Fiction
'Siege of Heaven' by Tom Harper
This book covers the same phase of history, the 1st Crusade from after the fall of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem that was covered by 'Prince of Legend' (2013) by Jack Ludlow, also the third book a trilogy: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-books-i-listened-toread-in-june.html However, in terms of quality Harper's book is in a completely higher league. Ludlow featured no real characters whereas Harper's story is from the perspective of Demetrios Askiates, a representative of the Byzantine Emperor travelling with the crusade, his friends and ultimately members of his family. Thus, while we see the same sieges and the same arguments among the crusaders we can engage with them far better than in Ludlow's book, which read as if a history text book had been simply transposed. Askiates has adventures, even travelling to Egypt and coming into scrapes with the leaders both military and religious, of the crusade. These come at a personal cost, so as with the best historical dramas, we see both the big and the small, sparking off each other. Harper has very good descriptions of, for example, pushing a siege tower and the streets of Antioch and Jerusalem, you feel much more that you are there rather than flying over it all. I am tempted to go back and find the previous two books and certainly if I see any other books by Harper, I will pick them up. The book might not be outstanding, but it is entertaining, and importantly for a historical novel, engaging on a personal level rather than like reading a decent textbook.
'The Death of Faith' by Donna Leon
This novel, the sixth in the Brunetti series is not as strong as the previous one, 'Acqua Alta' (1996) which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html However, this is not on the basis on which it has been attacked by some readers who are resentful of its portrayal of Catholic institutions and by the way forgetting that this book, published in 1997, predated 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003). It also predates all the public revelations about paedophilia in the Catholic Church which actually make aspects of this book even more believable than back when it was published.
I feel that the characters, while possibly uncomfortable for co-religionists are realistic. The problem is that the book lacks the dynamic of its predecessor. The first half of the book is really just a sequence of interviews by Guido Brunetti that vary very little in nature. Added to that, the crime is not really a crime, but ironically triggers criminal activity. Having read the work of Leonardo Sciscia and Michael Dibdin, I know a time comes when any crime novelist setting stories in Italy has to face the power of the church in that society. However, while some critics feel Leon has gone too far and relied on stereotypes, for me she baulks at the last and lays the blame firmly on an individual rather than on the institution that permits the behaviours she highlights in the novel. In some ways I admire Leon from not feeling compelled to adhere to a standard resolution of the crime, something I always liked in Sciscia's work. However, I feel she held her hand rather than pressing right in, perhaps for fear of a more stronger antipathy to her books from Catholic supporters than has proven the case anyway.
'Guardians of Time' by Poul Anderson
This is in fact four short stories that Anderson published in 1955-60 featuring an American veteran from the 1950s, Manse Everard, who is recruited by very powerful people from the distant future to work in fighting back against those trying to alter our known history. This gives Anderson a chance not simply to highlight lesser known parts of world history but also ask moral questions about the right to tinker with the universe and who makes the decision over what is 'right'. In the first story he investigates radioactive material that has turned up in the 6th Century in part of England controlled by the Jutes in an attempt to prevent the start of what in the 1950s were called the Dark Ages. He also gets drawn into trying to stop a fellow guardian seeking to spare the life of his wife during the Second World War.
In the second story one of the guardians has accidentally ended up becoming Cyrus II of Persia in the 6th Century BCE. Everard not only has to rescue him but also find a suitable replacement. In the third story he works to prevent Mongol and Chinese explorers effectively taking over 13th Century North America before the Europeans arrive in large numbers. This leads him to question whether the USA he knows was the correct path for the continent. The final story has Everard going into battle to prevent people from the future overseeing a victory by Hannibal in the Second Punic War which leads to a Europe and North America dominated by Celtic peoples and a slower development in technology so there are still steam cars in the mid-20th Century.
While it has the earnestness of 1950s science fiction and very easy to use devices for both time travel and moving around in the past, the stories are not simplistic. It is also interesting that Anderson highlights alternatives that even now tend not to be explored very much in all the writing focused on the American Civil War and Second World War. For anyone interested in alternate history, I suggest this book. My edition only had 160 pages, so it is a quick read too, but packs a lot of ideas in.
'Masaryk Station' by David Downing
This is the final book in Downing's 'Station' series and takes events forward to 1948. I was given these books but there is a reasonable chance I would have bought them anyway. However, I would have done this on the basis of being misinformed. There are some small elements of thriller and spy story in these books, but primarily they are just 'slice of life' novels about people living in Berlin through 1939-48. Almost as soon as an adventurous element arises, Downing snuffs it out. We have a little bit in this book with the hero John Russell looking at how former Nazi collaborators are being smuggled out of Yugoslavia and getting a blackmail film from Czechoslovakia. However, repeatedly, Downing backs up from real jeopardy. He also dodges around important historical events. The coup in Czechoslovakia is over before this book starts and the Berlin Blockade occurs after the book finishes. Downing's obsession throughout has really been to provide a sporadic travelogue of Berlin and some other Central European cities in the mid-20th Century. The novels are very fragmented and real points of tension simply dodged. I had expected a very different book to this, something much more like the work of Philip Kerr and Alan Furst who Downing is wrongly likened to. I admire his research for these books, but they are really just vignettes bundled together lacking in clear direction and certainly in adventure even when there seems to be ample opportunity in the context he uses, for it. If you are looking for details of Berlin around the Second World War then this is fine. If you are looking for a follow-on to Kerr's and Furst's work, look elsewhere.
Non-Fiction
'How to Write Alternate History' by Grey Wolf
This book published in 2013, should not be confused with the 2019 book of the same name edited by Andy Cooke, though their approach is very similar. Wolf's book is a series of blog postings that have been made into chapters. This means that the book is brisk, but I did miss connecting narrative between the chapters and an overarching conclusion. The approach also leads to some repetition as Grey highlights the same aspect more than once in the context of different chapters. Rather than giving a structured masterclass in writing alternate fiction, Wolf, provides a series of prompts and encourages the author to think about things that are often neglected in alternate history fiction such as architecture and music as well as things such as common names and whether the technology available has also been disrupted by the divergence from our history, e.g. a political divergence might alter railway building. Grey is good on the importance of characters in alternate history, which surprisingly, is something that recently I have found have been absent not just from alternate history but even straight historical fiction I have read. Overall, I do not think this book will enable you to write alternate history fiction if you have not already been thinking through it, but for authors of the genre I think it provides a useful checklist of reminders of things not to overlook.
