Books I Read/Listened To In September

 Fiction

'Resurrection Men' by Ian Rankin

This is the thirteenth book in the Rebus series and was prize winning. Unlike some of the recent preceding ones, this novel has energy. Rebus is sent back to a training college but is working undercover to find out about corrupt police officers. There is an air of uncertainty especially as the case the retrainees are given to work on is one Rebus knows and her does not know if he is as much under suspicion as the men they are working with. In parallel then overlapping, is the case handled by DS Siobhan Clarke. While not named on the covers in many of these stories she is as much a protagonist as Rebus himself. Rebus is still in his relationship with a curator, though a night-time encounter with her seems rather too convenient to be believable. There is quite a lot of tracking back and forth between the college and Edinburgh and Glasgow. Crime boss Big Ger Cafferty appears yet again though some of the focus is on one of his lieutenants. It gets a bit tiresome that he keeps on turning up. However, this novel is decent in terms of the doubts and self-reflection of Rebus and Clarke and how the different threads of the various stories come together.

'Fool's Errand' by Robin Hobb

This is the first of the Tawny Man Trilogy set in the same world as Hobb's Farseer Trilogy, the first book of which I read some while back: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/11/books-i-read-in-november.html Indeed its protagonist is the man who was known as Fitz in that series, but 15 years later when, having renamed himself Tom after all the dramatic adventures of the previous books, is now living a bucolic life with his adopted son and the wolf he is bound to. Hobb's world has two kinds of magic that are genetic inheritances but can be accentuated through training. The Wit allows someone to bind with an animal and communicate with them telepathically. If not handled properly the person can lose themselves in the animal's identity. At the time of this book, the Witted are being persecuted and horribly executed. The other is the Skill which is another form of telepathy allowing sight, i.e. being able to "farsee" and communicate over distances. Tom probably has both abilities. There are also hedge witches with the ability to make charms to achieve low-level magic which actually works.

The first third of the book seems to be going nowhere. We see Tom's quite life while he is visited by various people from his past who know more or less about his history. Most important is the Fool of the title, who had that role at court, but has now reinvented himself as Lord Golden (many nobles names are characteristics such as King Shrewd and Prince Dutiful). He is a kind of alien with unknown abilities but probably a recurring role as a prophet who needs a catalyst in the form of Tom. This section of the novel is effectively a huge recap of the entire Farseer Trilogy which might be a bit tiresome if you have read it, but does mean if you are new from Hobb's work you can get up to (leisurely) speed with her world. Then the rest of the book is a mission into the depths of the country to track down the heir apparent Prince Dutiful who is Witted and has been lured away by a hunting cat.

Hobb has real skill in her writing. Whereas there are some familiar tropes, she has a deftness in turning in ways you do not expect, especially in extracting her protagonists from danger in credible ways. The relationships between the main characters, including Nighteyes the wolf, are handled very well when they are faced with a range of unusual and mundane challenges. In addition to the adventuring with questing and battles, and various bits of magic, it is these relationships which really bare you on in the story. There are no absolutes and even the 'good' characters are grumpy and flawed. I know some readers do not like protagonists who make mistakes, but I feel it means that you can feel you are alongside the characters even though they are existing in a very different world to our own. In addition, despite the fantastical setting there are parallels to our world, notably in suspicion and hostility to those who are seen as 'other' and in turn the negative integration which can make the oppressed become almost fanatical in their defence.

I do not have any more books by Hobb at the present, but if you are looking for well-written fantasy which is credible but not as bleak as grimdark, I can recommend this series.

'Mr. Commitment' by Mike Gayle

This is the second novel by Gayle. I read his first, 'My Legendary Girlfriend' (1998) back in 2016: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-books-i-read-in-may.html Gayle was trumpeted as the male version of Helen Fielding in featuring in a reasonably light way novels looking at relationships in contemporary Britain (largely London). This one features Ben Duffy, known to his friends as 'Duffy' who is an unsuccessful stand-up comedian who aged 28 has been in a relationship with successful advertising executive, Mel for four years. They live at different ends of London and she asks him to move in with her and get married. Duffy spirals into lots of concerns about marriage, not really about commitment but about the trappings that come with marriage, such as consumerism and children. The novel is then a 'will they/won't they' back and forth with other options for both Duffy and Mel appearing. It is very much of the ilk of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' (1994), though with a lot less humour.

