The Books Of My Life: Alexander Rooksmoor

As I have noted before, I am regular reader of various features in 'The Guardian' newspaper. I know I am never going to be famous so they would not ask me to respond to these features for real. Still that does not stop me from thinking how I would respond and it is nice to be able to get these thoughts out of my system. Back in 2010, I did this for their 'Tell Us About Yourself' feature: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/12/tell-us-about-yourself.html Looking back on that now I would not disagree with many of the responses I gave then, even 15 years on. My fears of that time were well placed as we did lose our house in 2012 and our family was broken up living with wider family members, in rented rooms or B&Bs. We did manage to live back together again in 2015 after I managed to get a job which in total lasted 7 years, the longest one I have ever held.

Today I am going to have a go at the 'The Books Of My Life' feature in 'The Guardian': https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-books-of-my-life I accept it is arrogance to think that anyone might consider me a 'leading author'. Back in 2010, though I had written novels over the preceding 22 years, I had none on sale. Self-publishing and then being taken up by Sea Lion Press https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ enabled me to get my books out there and in turn it really fuelled my writing. I have now written 70 books, most of which are now on sale in e-book format. I might not be a best seller, 2014 was my peak year of sales and as with the marketplace in general there has been a decline since then. It is often said that everybody has at least one book in them, but clearly I have had a lot more than that and I have no idea how many more I will produce before I die. Thus, while I may not be renowned author and certainly am not 'leading', I feel it is reasonably legitimate for me to respond to the sort of questions that might be asked of such people.

Alexander Rooksmoor: 'Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed'

My earliest reading memory

I did not learn to read before going to school aged 4 years and 11 months. We had lots of books at home, but I tended to treat them in a visual way, looking at the images rather than the words. I understood the power of the printed word because my parents read so much. Apparently, aged 3, loath to attend playschool picked up a magazine (probably a Sunday supplement) and waved it at my parents insisting that it said that parents should not send their sons to play school. Thus, it was almost like a magic talisman rather than something to engage with myself. In terms of books, like most children of my generation in England, we started with the Peter & Jane books published by Ladybird. I remember the images of the book '1a. Play with Us' (1964 edition) better than I remember the words. I was a very slow reader and like many children of my generation sub-vocalised everything because we read aloud so much.

My favourite book growing up

The first fiction book I remember actually expressing a like for was 'The Grey Apple Tree' (1965) by Vera Cumberlege. However, the books I came back to most regularly was the series by R.J. Unstead about British history. These were published in the early 1970s and I remember us working to collect them all (in the age before online book ordering!). They ran from 'Invaded Island' (1971) from Stone Age to 1066; 'Kings, Barons and Serfs' (1971), 1066-1300; 'Years of the Sword' (1972), 1300-1485; 'Struggle for Power' (1972), 1485-1689; 'Emerging Empire' (1972), 1689-1763; 'Freedom and Revolution' (1972), 1763-1815; 'Age of Machines', (1974), 1815-1901 to the 'Incredible Century' (1974), 1901-1970. Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed. They were highly illustrated A4-sized hardbacks which could be found in most school and public libraries but as a history fan, I had my own set. I note that their subtitle is 'A Pictorial History' and I realise now, I did simply look at the pictures rather than read the text.

The book that changed me as a teenager

I remember that in the larger library in the nearest town, they had a children's section and then around the other side of a row of shelves was a single set of shelves for 'older children'. It actually was at the start of the 'adult' bit of the library and I think the librarians had designed it to tempt teenagers to move from the picture and project books and indeed the 'Doctor Who' novelisations, on to something a bit more mature. A lot of the books there were kind of 'kitchen sink' books for teenagers. I first cycled alone to this library (2.5 miles away) aged 11, which these days would probably terrify parents. I was very conscious of not going into age inappropriate areas (I was never someone who would sneak into movies older than for myself or try to drink alcohol underage). I remember one day hesitantly going round the corner to this section and borrowing the novelisation of 'Bugsy Malone' (1976?) not the script or graphic novel that are dominant now. I was struck by the fact it had one chapter that lasted less than a single page. I also remember a book of eyewitness accounts of various events, including the sinking of the 'Titanic'. 

It was the next step which came quicker than I had long realised which really changed me. I discovered the science fiction and fantasy fiction section of the library. I borrowed both 'The Colour of Magic' (1983) and 'The Final Programme' (1968). While I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Colour of Magic', 'The Final Programme' was the first book I had sat up through the night to complete. I had probably been attracted to it by the pop art/graphic novel book cover, but went on to read a lot of Michael Moorcock books in my life (and indeed all of Pratchett's work). For some reason my sixth form college library had the complete works of Moorcock as they were in the mid-1980s. I do not think the current librarian had ever explored the themes, i.e. lots of drugs and sex, that featured in many. I remember, aged 14 checking with my mother whether I should even be reading 'The Final Programme' given it mentioned sex on the cover, but she felt I was mature enough and ultimately it was more about needle guns and hallucinogenic security systems. What I think I learnt from Moorcock was that science fiction need not be all about big spaceships and robots. Furthermore, I went from 'The Final Programme' to 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971) which really sparked my interest in alternate history. My third novel, 'His Majesty's Dictator', which I completed in 1991, was heavily influenced by it.

The book that changed my mind

I have never really read a book that has altered my opinion on big issues. Maybe that reflects a dogmatism on my part. Friends use to often recommend me books that I 'must' read though it later turned out one was just getting rid of books he thought were terrible and wanted disposed of had misunderstood what lending a book to someone usually entailed. A couple of friends insisted I read 'The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story' (1984) by Richard Bach which I found tedious and fatuous. It was very arrogant in believing his story needed that kind of output. I see now that it was along these lines of annoyance that in 2009 I came to 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth. I had bought it assuming it was a straightforward fantasy novel. However, it became clear it was simply a vanity project to show off how much cleverer than the reader Barth knows he is. He even says openly that some readers will not 'get' what he is writing as if that is our problem rather than his.

While I had realised that 'in jokes' rarely work and had sought to remove anything that people might not get because it was too personal to me or my culture, Barth made me realise that any author who does not work with the reader is actually failing. We should both not pander to them but also we should not treat them with disdain simply because they cannot crack our own personal code. It also made clear to me that the books that get published are not necessarily 'good' books, they can simply be out one sale because the author has been fortunate and/or has contacts. I was alert from then on of books which were primarily the author parading their 'greatness' when in fact what they tend to produce in such circumstances is the literary equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes. I would put 'Auto da Fé' (1935) by Elias Canetti which I read in 2000, in this category too.

The book that made me want to be a writer

There was no book which did this. Creative writing was an assessed part of the English curriculum from age 5-16, though I got 'let off' early as I sat my English Language 'O' Level a year early, aged 15. Thus, creative writing was something we did almost weekly. We were all writers. As a consequence I was not conscious of being 'a writer' probably until about 2012, some 24 years after I had completed writing my first novel. I guess I had never really registered that other people did not write in their spare time too.