'The Edwardian Crisis, Britain 1901-1914' by David Powell
This is a brisk book that clinically highlights all the different elements of crisis that the UK faced in the 20th Century before the outbreak of the First World War including the cost of living, constitutional, female suffrage, labour unrest and conflict over Irish independence. He tones down the more excited portrayals as these occurrences and while he does consider how much worse things could have turned out, he certainly keeps to sober analysis. It does take some of the 'wind' out of the sense of crisis, but on the other hand it challenges the surprisingly resilient popular view that these years were some kind of golden twilight before the very modern horrors of the First World War. At times you feel he could give more details, but this is largely an analytical book rather than an account, so he steps in with detail when it adds weight to the points he is addressing rather than to bulk out the book. The book is also very good at looking inside political parties and the various movements, especially connected to female suffrage and the Irish question, highlighting that there was never a single viewpoint. Over all this is a very useful book if you want to look at what was actually happening in the UK at this time and also how much worse it could have been.
Audio Books - Fiction
'Bloodline' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having finally waded my way out of listening to 'Death of a Charming Man': http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/01/books-i-readlistened-to-in-january.html I have been able to get into more audio books this month. I had been hesitant to return to Mark Billingham's work following listened to 'Death Message' (2007) which because the detective uses a serial killer to murder someone he feels has escaped justice, I found morally unsound. However, I had already bought this audio book so turned to listen to it. Though it features a serial killer, son of a serial killer, it is less morally dubious. It has the grittiness that Billingham does well though some of the regular characters, especially pierced, gay pathologist are almost turning into caricatures. Billingham balances the tension in seeking down the killer who is active across Britain with the 'hero' Tom Thorne dealing with his girlfriend's miscarriage. The book, published in 2009, feels modern and appropriate. Glenister voices not just Thorne excellently but also provides a good range of voices for both the female and male characters. This book has a very good twist and I certainly think the book was an improvement on 'Death Message'. However, given my concerns about Billingham's moral compass in his writing I will not be buying any more of his books.
Audio Books - Non-Fiction
'Dear Me' by Peter Ustinov; read by the Author
I got know Ustinov from movies such as 'One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing' (1975) - which unsurprisingly given that (von) Ustinov of German-Russian extraction plays a Chinese in it now has 'racist' appended to its search terms and 'Death on the Nile' (1978) in which he plays a Belgian, does not. He was a regular on chat shows which is where he probably came most into his own as a raconteur. This autobiography was published in 1977 and tails off about 1972, so covers his life before I was really aware of him. I have seen 'Topkapi' (1964) and 'Spartacus' (1960) - though was not conscious he was in it - from that period. However, a lot of the movies, let alone the stage productions he was in or had written were unknown to me.
The book, at times, has Ustinov speaking to himself as a dialogue between different facets of himself which comes out very well in an audio book. The story of his life which was international throughout and involved lots of eccentric people is witty and interesting, showing up the petty madnesses of school, the military and performance. I had not been aware that he had been married three times and his first two marriages, the first when he was 19, seem to have been unpleasant. Those aspects offer a bitter element which sets off the rather rollicking nature of some of the other parts. Overall, while I might have found this book interesting to read, it certainly works best as an audio book as it is like sitting down and listening to a rather peculiar old uncle speaking of his life. I do not know if there is an equivalent for the latter part of his life - he lived until 2004 - but if there is I would buy it as an audio book too.
Showing posts with label Mark Billingham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Billingham. Show all posts
Saturday, 29 February 2020
Sunday, 30 June 2019
The Books I Listened To/Read In June
Fiction
'Prince of Legend' by Jack Ludlow
This is the final book in Ludlow's Crusades trilogy and features events during the 1st Crusade from soon after the capture of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem. I have long been interested in the Crusader States set up from what is now southern Turkey through modern Syria and Lebanon to Palestine/Israel, so was interested to read this book. Ludlow is a successful historical fiction author with a number of trilogies set in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe. This novel showed me why I have had complaints about my own (alternate) history books if Ludlow's approach is what is expected. Aspiring authors are repeatedly told 'show, don't tell'. In other words events should be seen through the eyes of the characters rather than simply narrated by the author. Ludlow totally throws aside that expectation. Much of the book is not a novel, it is a popular-level history book. At times it was as if I was re-reading 'The First Crusade' (1980) by Steven Runciman that I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/12/books-i-listened-toread-in-december.html
The 'action' features the leaders of the Crusade and every time one is introduced there is extensive background on him, his relatives and their rivalries back in Europe. Dialogue is minimal and was described to me as being like television documentaries in which they have some actors going through the motions to give a feel for a particular meeting. There are no female characters and we hear from no-one outside the inner circle of leaders. There is tension and rivalry between them, but it is handled in a clinical way. If the minimal dialogue was stripped out, then this could simply be presented as a history book.
There were some interesting details especially about the nature of Antioch and the villages and castles around it that I was not familiar with and then about the progress of the crusaders from Antioch to Jerusalem and briefly how they interacted with the emirates they went through on the way. However, it was not a work of fiction and there is no real story. If this is what people who buy my books think a novel is, then they are misinformed and they would be better off seeking out popular history books, which might lack the exciting covers and bombastic rhetoric on the front, but provide the technical detail these readers are looking for. For myself, while well informed, this did not at all feel like a novel. I found it interesting, but lacking any character development and full of historical facts rather than story, I was not engaged with it as I would have been with a work of fiction.