Some reviewers feel Gayle has portrayed the male characters as stereotypically useless men. I would disagree as in fact this is one of the challenges, most of the other men in the book, seem to be fully in control of their lives and doing pretty successfully. Many of these kinds of books have a sort of 'soft' social class portrayal of a kind of middle class and people around the fringes, actually doing better than would be the case given costs and low salaries in London. Duffy flat sharing is a reasonable portrayal. Marriage itself comes over as a middle class activity and it is tightly associated with dinner parties and especially in this book visits to Ikea. This seems to be an inescapable context. Even 'Starstruck' (2021-2023) strays into this territory though it is a lot funnier. I guess this was the focus back in the 1990s and is coming around again after different portrayals like 'The Royle Family' (1998-2012) 'Gavin and Stacey' (2007-2019), and 'Two Doors Down' (2013-2023). I know I am comparing a novel to TV series but it does show how few relationship novels I read.

This was not a bad book though what it features was hardly unexpected. It would have been good to have included more humour. Possibly the best thing is it might make young men - though they are unlikely to read it - actually think beyond their immediate needs to their longer term and see that relationships can be achieved without having to buy into the whole 'kit' of middle class consumerism.

'The Montmartre Investigation' by Claude Izner [Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefèvre]

This is the third book in the Victor Legris series. Legris is a book seller living in Paris in the late 19th Century who is also an amateur detective seeking to solve local crimes before the police do. The two authors, sisters who are both Parisian booksellers, are very knowledgeable about France in the period. The book is lovingly detailed in describing all the different districts, their buildings and the residents. Though set in 1891, the fringes of the French capital do open quickly into farmland and an urban goatherd is an important character. The case starts with the murder of a schoolgirl from a boarding school close to Legris's shop which he co-runs with his aged mentor and step-father, Kenji Mori and their assistant, Joseph, an aspiring crime novelist.

A number of people are murdered through the book and Legris and Joseph, often working alone, wheedle their way into various locations to get to the bottom of these and indeed to see if there is a connection between them and what it might be. The first killing might even be a case of mistaken identity and as a result Mori's goddaughter comes to stay at the bookshop. There is a lot of following people around the streets of Paris. There is also a lot of visiting the nightclubs, notably 'Le Moulin Rouge' and 'Le Chat Noir', where the protagonists happen to run into every famous Parisian artist, writer and composer of the time, which does feel rather artificial. Legris's lover is a painter, Tasha and it is nice to see an amateur detective who is not celibate, even if his relationship is complicated. 

There is a lot of interest in this novel. The details of the settings and the people are fascinating. The murder mystery is pretty clever and not that easily to predict, but avoids deus ex machina being needed to resolve it. The prime drawbacks are that there is a lot of tramping around and the tone seems off. This may be due to it being in translation from French. Despite a series of brutal murders, starting off with a stabbed girl, the tone is persistently light. This is fuelled by quirky customers at the bookshop, Legris having women throwing themselves at him, Joseph's mother' Legris on-off relationship and Tasha's disapproval of his investigating and so on. It may have greater gravity in the original French, but in English, despite points of interest it comes off uncomfortably jarring.

'Half A King' by Joe Abercrombie

This novel is set in a different world from, 'The Blade Itself' (2006) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html This one has a more Nordic flavour and focuses on states around the so-called Sundered Sea, a roughly circular sea with rather bleak moors, forests and fens around it and various cities on its shores. It focuses on Yarkvi, the second son of the King of Gettland who was born with a withered arm with only a thumb and one finger on his hand. With his father and elder brother dead, he is called back from training as a Minister - a celibate kind of combined herbalist, diplomat, advisor, order to be king. On a revenge mission to a neighbouring state his uncle attempts to kill him and takes the throne. Yarvi survives but ends up as a galley slave, then later escapes with others from the galley to make the arduous journey back to Gettland to recover his birthright.

Though Abercrombie aimed for this to be a young adult book; a little less 'grimdark', and it is a bit shorter than 'The Blade Itself' and much shorter than later books in that series, it is still pretty much a gritty read, with lots of death and suffering along the way. The book is not high fantasy and at times if someone told you it was set in genuine Nordic history you could almost believe it, including when a One God is put in place over the 409 gods worshipped before. With uncles and a widowed mother in a Nordic realm, there are heavy overtones of 'Hamlet' (1601). The portrayals of this bleak context are well done and the action moves along briskly. The portrayal of the characters is handled well and as Abercrombie notes in an interview at the end of the edition I have the focus on one point of view throughout and a small set of characters at any one time means the character development is rich. Some might foresee the twists at the end, but I found they were well handled.