I knew I got good marks for my creative writing and recall two of my stories being put up on the wall when I was in 3rd Year of primary school. One of them was called 'Wings for a Day' and apparently the teacher noted my knowledge (aged 7) of world events as I featured the fall of the Colonels junta in Greece writing 'in Greece there was a war' and mention of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (the Yom Kippur War had been the preceding year and my parents had an illustrated book about it), though unaware of the politics, rather than the simple news coverage of violence. As the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' team were shown in one of their spin-off books, as children we were obsessed by Moshe Dayan's eyepatch.

While I got good grades for my creative writing, this actually misled me because teachers would focus in their feedback (not called that back then) on my imagination and not the fact that I was screwing up a lot of the punctuation. This seems to have stemmed largely from my 3rd Year Middle School (nowadays Year 6) teacher, Mrs. Simmons, who had a real aversion to pupils using direct speech and would insist we stuck to reported speech. It was only as an adult that I realised I had been punctuating direct speech wrongly. If I had been a poorer writer, I would have been alerted to this sooner. If I had actually looked at what I had been reading then maybe I would have noticed I was not doing it the same way, though, of course, we tended to see what was done in books was not what we were doing in English at school. Many/most of us believed all poetry had to rhyme.

The book I came back to

In fact there are two, though both on a similar theme. 'Great Escape Stories' (1977) by Eric Williams and 'Colditz' (1974), the anthology version combining 'The Colditz Story' (1952) and 'The Latter Days' (1953) by P.R. Reid. I abandoned the Williams book as from daring stories of Second World War escapes by PoWs, it moved into civilians and then the Korean War. While I found the early stories, of the twelve, 'cosy' if it is legitimate to say that - and was especially impressed by the account of Airey Neave escaping Colditz dressed as a German officer - the later ones were much more unsettling. In the 1970s there were lots of people still around who had been adults during the Second World War. There were a lot of books like 'I am David' (1963) by Anne Holm which was read to us and a copy of 'The Diary of Anne Frank' (1947) was in our classroom when in what is now Year 6, not just the school library. You could watch 'Carrie's War' (the 1974 series of the 1973 book by Nina Bawden) after school and 'The World at War' (first broadcast in 1973) on Sunday afternoons so the Second World War was pretty much 'currency' for us much more than the 1950s or 1960s. The headmaster of my school later chided me for abandoning the book but even then, fearful of nightmares, I did not return to until I was an adult, still very certain about my aversion to torture, but having seen and read a lot more.

It is difficult now to remember why I felt so drawn to escape stories at the time, it is not something that seems to have continued after I went to secondary school. I abandoned 'Colditz' because I foolishly looked ahead while reading it on holiday in 1978 and finding that Lieutenant Albert Michael Sinclair (1918-1944) nicknamed the 'Red Fox' was killed on his final escape attempt in 1944. His repeated escapes made him a hero of mine and I had been using the codename 'Red Fox' in various secret clubs we tended to form as adolescents. It was chilling to read he had been killed and not, like Neave, got clear away. I lost all heart in reading the book and only came back to it and also read 'Colditz: The German Story' (1961) by Reinhold Eggers, as an adult in the late 1990s.

The book I could never read again

Aside from 'Chimera' and 'Auto da Fé' I have already mentioned I would add 'The Quincunx' (1989) by Charles Palliser. I had come across the term 'quincunx' when studying Latin (at a non-selective, comprehensive school - it did happen back then and I did want to be a professional historian) at school, meaning a pattern of five-twelfths (though to me it looked like five-ninths) and a design for the layout of trees in a garden (I was later into garden history), so I thought it would be a story about a sort of code perhaps concealed in a garden and to some extent the synopsis sustained that misapprehension. What it is instead is an unrelenting account of a boy and his mother who are tricked out of their relatively meagre middle class wealth in early 19th Century England. They then proceed to be subjected to all the worst privations of the era. The mother, Mary, having lost her house and all her savings due to a scam, after living as a squatter in an abandoned East London building ends up as a prostitute tied to a brothel. The boy, John, in turn is abused at a horrendous school where he has to literally fight for his food, in a mental asylum and as a scavenger in London sewers. Yes, we know that life was bleak and people were abused but the contorted path the two protagonists are taken along so that they can suffer as many different kinds of abuse as possible is perverse, almost ridiculous.

In second place in this category I would add, 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' (1988 edition) ed. by Boris Ford. Why they bothered to assemble 23 writers to comment on an era of writing that all of them appear to believe was much lesser in so many ways to what preceded, I have no idea. It was a real waste of time for them as well as the reader.

The book I discovered later in life

I am now 57 and am constantly discovering books. I imagine this question is about one which I may have read earlier in my life but only came to far later than that. I would point to 'Renaissance Europe 1480-1520' (1971) by J.R. Hale. I have read a lot of 'survey' books of European history but among them Hale's book really stands out. See my review here: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/09/books-i-read-in-september.html Hale really is command of the information he has and writes in such an engaging way for a non-fiction historical book. A lot of historians could learn from his approach. I bought this book in the late 1980s but it was over 30 years before I got round to reading it and I wished I had turned to it much sooner rather than leaving it in storage.

The book I am currently reading

'The Sussex Downs Murder' (1936) by John Bude [Ernest Elmore], the third of his novels I have read in the British Library Crime Classics series republication of his books.

My comfort read

While, as back in 2010, I still have a lot of affection for 'The Book of Heroic Failures' (1979) by Stephen Pile, the default book I turn to these days is the 'The Penguin Atlas of World History. Volume 2: From the French Revolution to the Present' (1964/2004). Doing this exercise has rather revealed that I am not really a reader at heart, I am more a looker at books so I guess this is why a book of lots of colourful maps is comforting to me.

The Books I Read In October

 Fiction

'Dark Matter' by Philip Kerr

This is a standalone crime novel from Kerr, set in London at the end of the 17th Century when scientist Sir Isaac Newton was a leading member of the Mint housed at the Tower of London charged with combating forgery. The story is seen through the eyes of a former soldier, Christopher Ellis who is employed as an assistant-cum-bodyguard as he investigates a number of murders around the Tower and of people connected with it. Newton is very much presented like Sherlock Holmes, which given his polymath abilities, perhaps was not an inaccurate presentation. The novel really conjures up London of the time and the religious tensions as well as those between different staff employed at the Tower which was also an arsenal. The story works well with the perpetrators seeking ways to throw Newton off the scent and different deaths not all being connected to each other. 