'Death in a Strange Country' by Donna Leon
This is the second book in the Commissario Brunetti series by Leon, featuring a police detective from Venice. I am still waiting to read one of her books which would explain the acclaim that there is for her series. At times Leon does not seem certain whether she is writing a 'cosy' crime novel set amongst the beauty and decay of Venice or wants to produce something more gritty. While I accept the series may improve, so far she has not approached Michael Dibdin in terms of writing crime novels set in contemporary Italy. This novel is patchy in terms of pace. When an American serviceman is found floating dead in a canal in Venice, Brunetti has to travel to Vicenza which at the time of the novel (1993) had a large US Army base. He has to navigate between the American authorities and powerful Italian businessmen but is aided by a member of the local carabinerie. The first two-thirds of the book are pretty slow, with Brunetti trekking back and forth between Venice and Vicenza. The pace is not aided by the fact that Leon goes into immense detail about how people have their coffees and other details which are clearly aimed to add atmosphere but really slow up the book. In contrast there are two 'info dumps' when Brunetti simply has a meeting with a person and they provide a great deal of the information he needs with no difficulty. The pace picks up towards the end of the book when corruption and environmental damage is uncovered. A side story about the theft of expensive paintings is connected in too, but again it has been a laboured affair with Brunetti taking ages to track down the supposed thief even though he knows him and he is in the constraints of Venice. There are some interesting elements in this novel, but the execution is erratic.
Non-Fiction
'A Brief Survey of Austrian History' by Richard Rickett
I have no idea where I got this book from. First published in 1966 (I have the 1972 edition) by a Viennese publishers, it was aimed at giving English-speaking tourists to Austria a history of the country. The flow of the book is very erratic and seems largely to alight on particular topics or individuals which interest Rickett rather than giving an even picture of the country. There is quite a lot of stuff on the medieval expansion of Austria and then on various rulers, notably Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph and the failed attempts at reform. Metternich gets particular attention, but so does a lot of cultural aspects especially in the 18th Century. The fight for Tyrol during the Napoleonic Wars was something I knew nothing about but despite being brief is covered in detail. The period up to the assimilation by Germany, through the 1920s and 1930s also gets much attention, but almost everything after that is covered briefly. I particularly wished for more about Austria in the 1950s and 1960s which gets scant coverage. Overall it is a odd, but perhaps charming little book, rather let down by the fact it flits from topic to topic on the basis of the author's interest rather than giving a thorough coverage no matter how brief.
Audio Books
'Death Message' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having listened to 'Lifeless' (2005) and found it refreshing, I was looking forward to this book that while two books later in the same series, featured the detective Tom Thorne. I know that Billingham has striven for grittiness and realism in his portrayal of policing in London. However, with this book it went too far and Thorne ends up as much a criminal as many of those he arrests. He is drawn into a series of killings as the murderer sends him mobile phone messages, a mix of text, photos and video, of the victims. While trying not to give away too much of what happens, Thorne begins to use the serial killer, not turning him into the police and eventually using him to exact revenge. There are some qualms on his part, but it seems towards the end as if Billingham has lost control of the plot.
It is common these days in novels to see things from both the criminal's and the detective's perspective, even when dealing with serial killers. We also have stories featuring corrupt or vengeful police officers, but you get the sense that this is not really what the author intended for his character (though I may be wrong). By the end you see Thorne as no better than the people he is supposed to be pursuing. It really undermines his relationship with his girlfriend, also a police detective of the same rank and his best friend, a police pathologist. His deceit of them removes any faith we had in Thorne. I do not know if it is the beginning of Thorne's slide into criminality; 7 books follow this one. However, for me, I was riled feeling that the sympathy built up for Thorne was tossed aside and it was far too easy for him to become the companion and indeed user of a serial killer, with minimal doubts about his actions.
Glenister did well with all the London voices, pretty decently with the female characters. However, my engagement with his narration was overshadowed by a novel which went right off the rails and made the 'hero' seem like it was him who should be being arrested rather than those he was meant to be going after, almost all of whom end up dead anyway, because of Thorne's negligence, and his use of a killer to carry out his own ends.
'Gallows View' by Peter Robinson; read by Neil Pearson
This book is the first book in the D(C)I Banks series of novels which have been televised in recent years. It is set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale where Banks and his family have moved from London. The book is set in the 1980s. This is one of the interesting things about crime novels, is that they really show up the technology of the time. As 'Death Message' (2007) was about mobile phones of the mid-2000s, this book, published in 1987 is about mid-1980s technology including early police computers, film cameras and even slide projectors. I would put it in the category of 'cosy' crime books, if it was not so sordid.
It has trappings of a cosy story being set in a small town with various characters and a very limited number of suspects. Many of the points of tension are low key as whether Banks will sleep with an attractive police psychologist and activities are old fashioned like building a dry stone wall and attending the camera club. One of the prime crimes investigated is a 'peeping tom' which seems to precede the sophisticated stalking of today. However, the story involves a rape and the rapist is detected through catching gonorrhea. Given that by the end three residents have been arrested - for manslaughter, rape and voyeurism, you do worry at the crime level of the small town and how quickly Robinson would have got through much of the population.
While I cannot put my finger on why, overall, I was disappointed by the book. Perhaps it felt too old without being period. Perhaps it seemed contrived, though I have accepted many crime books set in small places that have been so as well. I suppose the mix of these elements, simply did not work for me. Pearson who voices a lot of crime audio books, did well, capturing the Yorkshire accents of a range of people and doing convincing female voices. I was left feeling that, despite his efforts, Robinson's work is not something I will return to.
'The Winter Ghosts' by Kate Mosse; read by Julian Rhind-Tutt
This book features tropes that Mosse has built her career upon - a stranger coming to southern France and having a time-slip experience. There is also reference to the Occitan language and the Cathars, a persecuted heretical Christian-based religion prominent in the region in the 13th and 14th Centuries, the followers of which were massacred. It is different in that the protagonist is a man rather than a woman and it is set in 1928 and 1933 rather than in modern day. It features Freddie Watson, a young man from Sussex who has been unable to recover from the death of his elder brother, George, in June 1916, fighting on the Western Front. He has come out of a psychiatric institution but is still heavily troubled by grief. In December 1928 on a driving holiday in southern France he crashes his car and ends up in a small village. He is invited to attend a celebration for the feast day of St. Etienne but slips through time to a 14th Century version of the event where he encounters Cathar locals and witnesses their suppression.