If I see more books in the series I would certainly pick them up.

Non-Fiction

'What is History?' by E.H. Carr

This is a series of four lectures that Carr gave in 1961. Despite its age it has really stood the test of time (though it does refer to all historians as 'he' and talks about the USSR) in terms of its exploration of perspectives on history. It is a short book (159 pages in my edition) however covers a whole range of issues that still need to be thought about. Examples include whether anything in history is 'inevitable' and how historians are impacted by their attitudes of their own time when looking at attitudes of the past and whether we can ever be really objective. In some ways the book comes to a proto-Post Modernist approach which was to develop in the next thirty years, emphasising the looking at context rather than insisting that our perspective is somehow greater than others without checking this. He also points out how Western-centric so much of history is in the West and how this neglects histories that in the life of humanity have had huge impacts.

Despite its age, this book is very deft and putting questions that historians especially in the period of so much dubious 'history' appearing online, need to keep asking themselves and using to check their work. If you are interested in the study of history, I feel this book remains relevant especially in what it asks.

Audio Book

'The Collectors' by David Baldacci; read by Steven Pacey

This is the second book in Baldacci's Camel Club series. I listened to the third book back in 2020: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html It is typical of many of the CD audio books that seem to turn up in charity shops. The 'Camel Club' is a collection of misfit middle-aged and elderly men with various backgrounds largely in intelligence or the military who get wrapped up in conspiracies and solving crimes, led by Oliver Stone a former CIA assassin who now lives and tends a cemetery. In this one the gang investigate the killing of a librarian at the Library of Congress where one of them works and the assassination of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. There is a parallel story about a con artist and her gang ripping off an Atlantic City gangster, which overlaps with the main story as she was the former wife of the librarian.

There is a lot of chasing around Washington DC but the solution of what is going on is reasonably well handled.  Some of the technology, especially used in the con, seems dated, even for 2006 when the book came out. Unlike 'Stone Cold' (2007) which I listened to back in 2020, the language is a bit less tough-guy throughout and it is more a gang of quirky sort-of amateurs solving what is going on which turns out to be spying and treason.

Pacey does well with a range of distinctive American voices and is not bad with the few female voices that appear. This is not the sort of book that I would have gone out and bought but it is fine enough for listening to while commuting.

Books I Listened To/Read In March

Fiction
'Ten-Second Staircase' by Christopher Fowler
This another book in Fowler's Bryant & May series (in fact only the fourth, but it has felt to me, to be much more already) about elderly police detectives in a unit investigating peculiar crimes. Though their careers stretch across sixty years from the early period of the Second World War, so far only in two of the books in this series that I have read does Fowler set them in some other time than when they were written in the 21st Century. This one is no different, though another crime from the 1970s is also resolved retrospectively. It sees the murder of a series of controversial minor celebrities and if you know developments of the time (2005) will see parallels between the fictional characters and actual celebrities experiencing scandals. The murders are all extreme such as drowning an artist in their own tank of formaldehyde, electrocuting someone through gym equipment, dropping someone through four floors of a building by installing a fake floor. As the story develops, however, it seems that Fowler is more interested in how the media creates and feeds modern mythology of criminals and how this is a process which has effectively gone on for centuries.

The book has all the elements you would expect from the series. The leading pair grumble about life and deal with modern situations in different ways. There is an odd range of supporting characters and there is a lot of reference to the history of London and folk culture. It is not bad and the premise is quite clever though at times Fowler portrays estate life in London rather as you would see it on a children's television programme and similarly the private school he features seems largely to be from 1950s portrayals. There are some clever elements, but as seems to be required these days it is rather 'over-written'. There are simply too many details, too many elements included that they choke the progress of the story. I accept that I may becoming intolerant as I age and that I am guilty of doing this in my own writing. However, I am certainly far from being as successful as Fowler and feel that he or someone else, should look at editing his books more so they do not become so stodgy.

