other books on this basis that Sutherland has produced, 'Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?' (1999) and 'Henry V, War Criminal?' (2000).

Books I Read In January

With me reading much more fiction last year than for many years past, it seemed sensible to alter my book reviewing to monthly rather than annually which had meant there was a very long list to cover by the time I reached the end of December.  Thus, this is the first monthly review.  However, given that year I am intentionally reading the largest books I own to reduce the storage space and the weight if I need to move them again, the number may not be sufficient to warrant this approach.  However, I start giving it a go here.

Fiction
'Tourist Season' by Carl Hiaasen
This is the first novel in an anthology of Hiaasen's first three solo novels that I bought second hand at the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury back in the mid-1990s.  His writing is crime fiction set in southern Florida in the 1980s.  Supposedly the books are satirical and though this one has some quirky characters, perhaps I am too far from the time and place to recognise the satire.  The story is about an odd band to terrorists seeking to drive away holiday makers and especially people with holiday homes or retirement homes in Florida so that the over-development can be reversed and some sort of ecological balance be established.  Whilst sometimes incompetent they carry out a series of murders.  Brian Keyes, a private investigator is drawn into combating the terrorists; his ex-wife is now married to one of them and he is also assigned to protect a beauty queen who is one of their targets.  The tone is rather erratic, probably due to the efforts at humour.  However, the characters seem well drawn even when peculiar, incompetent or nasty.  You feel that if he had avoided the humour it could have been a far more intriguing novel but conversely could have been a lot worse in the way that satire often can be, very laboured.

Non-Fiction
'The New France: A Society in Transition 1945-1973' by John Ardagh
This was recommended by a former friend of mine.  It is an interesting collection of writings about France by a journalist who knew the country well.  The first half is a very analytical account of how the country was modernising with great detail of the development and challenges in different locations in France.  I do not know if anyone has produced a follow-up which took the story further.  It reads very much like a series of articles rather than an integrated book.  It is packaged in a serious academic way which may be to its disadvantage and I could see it being better received if it had been published ten years later, i.e. 1983, as a jolly discussion of Britain's near neighbours rather than being packaged as something almost academic.

Ardagh had the advantage of meeting with so many of the key players and ordinary people wrapped up in what was happening.  I first went to France as a toddler and visited as child during and soon after the period he discusses.  I was not aware how sharply divided on social class basis France was but feel still that there is a juxtaposition of the very modern and the ancient side-by-side even today.  I had studied 'Paris and the French Desert' at school but this book really highlights that regional imbalance.  Ardagh is far weaker when he digs into cultural issues.  He is very weak in trying to analyse the changing role of French women and he gets distracted notably when writing about movie director Jean-Luc Godard and his trip to a Club Mediterannee resort.  He does show well the impact of the 1968 uprisings and of the De Gaulle regime on France and for that I feel I understand this phase of French history, particularly the latter years, far better.  I certainly imagine that Ardagh would be stunned to find how enduring Johnny Hallyday has proven to be given he had clearly written him off as beyond the end of his career as early as 1973.