Mosse is great at portraying the locales, here more into the Pyrenees than in her previous books; the physicality of moving around them is well represented. She is also good at the mystery of people from the past impacting on the present. The challenge with this book is that it was extended from a 2009 novella and at times you felt it has been 'padded'. In particular Freddie, despite being haunted by his brother, is slow to realise that he is interacting with more ghosts, especially the beautiful Fabrissa who he falls for and this drives on his subsequent actions. While Mosse is good on what happened in the 14th Century, I am surprised that she makes no reference to how popular spiritualism had become following the First World War. Even if Freddie did not previously subscribe to its beliefs, he certainly would have been aware of rational people (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle notable among them) who felt they could be in contact with the dead. She does present Freddie's sustained grief well and reminds us that people do not 'get over' death easily, especially when it was on such a horrific scale as the First World War with so many very grim ends for people.
Rhind-Tutt, though best known for his comedy work, was an excellent choice to read the book, which is largely told in the first person, though jarringly at the end it switches to third person. It is not simply his voice but all the mannerisms that he puts into the portrayal of Freddie that make it very credible. Overall, I found this an interesting book though built on a simple premise. Mosse's descriptions are great and her sense of people is strong. She weakens the jeopardy with the looking back from 1933 so we know that not only Freddie survives the 1928 encounters despite their hazards, but mentally he is sound. I think this could have been handled differently. At times, especially given how long it takes Freddie to work out that Fabrissa is a ghost, there would have been much tighter editing, but Mosse is renowned for writing long books. If this had run for 3 hours rather than 5 hours 22 minutes as it did in my edition, it could have had a real punch. With length some of that is dissipated, but not to the extent that this is a poor book.
'Prince of Legend' by Jack Ludlow
This is the final book in Ludlow's Crusades trilogy and features events during the 1st Crusade from soon after the capture of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem. I have long been interested in the Crusader States set up from what is now southern Turkey through modern Syria and Lebanon to Palestine/Israel, so was interested to read this book. Ludlow is a successful historical fiction author with a number of trilogies set in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe. This novel showed me why I have had complaints about my own (alternate) history books if Ludlow's approach is what is expected. Aspiring authors are repeatedly told 'show, don't tell'. In other words events should be seen through the eyes of the characters rather than simply narrated by the author. Ludlow totally throws aside that expectation. Much of the book is not a novel, it is a popular-level history book. At times it was as if I was re-reading 'The First Crusade' (1980) by Steven Runciman that I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/12/books-i-listened-toread-in-december.html
The 'action' features the leaders of the Crusade and every time one is introduced there is extensive background on him, his relatives and their rivalries back in Europe. Dialogue is minimal and was described to me as being like television documentaries in which they have some actors going through the motions to give a feel for a particular meeting. There are no female characters and we hear from no-one outside the inner circle of leaders. There is tension and rivalry between them, but it is handled in a clinical way. If the minimal dialogue was stripped out, then this could simply be presented as a history book.
There were some interesting details especially about the nature of Antioch and the villages and castles around it that I was not familiar with and then about the progress of the crusaders from Antioch to Jerusalem and briefly how they interacted with the emirates they went through on the way. However, it was not a work of fiction and there is no real story. If this is what people who buy my books think a novel is, then they are misinformed and they would be better off seeking out popular history books, which might lack the exciting covers and bombastic rhetoric on the front, but provide the technical detail these readers are looking for. For myself, while well informed, this did not at all feel like a novel. I found it interesting, but lacking any character development and full of historical facts rather than story, I was not engaged with it as I would have been with a work of fiction.
'Death in a Strange Country' by Donna Leon
This is the second book in the Commissario Brunetti series by Leon, featuring a police detective from Venice. I am still waiting to read one of her books which would explain the acclaim that there is for her series. At times Leon does not seem certain whether she is writing a 'cosy' crime novel set amongst the beauty and decay of Venice or wants to produce something more gritty. While I accept the series may improve, so far she has not approached Michael Dibdin in terms of writing crime novels set in contemporary Italy. This novel is patchy in terms of pace. When an American serviceman is found floating dead in a canal in Venice, Brunetti has to travel to Vicenza which at the time of the novel (1993) had a large US Army base. He has to navigate between the American authorities and powerful Italian businessmen but is aided by a member of the local carabinerie. The first two-thirds of the book are pretty slow, with Brunetti trekking back and forth between Venice and Vicenza. The pace is not aided by the fact that Leon goes into immense detail about how people have their coffees and other details which are clearly aimed to add atmosphere but really slow up the book. In contrast there are two 'info dumps' when Brunetti simply has a meeting with a person and they provide a great deal of the information he needs with no difficulty. The pace picks up towards the end of the book when corruption and environmental damage is uncovered. A side story about the theft of expensive paintings is connected in too, but again it has been a laboured affair with Brunetti taking ages to track down the supposed thief even though he knows him and he is in the constraints of Venice. There are some interesting elements in this novel, but the execution is erratic.
Non-Fiction
'A Brief Survey of Austrian History' by Richard Rickett
I have no idea where I got this book from. First published in 1966 (I have the 1972 edition) by a Viennese publishers, it was aimed at giving English-speaking tourists to Austria a history of the country. The flow of the book is very erratic and seems largely to alight on particular topics or individuals which interest Rickett rather than giving an even picture of the country. There is quite a lot of stuff on the medieval expansion of Austria and then on various rulers, notably Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph and the failed attempts at reform. Metternich gets particular attention, but so does a lot of cultural aspects especially in the 18th Century. The fight for Tyrol during the Napoleonic Wars was something I knew nothing about but despite being brief is covered in detail. The period up to the assimilation by Germany, through the 1920s and 1930s also gets much attention, but almost everything after that is covered briefly. I particularly wished for more about Austria in the 1950s and 1960s which gets scant coverage. Overall it is a odd, but perhaps charming little book, rather let down by the fact it flits from topic to topic on the basis of the author's interest rather than giving a thorough coverage no matter how brief.