'Game of Death' by David Hosp
This book is set in the near future when virtual reality has become so sophisticated that people can feel that they have been transported to another place or time, they can even create their own scenarios to experience things they would not have otherwise lived. However, it turns out that in Boston, home of the company which has developed the system, NextLife someone is beginning to act out sexual murder scenarios that they have created in the system and killing models who were used for early avatars in it. Though there is some reference to the monitoring and Nick Caldwell, responsible for online monitoring at the company becomes infatuated by a woman he saw in one of the scenarios, the book actually quickly turns into a standard murder mystery with Caldwell and his perhaps love interest and colleague Yvette Jones getting mixed up with the police investigation and uncovering dubious activities of NextLife and its nefarious staff. It is not bad but it is not really exciting and soon becomes very standard for this kind of novel, though with Boston with its different neighbourhoods a setting that I have not read about before. There are decent twists and turns if handled somewhat mechanically. My main disappointment is that the book did not live up to the cover blurb:

'NextLife is an exciting young company on the brink of going public which promises its subscribers the chance to experience anything they want. Climb Everest. Dive off the Barrier Reef. Go to a 1970s Rolling Stones concert. Walk the Great Wall of China.'

We see none of this, just some of the sex-murder scenarios. As a result, I felt the virtual reality element was just a McGuffin into a standard murder mystery. Some of the chasing around Boston could have been reduced in exchange for more insight into the possibilities of NextLife especially in the opening chapters and more exploration of what impact, beyond the possibility of it triggering an infatuation in the real world, it might have on users. The murderer was a disturbed abusive man even before he accessed the system so we do not see what the system itself might do to screw with people's minds.

'Conspiracy' by S.J. Parris [Stephanie Merritt]
As I have noted before I largely buy my books from a local charity shop and then from a carboot sale. As a result I often end up with a book from somewhere along in a series. This is the case with this book. It is the fifth in the series featuring Giordano Bruno who was an actual person alive at the end of the 16th Century. He was a former friar, writer and thinker who was tried over seven years from 1593 for heresy and was executed in 1600. In this book, set in 1585, he has returned from London to Paris and, as a former aide to King Henri III and a tutor in memory, something Bruno was renowned for, he is drawn into the investigation of the murder of a priest who was a friend of his. So far, so good. The details of the setting of Paris at the time with its inns and various quality of houses plus the different factions notably the Duke of Guise and the Catholic League opposed to the King, the King's own faction and that of his mother Catherine De Medici are very good. A ball is the setting for one of the following murders and Parris brings it out excellently. The problem is then, that while this is a political conspiracy novel, she takes it far too far. Effectively Bruno ends up working for all of the factions and also being threatened by them. A range of beautiful women, one who has betrayed him in England, try to seduce him or hand him over to one of those groups he is working for/threatened by.

There are moments of action and tension. However, overall, the whole story becomes so inter-twined that in the last quarter of the book, you just want it to be over with. The sharpness of the early parts of the book are drowned by all the twisting and turning; the huge range of potential explanations and an ever-expanding cast. I imagine Parris was seeking to create something engaging, but she is in the end tripped up by having a need to include simply anyone of note in Paris at the time and thus in all the name-checking the plot is lost. The book was published in 2016 and at the end it hints that Bruno will move to Prague, though in reality he went to Marburg and Frankfurt before going to Venice where he was arrested, imprisoned and tried over years. One can praise Parris for her research and attention to detail, but as is often the case with historical novels, the sense that they have to communicate as much as a history book works against good story telling. It is becoming apparent to me that my age is now making it harder to engage with books which feel they have to be so heavily loaded with characters and plot twists. Even then, I would caution that this book is weighed-down by them whoever you might be.

'A Noble Radiance' by Donna Leon
I am glad that I have persisted in reading Leon's Brunetti series as after some early wobbling the quality has largely grown. Though 'The Death of Faith' (1997) had some flaws: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/02/books-i-listened-toread-in-february.html it took an interesting route which many crime authors would not have followed; 'Aqua Alta' (1996) was better still: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html

I like that willingness by some crime novelists to go in different directions. 'A Noble Radiance' is not radical but it is adept. It starts with the recovery of the body of a young wealthy man from a noble Venetian family - they are something Leon seems fixated with - who had been kidnapped two years earlier. How this differs is we are not really sure what has happened and whether it was simply a kidnapping or if murder was intended from the start or indeed it was a practical joke that went entirely wrong. The twist in this regard is very good and though clues have been laid, Leon has also proven very good at drawing your attention on to other things, other explanations, so by misdirection pulls off a clever story. Though the 'boundaries' are open, in that events take place in the northern Italian countryside, rather than a confined space, she cleverly limits those involved. You may not welcome Leon's mourning of the fate of Venetian nobility, but this context does provide motives and opportunities which would be absent with other families. Overall, Leon creates a feasible, engaging story and I hope that the standard continues in the remaining three novels of hers that I have in line to read.