The one flaw I see in this book are the sexually explicit scenes. I know Kerr felt a need to include Newton's niece, Catherine Barton, who kept his house at the time and that she 'progressed' in society by becoming the mistress and the wife of a nobleman and a politician, but all of that could have been covered without two scenes that are verging on the pornographic. I understand Kerr wanted to portray 'bawdy' London - a sado-masochist nightclub also features - but it really jars the rest of the novel. Barton is in the book too much to be ignored, but not enough to be developed beyond her sexual proclivities.

'Casablanca' by Michael Moorcock

This is a rather scattergun collection of essays and short stories from Moorcock. They are typical of him and I had read the one about the frozen cardinal in 'Other Edens' (1987). The title story about checking out a potential leader of the Maghreb in the near future is not bad but like most of the stories in the collection does not really go anywhere. 'Goldiggers of 1977' has an interesting premise in that people are using the Sex Pistols as the basis for a revolution in British society. It features Jerry Cornelius, his family and usual related characters so the idea is dissipated by the erratic rhetoric between them largely around locations in London popular in Moorcock books. The essays have reasonable pen portraits of Mervyn Peake, Harlan Ellison, Angus Wilson, Maeve Gilmore and Andrea Dworkin - who actually features a great deal among the other essays. Moorcock tries to chart a path between wanting the exploitation of pornography stopped without falling back on censorship or Puritanism and makes a case, largely launching from Dworkin's views that it can be tackled through a Feminist approach. However, it does not come over as a strong or clear argument.

This whole collection is very patchy and while Moorcock might have felt he was being as challenging and provocative as he was back in the 1970s by the time this was published in 1989, he comes over as grumpy and indeed at times petulant. The whole tone reminded me much of public statements of Alan Moore who never seems happy with anything and gives the air that he believes he can understand things that no-one else is capable of comprehending.

'Familiar Rooms in Darkness' by Caro Fraser

In many ways this is very much a literary family drama, with the compulsory big group scenes at a house in France. However, the questions Fraser asks about who/what a biographer should be loyal to and the question that comes up a lot now about whether we can continue to value someone's work when we learn that the person did nasty/criminal things, raises it a bit above most books of that kind. The story is around the fictional poet, playwright and author Harry Day. Nearing the end of his life he employs a journalist Adam Downing to write his biography. Day dies early in the book and Downing continues working with his family including his wife, his ex-wife and his two children Charlie and Bella. However, increasingly he encounters people that knew Day in the 1960s (the book was published in 2004 and is set contemporaneously) but who were not on the list of people for Downing to interview. Steadily this reveals much darker sides to Day, starting mildly with the question of his children's paternity and his sexuality to much nastier secrets. Downing has to navigate these elements which would make his biography a draw and the stories that the family members have long told themselves are the "truth". Downing falling for Bella simply adds to the confusion as he is increasingly asked to portray the stories the family told rather than what actually occurred. While rather trope-laden and probably referencing people I do not know, it does go a bit further than I had initially expected in questioning the set-up.

Non-Fiction

'An Illustrated History of the Gestapo' by Rupert Butler

Compared to Butler's 'Gestapo' (1981) which I read in 2022: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/04/books-i-read-in-april.html this book is much more toned down and far more respectful. It was released in 1992 in part to raise funds for the preservation of Lidice in Czechia which was levelled and its population massacred following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. It a well-informed sober way Butler outlines the growth of the Gestapo and those involved with it. It analyses the different approaches of the organisation in different parts of Europe and looks at what happened after the war to the perpetrators. It includes short biographies of some of those ordinary people affected by the Gestapo's activities. The photographs included do add to what is being told and have been chosen well to inform the reader. Overall while this might appear a brasher book than his earlier one, in fact it is a far better treatment of this grim element of German history and very useful for a general reader seeking to know what that particular arm of the Nazi regime was about.

'A Portrait of Europe 1300-1600: Authority and Challenge' by Donald Lindsay and Mary R. Price

This book was published as a contextual read for students of the time period. It works very well at that in large part rather than trying to progress chronologically through the era, by instead focusing on specific topics or the contexts created by particular individuals. There are very complex topics notably the Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, but the brisk writing really manages to provide detail without bogging you down in it. It is good in presenting the role that Ulrich Zwingli played in Protestantism which tends to be overshadowed by Luther and Calvin. For a book published in Britain it avoids being Anglocentric and it provides useful information on Russia and the Ottoman Empire, both with important roles, but which too often in general texts get left out as being 'peripheral' to Europe. It also does a good job of the complexity of the Netherlands fight for independence. Occasionally strange ideas from the authors break through, e.g. as on the origins of gunpowder, but overall it is a useful book for those wanting the historical background for fiction or dramas set in this time period.

Books I Read/Listened To In October

 Fiction

'The Shadow of the Wind' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This is the first part of Ruiz Zafón's renowned tetralogy. It is set in Barcelona, 1945-56. It is a little magic realism, with most elements quite realistic, if Gothic in tone. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books which the protagonist is taken to as a boy and is the home to books that would otherwise be lost has a fantastical element. However, other aspects such as the role of the secret police under the Francoist regime, established right across Spain in 1939, is realistic. Daniel is allowed to pick one book from the cemetery and selects 'The Shadow of the Wind' by Julian Carax an unsuccessful published author from Barcelona who spent much of his life in the inter-war years in Paris. Daniel sets out to discover the story of Carax, especially his subsequent death in Barcelona, and those who knew him that remain. This involves a lot of investigating among deserted buildings of the city and avoiding various nasty characters including the man intent on burning all Carax's work. It is also a coming of age story and Daniel's challenges with the young women he falls for, in part mirror Carax's own.

This book has been immensely successful. It was published in 2001 and translated into English in 2004. I am not sure why I had not come across it before, though possibly as given my reading patterns I typically reach books some 15-20 years after they have been successful and they are common in charity shops. I was interested in the setting, having read quite a lot on the Spanish Civil War, but much less on the period afterwards. The Gothic atmosphere is well rendered. The investigation and the sense of jeopardy were handled effectively. I did feel that it went too far in trying to be twisty in its narrative and its revelations and that my patience with how many times it might loop around or parallels be drawn, was probably exhausted by the three-quarter mark, though I continued to the end. Perhaps the petty, and at times violent, nastiness of characters especially towards their children, becomes tiresome after a while.

I have the second book, in the sequence, 'The Angel's Game' (2008) which is a prequel to read. While it was a labour to finish the first book, I did admire the imagination of the author and his portrayal of the settings so will not abandon reading the second one in due course.