Audio Books
'Death Message' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having listened to 'Lifeless' (2005) and found it refreshing, I was looking forward to this book that while two books later in the same series, featured the detective Tom Thorne. I know that Billingham has striven for grittiness and realism in his portrayal of policing in London. However, with this book it went too far and Thorne ends up as much a criminal as many of those he arrests. He is drawn into a series of killings as the murderer sends him mobile phone messages, a mix of text, photos and video, of the victims. While trying not to give away too much of what happens, Thorne begins to use the serial killer, not turning him into the police and eventually using him to exact revenge. There are some qualms on his part, but it seems towards the end as if Billingham has lost control of the plot.
It is common these days in novels to see things from both the criminal's and the detective's perspective, even when dealing with serial killers. We also have stories featuring corrupt or vengeful police officers, but you get the sense that this is not really what the author intended for his character (though I may be wrong). By the end you see Thorne as no better than the people he is supposed to be pursuing. It really undermines his relationship with his girlfriend, also a police detective of the same rank and his best friend, a police pathologist. His deceit of them removes any faith we had in Thorne. I do not know if it is the beginning of Thorne's slide into criminality; 7 books follow this one. However, for me, I was riled feeling that the sympathy built up for Thorne was tossed aside and it was far too easy for him to become the companion and indeed user of a serial killer, with minimal doubts about his actions.
Glenister did well with all the London voices, pretty decently with the female characters. However, my engagement with his narration was overshadowed by a novel which went right off the rails and made the 'hero' seem like it was him who should be being arrested rather than those he was meant to be going after, almost all of whom end up dead anyway, because of Thorne's negligence, and his use of a killer to carry out his own ends.
'Gallows View' by Peter Robinson; read by Neil Pearson
This book is the first book in the D(C)I Banks series of novels which have been televised in recent years. It is set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale where Banks and his family have moved from London. The book is set in the 1980s. This is one of the interesting things about crime novels, is that they really show up the technology of the time. As 'Death Message' (2007) was about mobile phones of the mid-2000s, this book, published in 1987 is about mid-1980s technology including early police computers, film cameras and even slide projectors. I would put it in the category of 'cosy' crime books, if it was not so sordid.
It has trappings of a cosy story being set in a small town with various characters and a very limited number of suspects. Many of the points of tension are low key as whether Banks will sleep with an attractive police psychologist and activities are old fashioned like building a dry stone wall and attending the camera club. One of the prime crimes investigated is a 'peeping tom' which seems to precede the sophisticated stalking of today. However, the story involves a rape and the rapist is detected through catching gonorrhea. Given that by the end three residents have been arrested - for manslaughter, rape and voyeurism, you do worry at the crime level of the small town and how quickly Robinson would have got through much of the population.
While I cannot put my finger on why, overall, I was disappointed by the book. Perhaps it felt too old without being period. Perhaps it seemed contrived, though I have accepted many crime books set in small places that have been so as well. I suppose the mix of these elements, simply did not work for me. Pearson who voices a lot of crime audio books, did well, capturing the Yorkshire accents of a range of people and doing convincing female voices. I was left feeling that, despite his efforts, Robinson's work is not something I will return to.
'The Winter Ghosts' by Kate Mosse; read by Julian Rhind-Tutt
This book features tropes that Mosse has built her career upon - a stranger coming to southern France and having a time-slip experience. There is also reference to the Occitan language and the Cathars, a persecuted heretical Christian-based religion prominent in the region in the 13th and 14th Centuries, the followers of which were massacred. It is different in that the protagonist is a man rather than a woman and it is set in 1928 and 1933 rather than in modern day. It features Freddie Watson, a young man from Sussex who has been unable to recover from the death of his elder brother, George, in June 1916, fighting on the Western Front. He has come out of a psychiatric institution but is still heavily troubled by grief. In December 1928 on a driving holiday in southern France he crashes his car and ends up in a small village. He is invited to attend a celebration for the feast day of St. Etienne but slips through time to a 14th Century version of the event where he encounters Cathar locals and witnesses their suppression.
Mosse is great at portraying the locales, here more into the Pyrenees than in her previous books; the physicality of moving around them is well represented. She is also good at the mystery of people from the past impacting on the present. The challenge with this book is that it was extended from a 2009 novella and at times you felt it has been 'padded'. In particular Freddie, despite being haunted by his brother, is slow to realise that he is interacting with more ghosts, especially the beautiful Fabrissa who he falls for and this drives on his subsequent actions. While Mosse is good on what happened in the 14th Century, I am surprised that she makes no reference to how popular spiritualism had become following the First World War. Even if Freddie did not previously subscribe to its beliefs, he certainly would have been aware of rational people (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle notable among them) who felt they could be in contact with the dead. She does present Freddie's sustained grief well and reminds us that people do not 'get over' death easily, especially when it was on such a horrific scale as the First World War with so many very grim ends for people.
Rhind-Tutt, though best known for his comedy work, was an excellent choice to read the book, which is largely told in the first person, though jarringly at the end it switches to third person. It is not simply his voice but all the mannerisms that he puts into the portrayal of Freddie that make it very credible. Overall, I found this an interesting book though built on a simple premise. Mosse's descriptions are great and her sense of people is strong. She weakens the jeopardy with the looking back from 1933 so we know that not only Freddie survives the 1928 encounters despite their hazards, but mentally he is sound. I think this could have been handled differently. At times, especially given how long it takes Freddie to work out that Fabrissa is a ghost, there would have been much tighter editing, but Mosse is renowned for writing long books. If this had run for 3 hours rather than 5 hours 22 minutes as it did in my edition, it could have had a real punch. With length some of that is dissipated, but not to the extent that this is a poor book.