Non-Fiction
'The German Opposition to Hitler' by Hans Rothfels
One reason why I was drawn to this book, first published in 1961, though I have the 1970 edition was because when I was studying history in the 1970s we used books published in the previous 20-25 years. Despite acknowledgement of the 20th July 1944 attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler, the books even including ones by leading 20th Century historians such as A.J.P. Taylor recounted the Nazi regime as if there had been no resistance to it from within Germany. Even Taylor dismissed the 20th July plotters as deluded and seeking only to maintain Prussian militarism and hierarchy at a time when it was clear Germany was to be defeated. I never really understood why this attitude was adopted. Rothfels's book outlines why unconditional surrender and a wish to make the German public responsible for the crimes directed by their leaders meant that the extensive opposition groups he shows in this book had to be utterly dismissed, even at the price of prolonging the war and ultimately handing much of Europe from the Nazi dictatorship to the Soviet one.

While Rothfels outlines the groups that were formed and the attempts to stop Hitler even before war had begun, he is strongest in looking at what these various groups believed and the immense efforts they put into planning a post-war democratic Germany and indeed Europe. He shows how diverse the people were who were drawn to resist and that how as the years passed, links were made between military conspirators, assorted religious groups, former politicians and trade unionists. Facing such a horrendous regime, it is clear, broke down many of the frictions that had previously existed. While he does not go on into the post-war period, from his evidence one can make a convincing case that the foundations of West Germany's prosperity were being laid by the opposition groups even while the war persisted. Naturally it is exasperating how unresponsive the British and Americans were to repeated contact from opposition groups before and during the war, especially given the risks these Germans took. Most galling is the US attitude that effectively saw the 20th July plotters as no better than Hitler. Perhaps this attitude helps explain how feeble so much of the de-Nazification was during the occupation period (see my review of 'Blind Eye to Murder' (1981):  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-books-i-read-in-august.html ) as it had been well established that Germans were simply all as guilty as each other and had no genuine belief in liberty or democracy whether due to militarist or Soviet perspectives.

This is a useful book to have alongside histories that have followed which provide greater detail of the activities of opposition groups because it provides the intellectual context in which such people were operating and highlights what drove them on and inhibited their engagement with such risky enterprises. This remains important when, even in the 21st Century we have commentators spilling over from Baigent and Leigh's approach, still going on about some sinister dark intentions of those simply seeking to end such a horrendous regime being in control of Germany. This book is crisp, attentive and well worth a read despite its age.

Audio Book - Fiction
'Stone Cold' by David Baldacci; read by Michael Brandon
Not having read any of Baldacci's books featuring former secret service assassin, Oliver Stone, I was rather bewildered that we begin the book following Harry Flinn a man with a similar background in homeland security but who is assassinating a number of former operatives responsible for the death of his father. This book is apparently the third in the 'Camel Club' pentalogy because it they feature a group of eccentric but talented men who aid Stone with what he is doing. Not having this background meant I was very lost for a lot of the early part of the story. There are effectively three threads - Flinn's vengeance, Stone's own vengeance against his former employers that overlaps with Flinn's and Stone aiding confidence trickster Annabelle Conroy in getting back at crooked casino owner Jerry Bagger who killed her mother. In many ways the book tries too hard, but I guess that is what fans of Baldacci's work are looking for.

Everyone talks tough, even when brought out of retirement, Flinn's elderly mother who turns out to have been a top double agent working on assassinating Soviet leaders. Thus, the book seems overblown, added to the fact that no-one has a normal conversation, it is all scowling or wise cracks. Brandon does this kind of dialogue very well, whether from women or men, though he makes one sound very much like Richard Nixon. There are some interesting set pieces as everyone tries to get to the people they feel they must kill and those people feel they have to get to them, but there is so much of this, that it soon becomes tiring. I have 'The Collectors' (2006) which turns out to be the previous book in this series, but do not know if I have the energy for it. If you like gung-ho action mixed in with a lot of political conspiracy and double-crossing then this book might suit, but even then I would recommend Andy McNab's work as he manages to have such elements without overwhelming the reader.