'A Question of Blood' by Ian Rankin

I actually listened to the audio book version of this back in August 2018: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html Interestingly, this time round, reading it, I felt that it was actually tighter than I felt back then listening to it. There is some travelling about, but compared to some of Rankin's books I have read in recent months, this felt to be necessary. The fact that Rebus and DS Clarke work together rather than separately for much of the book, may be one reason why aspects do not feel superfluous. The story does move on briskly and as I noted before, not being a standard murder mystery in that the killer is known from the outset, does not undermine the investigation and it is interesting that some of the 'red herrings' are put in intentionally by people working to their own agendas. Thus, overall, I was glad I came back to this book as I was much more satisfied with reading this particular entry in the series, the 14th, then I was listening to it five years ago.

'Breakfast in the Ruins' by Michael Moorcock

While I have read a lot of Michael Moorcock books down the years, this was one, published in 1971, that I had not come across before. It is a short novel (174 pages in my edition) which see the protagonist Karl Glogauer dropping into various versions of himself, usually as a boy in various locations from 1871 to 1990. He is projected into these roles, it appears, through having homosexual sex with an unnamed Nigerian man who he meets in the roof garden cafe of the Derry & Tom's department store, a location regularly turning up in many of Moorcock's books.

Aside from the mode of 'transport' and a vignette set in 1990, there is not much science fiction or fantasy, rather they are quick portrayals of different historical settings including Paris under the Commune, 19th Century Brunswick, Capetown, Havana at the time of the Spanish-American War, the east end of London,  (German) Alsace during the First World War, Kiev during the Russian Civil War (a popular context for Moorcock), New York at the time of Wall Street Crash, Shanghai during the 28th January Incident of 1932 (rather than the Japanese invasion of 1937), Berlin in 1935, Auschwitz in 1944, Tel Aviv in 1947 at the end of British mandate, Budapest in 1956, Kenya in 1959 during the Mau Mau Emergency, with US troops in Vietnam in 1968 and the west end of London (notably Ladbroke Grove another venue Moorcock likes to use) with a prediction of rioting and unemployment in the 1980s which was a reasonably accurate prediction. As you can tell all the settings are grim; often violent.

Also in common with his style, Moorcock mixes in excerpts from newspapers and non-fiction books of various periods. He also presents a moral dilemma at the end of each chapter. In many ways he was the precursor of a lot of what goes on in terms of social media these days. At the time the book must have appeared like a lot of his work, as a challenging text in terms of the incidents it focused on, its very format and the engagement with topics such as homosexuality and abuse. Now such are commonplace features on TV and in books thought non-linear, multi-perspective structures are unpopular with readers even if they do feature in movies and TV series. Consequently what a reader in 2023 is likely to pick up on is the quality of the descriptions of the contexts and in one case quite an engaging short story. Aside from that, it does feel at times as if Moorcock was showing off his ability to be non-traditional in his approach which would have jarred/challenged readers in 1971 much, much more than it does 52 years later.

'Walking on Glass' by Iain Banks

I believed that I had not read this book, though given I get through about 50 per year, perhaps it is to be expected that I forget some from a decade or two ago. This was published in 1985 so I would have had ample time to read it in the past 38 years. It was not as if I was entirely familiar with the book and I did not know the ending. It consists of three strands that we move between in turn. Two of them are about men living in London in 1983/84: Graham Park, an art student and Steven Grout, a man who maybe neuro-diverse or mentally disabled. For much of the novel we see them moving around on a particular day, one in which Graham is going to visit a woman called Sara who he is in love with but has been rather toying with his affections and Steven loses his job as a roadworker. I did not recall either of these stories. 

I did recall the third strand which features a man called Quiss and a woman called Ajayi who come from opposing sides of a war on a different planet or time. They are confined to a vast castle in a bleak landscape and have to play out almost impossible games such as one-dimensional chess, open-plan Go, spotless dominoes, Chinese Scrabble and Tunnel. Working out how to play and completing a game allows them one chance to answer the riddle and be released from the castle. In the depths of the castle are rooms in which other prisoners can insert themselves into the lives of others as a distraction from their imprisonment.

This was Banks's second 'contemporary' book and like 'The Wasp Factory' (1984) combines the mundane with the rather outré aspects. It also points to his other stream of writing as Iain M. Banks, as a science fiction author. Overall the book, rather like its predecessor, shows different personal Hells. It shows how we can construct or at least contribute to constructing contexts which distress us mentally and then fall victim to these; often unable to break out of them even if in (large) part we have built them up in the first place. This does say something about neuro-diversity and mental health, explored less sensitively in the 1980s than now. Unfortunately Banks's 'solution' seems to be simply to seek oblivion, whether that is through self-destruction, suffering a severe injury or simply abandoning even our best work. Added to that it makes a strong message that we should never hope and ultimately the nastiest people in our world will always come out best off.

While it might not be perceived this way, as with 'The Wasp Factory' this novel is effectively a low-key horror story and should be approached in that way. It is an unhelpful musing on the mental worlds we construct and its overall message is that anyone finding themselves in such situations should simply give up, whether on their efforts or indeed life itself. As you can imagine, I did not enjoy this book. It is engaging as it goes along but in all three strands ends up being utterly bleak.

Non-Fiction

'The Weimar Republic' by Eberhard Kolb

This was a good book to read after Wehler's 'The German Empire' (1985) which I read in August: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html Like Wehler, Kolb provides a brisk but focused analysis of the next period in German history, which eschews being dogmatic down any of the lines which became very ensconced in German history in the 1960s-80s. The first part of the book is an account, which really cuts through the confusion and draws attention to aspects which are overlooked. He makes the notable point that the state's democracy had died by 1930, almost three years before Hitler came to power. Kolb dismisses many of the 'easy' answers that have been put forward for the failure of the Weimar Republic and indeed misconceptions, perhaps even myths, that for so long persisted, regarding the rise of the Nazis. The second half of the book looks at research into different themes of the period as it was when this edition, the first in English was published in 1988. The bibliography was updated from the German first edition four years earlier; there is a 2004 edition in English available too. Thus, this book provides a valuable insight into a period of history which retains interest (e.g. 'Babylon Berlin' TV series, which began in 2017 is still running with a 5th season planned) and a good counter to many of the lazy answers that people continue to wheel out about how the republic fell.

Audio Books

'Prince' by Rory Clements; read by Peter Wickham

Set in 1593, this is the third in Clements's series of spy thrillers featuring John Shakespeare, brother to the more famous William. It is very well done with aspects of what you might expect from a modern spy thriller but clearly set in the late Elizabethan period with rich descriptions of all the sights, sounds and smells of the time. Shakespeare works for Robert Cecil, effectively spymaster for Elizabeth I in the last decade or so of her reign. While his father Cecil acted as her Secretary of State, 1590-96, Robert despite being disabled, carried out a growing part of his work before taking on the position 1596-1612.