Thursday, 31 January 2019
Books I Listened To/Read In January
Fiction
'The Ghosts of Altona' by Craig Russell
Though I have always been interested in crime stories set in Germany, for some reason I had not come across Russell's series though the first came out in 2005. This book published in 2015 is the seventh, and so far, last book in the series featuring Jan Fabel. In this book he has risen to the rank of Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar which Russell clumsily renders as 'Principal Chief Commissar' and is even offered the chance to become head of all of Hamburg's detectives. It is always a challenge with a successful police detective character that they tend to get promoted and so moved away from the heart of crimes. Ian Rankin has resolved this by trapping John Rebus at Inspector rank for many years. The rendering of Hamburg police ranks, though not other German titles into English is one thing I do not like about the book. It leaves the reader in confusion about what standing the various police have.
Overall, I felt this book was much like one written by Colin Dexter, added to by the fact that it features a club from a university. Though at times Morse's investigations on screen felt ponderous (the books are far brisker) this book stretched for far too long (535 pages in my edition). Though there are some reasonable twists, a bright reader, let alone one who reads crime novels regularly, will have solved the crime well before Fabel does, so it is rather frustrating to find that the detective who is supposedly nationally famous for his skills, is slower than amateurs like us. It would have been a far better book with 200 fewer pages. The details about Hamburg and its surrounding districts, plus Fabel's background, his colleagues and family, are fine, but at times feel like padding when we want greater speed. The murders are well portrayed and the meshing of different cases is reasonably done, though the 'lesson' from one for another seems heavy handed and again suggests that Fabel lacks imagination, even deductive powers. Fabel could be an interesting character, and maybe he is in the earlier books. If Russell has decided not to continue with this series, it is probably slightly overdue. I might check out one of the earlier books if it crosses my path, but while this book was not bad, it was far from brilliant.
'Ruled Britannia' by Harry Turtledove
This was another book that could have benefited from tightening up. My edition came in at 458 pages but with smaller than standard text size, so probably as wordy as 'The Ghosts of Altona'. Turtledove is the undisputed king of alternate history fiction and it is disheartening to read quoted on the cover '[n]obody plays the what-if game of alternate history better' in one stroke being complimentary to the author but utterly dismissing his genre as a 'game'. I notice his latest book will be historical fiction rather than alternate history.
While with my alternate history books, I often get people complaining that the focus is on everyday life in the changed world and that the focus should always be the point of departure, typically a violent one, I am glad that Turtledove takes a different line. This novel is set in London in 1597, nine years of the victory of the Spanish Armada. Queen Isabella and Archduke Albert are on the throne of England, with Isabella's father, the ailing King Philip II, still in charge of Spain. The book focuses primarily on William Shakespeare and the Spanish playwright, Senior Lieutenant Lope de Vega, who is serving with the occupying army. Other real people appear including the imprisoned Elizabeth I and some of her ministers, Christopher Marlowe, killed 6 years later than in our world, and a range of people connected with the theatre that Shakespeare knew or worked with. The plot is around Shakespeare being pressured to both write a play celebrating the life of Philip II on behalf of the occupiers and one around the story of Boudicca in an attempt to rouse English resistance to the occupation.
The setting is excellently portrayed. Turtledove shows acute knowledge of the context and paints it richly in this novel. He makes use of plays from the time to provide 'what if?' lines and plays for Shakespeare - he has not produced any of his historical plays, but his comedies and tragedies are well liked; he is still active as an actor too. It takes some time to become comfortable with the Tudor language and terms. At times you feel Turtledove does not know where to go next and though the book builds to a climax, you feel it wonders and could have been tightened a great deal. The role of a witch with the ability to hypnotise really riled me and she seemed just to be a very irritating plot device. There is also far too much sex in the book. Shakespeare is at it a lot of the time and De Vega has a string of mistresses, some simultaneously. At times it gives the author a chance to show different facets of the alternate London he has created, notably the bear-baiting, but given the longeurs anyway this just adds more padding. Thus, while there were points which irritated me, even riled me, I felt this was a very strong alternate history book, well researched and very interesting. I hope people will remember it when insisting that all alternate history novels must focus on the immediate point of departure and subsequently only on warfare.
'Redcoat' by Bernard Cornwell
This books suffers from a problem that I have noticed in other of Cornwell's books set in North America and many which do not feature Richard Sharpe. The problem is, that while he creates rich characters with a good attention to attitudes and behaviour of the time, far too few of them elicit any sympathy from the reader. As a result you wade through nasty people being nasty to other nasty people. While is it great to have some strong antagonists, if unpleasant people are in the vast majority, it is difficult to be more than a spectator sitting well back from the conflict. In the Sharpe books, while you had nasty people, you could always fall back on Sharpe and his comrades, who while flawed, were people you could feel sympathy for, even affinity with. Cornwell seems to have particular problems with sergeants and women. All the women in this book are self-serving even when professing zealous patriotism, deceptive and really people you would not want to go anywhere near. There are the fragments of a love story, but even then the woman featured is so hard, she seems to have very little romance in her and is much more concerned about victory for the American side than anything or anyone else.
The book is set in Philadelphia in 1777 during the American War of Independence. It was the largest city in the Thirteen Colonies at the time and at the start of the book is occupied by British forces. However, many still loyal to the American side remain in the city and most of the book is really about spying and passing on information, focusing on the British soldiers and American civilians who get mixed up in this which ultimately leads to the British occupation being troubled and costly, ultimately after the book has finished, to end. I like the fact that Cornwell has focused on a specific location and set of characters rather than ranging all over the place. He does well in portraying the city in grim weather (to the extent that I would never want to visit it) added to the growing shortages it faces. As always, Cornwell has good battle scenes, but in this novel they are pretty limited. For the rest you are effectively watching a dance of unpleasant and/or deluded people in a very grey setting. Thus, it was quite interesting, but far from engaging.