John is initially set to investigate terrorist incidents using gunpowder against Dutch refugees from the Eighty Years War who have settled in London. There is much tension around these immigrants though it is soon apparent it is being exploited for a range of purposes. John is later sent to find out about the possibility of an unknown Catholic child of Mary, Queen of Scots who it is believed the Spanish fighting against the Dutch and hostile to Britain, are aiming to set on the Scottish and perhaps the English throne too. Between them John and his assistant Boltfoot Cooper investigate around London and especially into Essex for the conspirators.

Clements handles the story well. There is rivalry between John and his fellow agents which adds interesting points of tension and dynamics to the plot. Clements does not hold off from brutality of the times, with regular reference to tortures and violence even to

 John's loved ones. There are vain people and brutal people involved, so the jeopardy feels genuine and there are blind alleys which John goes down. He is capable but not all-seeing, which allows us to feel an affinity with him. Some of the conspirators are rather larger than life, but throughout Clements does ground them with genuine motives and behaviours appropriate for the late 16th Century. There is an epic climax which is built up to well and does not feel ahistorical.

Overall, there is a lot going on in this book, but it maintained my interest without losing me, right throughout. It runs to almost 13 hours on audio, unabridged. Wickham is called on to do a lot of voices from France, Spain, Scotland and the Netherlands, and most of these are handled well, including the female voices. The only gripe is one of his Dutchmen sounds more Polish, though that only brought home how many parallels there can be felt to be between xenophobia of the the Englands of both Queens Elizabeth. This is part of an 8-book series and I would certainly buy more that I come across whether printed or in audio format.

'End in Tears' by Ruth Rendell; read by Christopher Ravenscroft

I have never read any of Ruth Rendell's novels, though I have seen TV dramatisations of 'A Fatal Inversion' (1987; broadcast on TV 1992) and 'Gallowglass' (1990; broadcast 1992) novels she wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. This novel is the 20th in the Chief Inspector Wexford series and was published in 2005, so after the 48-episode 'The Ruth Rendell Mysteries' TV series (broadcast 1987-2000), which I never saw but was aware on.

The novel is a classic contemporary-set British police procedural novel set in Sussex. A killing of a woman by a lump of concrete being dropped on the car she was travelling in is soon followed by the murder with a brick of a young single mother. This brings Wexford into a complex investigation despite the small range of suspects and it is soon tied up with inheritance, surrogacy and the guardianship of children, with echoes in Wexford's own life. Aside from fewer people having internet access and a lingering discomfort over homosexuality, this book could be set now and Rendell does well in combining modern concerns with a classic crime genre with some tropes, notably the brothers, that would have fitted in earlier decades. It jogs along quite well and the conclusion comes across as believable though perhaps unexpected.

Ravenscroft does reasonably well with the voices, especially as there are a lot of women of differing ages to cover. His Wexford ironically is perhaps his weakest voice and I think this is because he was seeking to emulate the actor George Baker's portrayal of Wexford in the long-running TV series, but at times the deep West County accent wobbles. It would probably have been better for him to deliver his own take on the character's voice.

'Tomorrow Never Dies' by Raymond Benson; read by Simon Vane

As regular readers of this blog will know about five years ago I listened to all of the original Ian Fleming James Bond books in audio format. Since I read 'James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me' (1979) by Christopher Wood, when it came out, I have not read any of the novelisations of the movies until I came across this one. Apparently it is based on an unused version of the movie script. However, in common with what I understand is usual with these novelisations, coming to the book does add quite a lot to the movie. There are back stories to Elliot Carver, Paris, Mr. Stamper and so on which develop these characters. In particular through showing their flaws and their physical traits, the characters especially of Carver and Stamper that we see in the movie, make more sense. There is a whole extra character, a non-binary heir to the Chinese throne who does not even turn up in the movie.

Wai Lin gets more detail too and we see 'behind the scenes' before she encounters Bond. She is, however, portrayed as being 28 (which does seem young to be a Colonel in the Chinese Ministry of State Security) and petite whereas Michelle Yeoh who portrayed her in the movie was 35 at the time and 1.63m (5'4") but shot so she looks little shorter than Pierce Brosnan at 1.86m.

The action scenes are well handled, influenced by the movie, clearly, though in some cases much more practically portrayed and factors such as the need for decompression when coming up from the sunk ship are addressed rather than skipped over as in the movie. Bond also has to use more initiative when aboard the stealth ship than being fully kitted out as he is in the movie. Rather scary is a scene which does not feature in the movie in which Carver outlines the wars he intends to start in the coming years, including a vicious Arab-Israeli conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an American civil war. Benson, or whoever wrote the script back in 1997, had pretty decent insight into the likely conflicts of a quarter of a century into the future.

Simon Vane does well on the accents, just avoiding sounding too stereotypical with the German and Chinese ones. He is clearly influenced by the movie portrayals and captures Jonathan Pryce's Carver well and indeed even Judi Dench's M decently. I would certainly be interested to see other novelisations of the movies though this is rated to be one of the best. The two I have read/heard do add depth to what is shown in the movies; the background stories and the grittier elements do feel to bring them closer to the Fleming books than mainstream movies probably permit.

'A Murder of Quality' by John Le Carré [David Cornwell]; read by John Le Carré

I read the novel of this some time in the past but had forgotten the plot. It is a murder mystery set at a public school. Le Carré was educated at Sherbourne and taught at Eton. Like George Smiley, the protagonist of the novel, Le Carré had been a spy working for both MI5 and MI6 at different times before becoming a novelist. This novel is set in the 1950s with the overhang of the war not too distant. However, a lot of the attitudes and behaviour shown would be no different if you set it, as many authors do, in a British public school of the 21st Century. I suppose this makes it ironically more accessible to readers (even though only a small minority would ever attend such as school) than if it had been set in a grammar school or a secondary modern school of the time.

The wife of schoolmaster is beaten to death with a coaxial cable. Thus reminding us though the context of the public school is a supposedly genteel setting, in fact the brutality of the war and the cheapness of life continued to impact on the attitudes of many in the following years - you sometimes often spot this in Agatha Christie novels of the time and I instantly think of 'A Murder Is Announced' (1950). This novel has a similar element in that Smiley is drawn in after the victim has sent a message predicting her murder.

The novel is brisk but conjures up a range of characters in this constrained setting, which perhaps while they have become stereotypes in the years since, seem to be nuanced when portrayed by Le Carré. He is particularly adept at showing us characters and then completely undermining our perception of them. Some readers might be riled by this, but the author does remind us that even his protagonist's view of people may be far from perfect and especially coming fresh to the locus, largely judges them through what people say about them.

I can see why this novel has retained its appeal as it is almost an exemplar of writing a 20th Century English murder mystery and you feel that Le Carré did it to put himself into that context and show what he could do in that genre rather than spy fiction. It is not common to have the author read their book on audio. This is only the third book I have listened to where that has been the case. It does take Le Carré a little time to get into his performance, perhaps because it was not something he did habitually. However, he is soon well underway and coming from the class and background he is portraying he proves very capable of portraying characters of both genders from that context well. At just 2 hours 30 minutes in total, this is certainly one to listen to (or indeed read) if you have exhausted your collection of Christie, Marsh and Sayers, but want something clever set in a context they would recognise.