Audio Books - Fiction
'Lifeless' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
This appears to be the fifth of what so far are fifteen books featuring police detective, Tom Thorne, published since 2001. Again it reminded me of how many books are coming out in genres that interest me, that simply pass me by, for many years at a time, until I stumble over them. This one sees Thorne go undercover as a rough sleeper on the streets of Central London. I used to spend a lot of my time in the 1990s and early 2000s in that area and so could really envisage the places Billingham writes about and the kind of people encountered there. The case involves the murders of rough sleepers. Billingham cleverly dodges a standard serial killer approach and is very good about sowing distrust about those in authority that Thorne meets. The case is soon connected to the military - in part because so many rough sleepers are ex-armed forces - and to atrocities committed in Iraq. I thought Billingham handled the novel very well, especially in terms of the setting and the homeless people that Thorne encounters and develops friendships with. The plot is reasonably twisted and again, like the setting, very credible. This might not be the best crime novel I have ever come across, but I was engaged by it and have already bought a couple more audio books of Billingham's novels. Glenister sounds how you would imagine Thorne to be and that works very well for the story, but he does a pretty decent job with the other characters, including the few women that appear.
'Thunderball' by Ian Fleming; read by Jason Isaacs
This novel has formed the basis for two movies 'Thunderball' (1965) and 'Never Say Never Again' (1983) which stick surprisingly close to features of the book. It starts with Bond, smoking 60 cigarettes a day and drinking the equivalent of half-a-bottle of whisky a day, being sent to a health retreat where he ends up in a fight with another guest which actually postpones the schemes of SPECTRE - the first time the criminal organisation appears, rather than having Smersh of the USSR involved somewhere even if far in the background. The story is pretty straight forward, with MI6 and the CIA scrambling to find where one of their atomic bomber aircraft has ended up, Bond is sent to the Bahamas and is fortunate enough, with the aid of his old friend Felix Leiter to find out that Emilio Largo (the deputy head of SPECTRE but in this book number No. 1) has retrieved the bombs and is planning to use them to destroy a US missile testing base in the Caribbean and threaten Miami. A ransom of £100 million in gold (worth about £5 billion now) is demanded to prevent the attacks.
The book is reasonable. Fleming returns to some of his favourite themes - the Caribbean and treasure hunting. Domino Pettachi, the sister of the man who stole the bomber and is kept by Largo, comes over as a flawed character who as in quite a few of these books, is the woman who saves Bond's life when he makes mistakes. As Isaacs points out in the interview at the end, though Bond and Leiter have clandestine Geiger counters, they are in fact poorly equipped compared to SPECTRE and Bond's intervention to prevent the planting of the first Bond leaves 6 US sailors aiding him, dead. Bond is certainly not the superhero of the movies, and in fact is very unhealthy. The book is engaging rather than gripping but also is a slice of history, showing the concerns; the continued hang over from events of the Second World War and even the brands of 1961 and that while they were misogynistic times, Fleming, as in previous books, is content to let a woman win through when Bond proves slow-witted. Isaacs does the voices very well, including Domino, though as he points out, trying to work out what half-Greek, half-Polish Blofeld, based in Paris, sounded like, was a real challenge.
'The Ghosts of Altona' by Craig Russell
Though I have always been interested in crime stories set in Germany, for some reason I had not come across Russell's series though the first came out in 2005. This book published in 2015 is the seventh, and so far, last book in the series featuring Jan Fabel. In this book he has risen to the rank of Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar which Russell clumsily renders as 'Principal Chief Commissar' and is even offered the chance to become head of all of Hamburg's detectives. It is always a challenge with a successful police detective character that they tend to get promoted and so moved away from the heart of crimes. Ian Rankin has resolved this by trapping John Rebus at Inspector rank for many years. The rendering of Hamburg police ranks, though not other German titles into English is one thing I do not like about the book. It leaves the reader in confusion about what standing the various police have.
Overall, I felt this book was much like one written by Colin Dexter, added to by the fact that it features a club from a university. Though at times Morse's investigations on screen felt ponderous (the books are far brisker) this book stretched for far too long (535 pages in my edition). Though there are some reasonable twists, a bright reader, let alone one who reads crime novels regularly, will have solved the crime well before Fabel does, so it is rather frustrating to find that the detective who is supposedly nationally famous for his skills, is slower than amateurs like us. It would have been a far better book with 200 fewer pages. The details about Hamburg and its surrounding districts, plus Fabel's background, his colleagues and family, are fine, but at times feel like padding when we want greater speed. The murders are well portrayed and the meshing of different cases is reasonably done, though the 'lesson' from one for another seems heavy handed and again suggests that Fabel lacks imagination, even deductive powers. Fabel could be an interesting character, and maybe he is in the earlier books. If Russell has decided not to continue with this series, it is probably slightly overdue. I might check out one of the earlier books if it crosses my path, but while this book was not bad, it was far from brilliant.
'Ruled Britannia' by Harry Turtledove
This was another book that could have benefited from tightening up. My edition came in at 458 pages but with smaller than standard text size, so probably as wordy as 'The Ghosts of Altona'. Turtledove is the undisputed king of alternate history fiction and it is disheartening to read quoted on the cover '[n]obody plays the what-if game of alternate history better' in one stroke being complimentary to the author but utterly dismissing his genre as a 'game'. I notice his latest book will be historical fiction rather than alternate history.
While with my alternate history books, I often get people complaining that the focus is on everyday life in the changed world and that the focus should always be the point of departure, typically a violent one, I am glad that Turtledove takes a different line. This novel is set in London in 1597, nine years of the victory of the Spanish Armada. Queen Isabella and Archduke Albert are on the throne of England, with Isabella's father, the ailing King Philip II, still in charge of Spain. The book focuses primarily on William Shakespeare and the Spanish playwright, Senior Lieutenant Lope de Vega, who is serving with the occupying army. Other real people appear including the imprisoned Elizabeth I and some of her ministers, Christopher Marlowe, killed 6 years later than in our world, and a range of people connected with the theatre that Shakespeare knew or worked with. The plot is around Shakespeare being pressured to both write a play celebrating the life of Philip II on behalf of the occupiers and one around the story of Boudicca in an attempt to rouse English resistance to the occupation.