Books I Listened To/Read In August

 Fiction

'The Grim Reaper' by Bernard Knight

This is the sixth Crowner John book in the series. As with the others, the action picks up soon after the previous book ended. However, Knight does recap a great deal, so even if you have not read any of the other books you can pick up the story very easily. Indeed this might be a good one if you want to read as a stand-alone volume. Knight certainly communicates the nature of society and the law in late 12th Century England very well without it seeming to be a lecture.

This book is focused on Exeter and is actually a serial killer investigation. On those grounds it is probably one of the best of the series. John also gets back with Nesta his Welsh mistress and inn keeper, one of the favourite characters of the books. The suspects are limited by the fact that though the murders are diverse in nature, the corpses are accompanied by written extracts from the Bible.

Given the low level of literacy, even among clergymen, this restricts the likely killer to certain priests in the city. We are shown each of the various men and rather different to the previous books, the reader is effectively encouraged to decide between them. However, the investigation is not straightforward. John's own secretary, Thomas De Peyne is even arrested as a suspect, given his knowledge. As is common there is a lot of friction between John and his brother-in-law the Sheriff of Devon, but there is additional issues with the arrival of the judges of the periodic courts in Exeter. Knight balances the politics of the time very well and this adds an extra dimension to the investigations.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and felt it was one of the strongest so far. However, as you can see from my reviews of the previous ones, you can never tell the quality of the next book in the series. Despite, that I am persisting with working my way through them.

'The Twilight Man' by Michael Moorcock

I bought this book at the same time as 'The Rituals of Infinity' (1971) which I read in July: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/05/books-i-listened-toread-in-may.html Like that book it had started life as an episodic story in 'New Worlds' and this combined, revised version was published in 1966. I have read a review which suggests 'The Twilight Man' is atypical of Moorcock's work. However, in contrast I see a lot of seeds of novels and stories which followed. For example a decadent world in which the population had technology to do what they wish and a very 1960s attitude to sex, seems very characteristic of the Dancers at the End of Time novels. The Faustian pact with a flawed, powerful person which has a high cost to the one making the deal, runs right through the Elric books. Even the rotation of Earth having ceased and the Moon or some equivalent welded to the planet, appears again in Moorcock's writing. Thus, I see this novel as laying out many of the themes Moorcock would return over the following two decades and beyond.

As a novel in itself, it is crisp and tight, perhaps unsurprising for something originally produce for a magazine. Moorcock manages to produce a range of different characters quickly but effectively. This enables to see a range of approaches to humanity dealing with the end of the ability to reproduce its species. At times, in this regard, it reminds me a little of  'On the Beach' (1957) by Nevil Shute. However, Moorcock wraps it in his characteristic baroque styling which combines science fiction with fantasy in his unique way. As with the best science fiction, while there is action, the reader is provoked into considering how they would react and behave themselves in this context. Overall if you are looking for a deft, brisk piece of science fiction which delivers a lot for being slender, and, despite the dated sexual politics, asks relevant questions in an age when we have powerful billionaires, our environment is damaged and many societies are facing declining birth rates, then I recommend this book. It is also refreshing to have something that can be read in one sitting, rather than the 800+ page books which are so dominant in science fiction and especially fantasy.

'Altar of Bones' by Philip Carter

Bizarrely 'Philip Carter' (now has added an 'L.' in the middle presumably to avoid confusion with the dietician; cycling and IQ test authors of the same name), it is stated openly, is a pseudonym for an internationally acclaimed author. Who this is in reality I have not been able to find out. A rather ambivalent review quoted on the cover of the edition I read, suggests it might be Harlan Coben and goes on to say, though, that it is better than his other novels, despite their success. I did wonder if it was produced by a female author in the way that J.K. Rowling published books as Robert Galbraith when she moved into producing thrillers; knowing that male readers, especially of action books, too often baulk if they see a female name on the cover. Certainly there are strong female characters in this novel, though ultimately the outcomes for the heroine Zoe Dmitroff ends up with a painfully conventional conclusion; one that I felt was included to please mainstream US readers. At times I do wonder if it was written by the couple, especially given how many characters turn up and the two story threads orbiting the same protagonists.

Whoever wrote this book, published in 2011, it looks as if they were aiming to produce their equivalent of 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003; movie 2006). The sense of a special bloodline passed through women; visits to art galleries and chases around Paris and consulting eccentric specialists certainly parallel incidents in that book. It also had minor parallels with 'Labyrinth' (2005) by Kate Mosse. People are seeking a shrine, the eponymous Altar of Bones, located in Siberia, that while not granting immortality can cure incurable diseases and slow up the ageing process. If that is not enough, there is a spy story about KGB operatives in the USA both assassinating President Kennedy (with a film to prove it) and Marilyn Monroe. The fact that one of the antagonists seeking the film effectively exits the novel shows the extent to which the author had bitten off more than they could chew.

The book is fast moving and if you enjoy Dan Brown's books this will go down well. It is rather bewildering at the start when we are introduced to a string of characters in quite a bit of detail and then they are bumped off; though one reappears alive later. Zoe's mother being a Russian mafia boss does seem to jar with the novel and at least one of the assassins seems like the Terminator and able to cause a string of shootings without provoking any genuine official resistance, no matter which country she is in. The book is not a bad thriller and probably would work for you if seeking an action-mystery book with fewer religious overtones. However, you have to accept stretching of credibility and, conversely, some very conventional outcomes, especially for female characters.

Non-Fiction

'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' ed. by Boris Ford

This is the 1988 edition of the 1983 revision of this volume, though some chapters look to have had minimal updating since 1960. I was given it as a gift when I finished a job in the civil service in 1991, largely on the basis that I read a lot of books by Aldous Huxley. While the book covers the period when he was active, he barely gets a mention. After two introductory chapters on Britain at the time and on its literary scene, the book is a series of essays predominantly about one author or a set of authors and on occasion, a theme. The time frame is rather vague but sort of covers the 1890s to the 1950s, though some chapters, especially the one on Irish writing, stretches far beyond that. The writing is at times intense with critiques, especially of poetry, going down to considering individual words used in specific poems.

Despite the use of 23 writers, predominantly literature academics, there is a connecting theme and that is how negatively they view their subjects. D.H. Lawrence is permitted a couple of books deemed worthy but a lot of his stuff is dismissed as too fantastical. Virginia Woolf is entirely condemned as being 'minor'; Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene, C.P. Snow and W.H. Auden are seen as writing, respectively, nothing of quality and/or nothing substantial. I do not know if this was agreed by the various contributors, but in chapter after chapter they seem to be comparing their subject to some unrevealed 'golden' example that all these authors and poets fall short in meeting. Who the authors or the time period that they are thinking of, is not clear.

There is reference to French and Russian writing which generally seems to come off better than anything they read from those writing in English. You can tell the age of many of the essays, presumably brought over from the Pelican Guide version as even complex French text is not translated; it assumed that the reader is highly fluent in the language so can comprehend the very specialised points being made by those quotations.

There are some interesting points made, such as the role of sailors and the sea in Joseph Conrad's work and Ezra Pound effectively contrasting different versions of himself in his work. The chapters on the rural tradition, First World War writing and Irish English-language literature are interesting. I was introduced to the work of Edward Thomas and L.H. Myers with which I was not familiar. However, fitting with the consistent tone of this book, both are presented as, at best, mediocre; hardly encouraging me to read them. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid was also unfamiliar to me but given his extensive use of Scottish dialect which requires a multitude of footnotes to explain, I would hardly count him as being an English-language poet.

Some of the chapters, notably on the 'language of thought', and criticism and the reading public are so wrapped up in themselves and so dismissive that they are a waste of time; in the latter case, it seems the essayist seems to think that since the death of his journal, no effective criticism has been produced. These are irritating expoundings on topics of minimal interest and are more about the essayists wanting to get irritated about something rather than contribute to scholarship.

I can certainly see why this book gets bad reviews online. If you are to be a student on 20th Century English Literature then this book can be guaranteed to quell and interest, let alone passion, you might have in the authors of that time. This book recommends none of them and portrays them instead as failing and rather pathetic inadequate people not in control of their writing and unable to attain, in most cases any baseline standards; the best only achieve it once or twice, no matter how long their careers.

I came away from this book really questioning why it had been produced and continued to be put out in multiple editions. Yes, it might help with being critical of writing of these times, but in most cases a student writing this way, shackled to personal hobbyhorses and dismissing what many would feel were 'major' if not 'great' authors and poets, would be unlikely to score highly for their essay.

Books I Listened To/Read in May

 Fiction

'The Rituals of Infinity' by Michael Moorcock

This was a Moorcock novel that I had not encountered before. It was first serialised in the 'New Worlds' magazine, 1965-6 before being released as a novel in 1971. I do miss the days of the slim science fiction novels. My edition of this book is only 192 pages long. There is something crisp and to the point of this kind of novel which seems absent these days. The central concept of the novel is that the hero Professor Faustaff is part of a team travelling between a number of alternative Earths that have been created and discovered but are being rather erratically destroyed. Yet another Earth appears and people from other versions are drawn there to re-enact various scenes from Earth's history, the rituals of the title. Fighting back against the demolitions mutates the planets further. For a short novel it covers the idea quickly and yet manages to get in ambivalent characters and complex twists before the true antagonists are revealed. Faustaff is a robust character, unlike many of those Moorcock subsequently wrote. The 1960s background is apparent in that sex is never far from anyone's minds and a young woman simply drops into having sex with Faustaff and waits around while he adventures so they can have more. Though very much of its time, it does show the inventiveness of Moorcock at a time before some of his writing became so esoteric as to easily lose readers.

'Rome. The Emperor's Spy' by M.C. [Manda] Scott

Manda Scott is a very accessible author and she wrote a nice email in response to one I sent her via her website. I was particularly interested in the short story which is included at the end of this novel, 'The Roman in Britain' which is a 'what if?' story about Boudica being victorious and driving the Romans out of Britain, a topic which featured in my chapter, 'From these Shores' in my 'what if?' anthology 'Route Diverted: What If? Stories of the British' (2015). It was great to see someone who has written a lot on the Roman period tackle this topic.

This is the first book in the second tetralogy from Scott, bringing over characters from her successful Boudica tetralogy, 2003-2006. She has also written spy fiction and this book combines the two genres. It is around a team of chariot racers and their support staff in the reign of Emperor Nero leading up to the Great Fire of Rome in 64. This provides the context for seeking out a prophesy which says that if Rome and Jerusalem are burnt then there will be the Second Coming. A heavily scarred and crippled spy, Sebastos Pantera accompanies the team from their starting point near what is modern-day Cherbourg in northern France to a training camp in Alexandria, Egypt and on to Rome itself. This is a novel which is unafraid to feature a number of LGB characters, in line with the cultures of the time.

One challenge of the book is the multiple viewpoints as Scott has brought in Math, a male prostitute and trainee charioteer, son of a British warrior, 'Ajax' the prime charioteer of the team concealing a past in the Middle East and his sometime lover, healer, Hannah alert not just to the Sibylline Oracles but also the factions forming early Christianity. This can make it complex for the reader and there are some scenes such as a fire at the town in France and later during the torture by the prime antagonist when Scott goes through what is happening a number of times from different perspectives. The fragmentation between the three sites, though adding background interest, also complicates and lengthens the novel, reducing some of its dynamism.

I did find the discussion of just two of the different factions that followed in the wake of Jesus (or indeed Judas as he may have been named) interesting. It seems ironic this was the third book in two months I had read/listened to which looked at how people did not believe Jesus was divine until much later, centuries after his death. The portrayal by modern-day Christians of the Bible being written during or immediately after Jesus's lifetime and that there is a simple path from the early churches to the modern one, is mistaken. In an essay at the end, Scott highlights that there were perhaps 30 factions that might have become the Christian Church and the one led by St. Peter easily might not have won out.

The conspiracy, the spying elements, the races and fighting against the final fire, are the highlights of the book and where Scott shows her ability with the tension and action. She certainly grounds her novel in detailed research but sensibly uses that as rich colouring while saving the historical debate to the essay at the end. Overall this is not a bad book. If the multiple viewpoints on particular incidents is reduced in subsequent books then I would be happy to read more in the series. I certainly welcome that someone has brought the spy novel to a very different era to the Cold War.

'The Tinner's Corpse' by Bernard Knight

I welcomed the fact that this novel eschewed the action-adventure stuff of the previous two. Instead it focuses on one and then a second quite mundane murders among the tin panning industry of Dartmoor. Knight has done a lot of research and shows how the industry at the time outstripped that of Cornwall and was the second most profitable export from England. Consequently, tinners were permitted their own kind of parliament and bar for crimes of physical harm, had their own laws and prison. Knight also moves on with his protagonist, Sir John De Wolfe's life. A second coroner is appointed to North Devon and De Wolfe's relationship with his tavern landlady mistress comes to an end. There is a lot of trekking around Dartmoor but this is handled without it being tedious and giving a real feel for the locales which differ so much from Exeter where De Wolfe is based and its surrounding countryside.