The setting is excellently portrayed. Turtledove shows acute knowledge of the context and paints it richly in this novel. He makes use of plays from the time to provide 'what if?' lines and plays for Shakespeare - he has not produced any of his historical plays, but his comedies and tragedies are well liked; he is still active as an actor too. It takes some time to become comfortable with the Tudor language and terms. At times you feel Turtledove does not know where to go next and though the book builds to a climax, you feel it wonders and could have been tightened a great deal. The role of a witch with the ability to hypnotise really riled me and she seemed just to be a very irritating plot device. There is also far too much sex in the book. Shakespeare is at it a lot of the time and De Vega has a string of mistresses, some simultaneously. At times it gives the author a chance to show different facets of the alternate London he has created, notably the bear-baiting, but given the longeurs anyway this just adds more padding. Thus, while there were points which irritated me, even riled me, I felt this was a very strong alternate history book, well researched and very interesting. I hope people will remember it when insisting that all alternate history novels must focus on the immediate point of departure and subsequently only on warfare.
'Redcoat' by Bernard Cornwell
This books suffers from a problem that I have noticed in other of Cornwell's books set in North America and many which do not feature Richard Sharpe. The problem is, that while he creates rich characters with a good attention to attitudes and behaviour of the time, far too few of them elicit any sympathy from the reader. As a result you wade through nasty people being nasty to other nasty people. While is it great to have some strong antagonists, if unpleasant people are in the vast majority, it is difficult to be more than a spectator sitting well back from the conflict. In the Sharpe books, while you had nasty people, you could always fall back on Sharpe and his comrades, who while flawed, were people you could feel sympathy for, even affinity with. Cornwell seems to have particular problems with sergeants and women. All the women in this book are self-serving even when professing zealous patriotism, deceptive and really people you would not want to go anywhere near. There are the fragments of a love story, but even then the woman featured is so hard, she seems to have very little romance in her and is much more concerned about victory for the American side than anything or anyone else.
The book is set in Philadelphia in 1777 during the American War of Independence. It was the largest city in the Thirteen Colonies at the time and at the start of the book is occupied by British forces. However, many still loyal to the American side remain in the city and most of the book is really about spying and passing on information, focusing on the British soldiers and American civilians who get mixed up in this which ultimately leads to the British occupation being troubled and costly, ultimately after the book has finished, to end. I like the fact that Cornwell has focused on a specific location and set of characters rather than ranging all over the place. He does well in portraying the city in grim weather (to the extent that I would never want to visit it) added to the growing shortages it faces. As always, Cornwell has good battle scenes, but in this novel they are pretty limited. For the rest you are effectively watching a dance of unpleasant and/or deluded people in a very grey setting. Thus, it was quite interesting, but far from engaging.
Audio Books - Fiction
'Lifeless' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
This appears to be the fifth of what so far are fifteen books featuring police detective, Tom Thorne, published since 2001. Again it reminded me of how many books are coming out in genres that interest me, that simply pass me by, for many years at a time, until I stumble over them. This one sees Thorne go undercover as a rough sleeper on the streets of Central London. I used to spend a lot of my time in the 1990s and early 2000s in that area and so could really envisage the places Billingham writes about and the kind of people encountered there. The case involves the murders of rough sleepers. Billingham cleverly dodges a standard serial killer approach and is very good about sowing distrust about those in authority that Thorne meets. The case is soon connected to the military - in part because so many rough sleepers are ex-armed forces - and to atrocities committed in Iraq. I thought Billingham handled the novel very well, especially in terms of the setting and the homeless people that Thorne encounters and develops friendships with. The plot is reasonably twisted and again, like the setting, very credible. This might not be the best crime novel I have ever come across, but I was engaged by it and have already bought a couple more audio books of Billingham's novels. Glenister sounds how you would imagine Thorne to be and that works very well for the story, but he does a pretty decent job with the other characters, including the few women that appear.
'Thunderball' by Ian Fleming; read by Jason Isaacs
This novel has formed the basis for two movies 'Thunderball' (1965) and 'Never Say Never Again' (1983) which stick surprisingly close to features of the book. It starts with Bond, smoking 60 cigarettes a day and drinking the equivalent of half-a-bottle of whisky a day, being sent to a health retreat where he ends up in a fight with another guest which actually postpones the schemes of SPECTRE - the first time the criminal organisation appears, rather than having Smersh of the USSR involved somewhere even if far in the background. The story is pretty straight forward, with MI6 and the CIA scrambling to find where one of their atomic bomber aircraft has ended up, Bond is sent to the Bahamas and is fortunate enough, with the aid of his old friend Felix Leiter to find out that Emilio Largo (the deputy head of SPECTRE but in this book number No. 1) has retrieved the bombs and is planning to use them to destroy a US missile testing base in the Caribbean and threaten Miami. A ransom of £100 million in gold (worth about £5 billion now) is demanded to prevent the attacks.
The book is reasonable. Fleming returns to some of his favourite themes - the Caribbean and treasure hunting. Domino Pettachi, the sister of the man who stole the bomber and is kept by Largo, comes over as a flawed character who as in quite a few of these books, is the woman who saves Bond's life when he makes mistakes. As Isaacs points out in the interview at the end, though Bond and Leiter have clandestine Geiger counters, they are in fact poorly equipped compared to SPECTRE and Bond's intervention to prevent the planting of the first Bond leaves 6 US sailors aiding him, dead. Bond is certainly not the superhero of the movies, and in fact is very unhealthy. The book is engaging rather than gripping but also is a slice of history, showing the concerns; the continued hang over from events of the Second World War and even the brands of 1961 and that while they were misogynistic times, Fleming, as in previous books, is content to let a woman win through when Bond proves slow-witted. Isaacs does the voices very well, including Domino, though as he points out, trying to work out what half-Greek, half-Polish Blofeld, based in Paris, sounded like, was a real challenge.
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