The book lines up a number of suspects and has the classic situation of a contested will with various precepts. However, just as you feel you are building to a satisfying conclusion, the book stops. I have always been supportive of crime stories in which the criminal is not brought to justice and it is to be expected with stories set in the 12th Century when power and status meant much more than actual guilt and torture was habitually used in investigations. However, it seems in this case that Knight reached a certain page (330 in my edition) and was told to stop. There are no arrests, no resolution, not even De Wolfe being certain who the guilty individual(s) was/were. It just crashes to an end. I do not know if Knight finishes off the story in a subsequent novel or we simply have to put up with this. After his need for action to round off the previous two novels, it seems he was at a loss as to how to end this one. However, whatever the cause, whether he had no idea how to end it or publishers told him to cease, this makes it probably the most disappointing of the series. As I have a number of the subsequent books, I can only hope he handled them better or I will have to abandon reading them.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Latin America' by George Pendle

This book was first published in 1963 but was updated to 1976, the year before Pendle's death. It continued to be reprinted and my edition is from 1987. Thus, you should not expect to find any recent history of the countries covered. However, this is a good introduction to the region and Pendle is excellent in showing how long-term factors such as the geography, the various ethnicities, the relationship with Europe, the beliefs and the economic factors have shaped the diverse countries in the region throughout the centuries right into the 20th Century. He manages to summarise events from the civilisations in place before Europeans arrived, the conquistadors, the break away from the colonial countries, the various wars and revolutions then caudillo regimes very well. This is a quick way to get an engaging description of the various countries set in context, perhaps as a basis for reading newer works. I found it easy to read and full of details of which I had been ignorant before, despite having even studied Latin American history for a period in the 1980s when I bought this book.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes I' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; read by David Timson

This is one of the Naxos audio book versions of the stories. This volume contains 'The Speckled Band', 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches', 'The Stock-Broker’s Clerk' and 'The Red-Headed League'. These stories effectively break into two pairs with the first two about young women put under pressure by nefarious men and the second two about honest urban workers tricked for the purposes of a crime. Hearing them in this collection really highlighted to me what Conan Doyle did well in detailing late Victorian society. Here we see women mixed up in legal and inheritance situations as the result of deaths and remarriage. The step-family is far from being a late 20th Century invention too many people pretend.

In addition, there is a sense of vulnerability, that many in an age without social welfare were at the mercy of relatives and employers. Conan Doyle does seem to chide, in turn the stock-broker's clerk and the pawn broker, for not being more suspicious of overly well-paid positions they are offered; double pay for a job is a trait in a number of the Holmes stories. However, he also shows that at a time without even labour exchanges, let alone Jobseeker's Allowance, how people had to accept what was offered, no matter how dubious, or face penury. Thus, though I was familiar with the stories, having them this way, I found something more in them. Timson is excellent with the range of voices covered, both male and female, but especially Holmes and really brings to life the details of the text. Particularly memorable was a line from 'The Red-Headed League': 'He is as brave as bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster'!

Books I Read In January

Fiction

 'The Dark Echo' by Michael Connelly

This was Connelly's first crime novel. He remains popular after almost three decades of publishing and I was given a number of his books. Published in 1992 it features Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch a police detective in Los Angeles, working in the Hollywood Division after having killed a suspected serial killer. From the outset, it is clear Connelly is seeking to reproduce the 'hard boiled' detective novels of the 1930s and 1940s with lots of tough talking and jargon. Though he lives in a fancy house in the hills there is a lot of time in seedy motels. We know Connelly was a big fan of Raymond Chandler. However, unlike Chandler and Hammett, Connelly also has a slightly different trope that he can tap into. At times this book felt like one of those glossy thriller movies of the late 1980s/early 1990s, like 'Jagged Edge' (1985) and 'Fatal Attraction' (1989). The book was published the same year that 'Basic Instinct' came out. The sex between Bosch and Eleanor Wish, the FBI agent he is partnered up with certainly seems to stem from that kind of approach rather than being necessary to the story. The third trope which shapes the book is the Vietnam War experience one. The timing of the book is important as in 1992, American men who had fought in Vietnam in their late teens/early twenties were now in their early forties. Though it might not have been intentional, the book certainly reminds us how much harm the involvement in the war did to so many in the USA, let alone Vietnam.

The driver for the plot stems from the war, with Bosch being drawn into investigating the murder of an old comrade of his from when they both fought as specialists in clearing out the tunnels used by the Vietcong to move between villages; the 'black echo' referring to the sense of being in these tunnels facing an unseen enemy. The dead man's skills link into a complicated raid on safe deposit box depositories though aimed at two cruel South Vietnamese police officers who were brought to live lives of luxury in the USA. At times, as a result you feel there is a little too much going on, and I have not even included the twists and betrayals which also feature before the end. 

I guess that Connelly needs to be commended for keeping all the 'balls in the air' while generally not allowing the book to sink into a complex mess. It feels that there were certain things Connelly felt he had to include. He was slightly too young to have served in Vietnam, turning 19 only in 1975, but I imagine there would have been men of his generation around who would have experienced it. I tend not to judge an author by the first book in their series, because often they have to 'get over' aspects that may have been hanging around for a long time and subsequent books are better reads. In many ways, though he drew on so much that had been seen elsewhere, the combination just about works. At times elements seem pretty contrived: Bosch getting assigned to the case, the Internal Affairs handling of him, the very fast relationship with Wish and the stuff in the tunnels. However, maybe that rather than subtlety was what readers of the 1990s were seeking and no-one can deny his books are popular. I am certainly not going to throw away the rest and trust they will improve as I work through the Bosch sequence.

'The Jade Man's Eyes' by Michael Moorcock

It has been a long time since I read work by Moorcock, an author whose books I used to eat up as a young man. This is a little oddity, a 75-page novella published by a small obscure press, into marijuana, in 1973. It is set in the world of the Young Kingdoms and Elric of Melniboné, Moorcock's fantasy, infirm albino anti-hero who lives in a fatalistic world that the author intended as a counterbalance to the muscle-bound fantasy heroes like Conan the Barbarian of the time; the first Elric book appeared in 1961 and Moorcock was returning to producing Elric stories as late as 2010. This story was later revised and formed the third part of 'The Sailor on the Seas of Fate' (1976). It sees Elric and his companion Moonglum enlisted to sail up a river in a jungle covered region of the south-west of the world to visit the abandoned city of R'len K'ren A'a where Elric's own people originated before leaving it for the large island of Melniboné. Unsurprisingly the novella has a kind of 'Heart of Darkness' (1899) feel to it, with numerous members of the crew being killed by the part-reptile/part-flamingo locals. Elric comes back into contact with his demonic patron Arioch who ultimately is persuaded to lift curses from the city. As is typical with the Elric stories, there is a fatalistic sense throughout added to the decay he sees. It really needs to be read in that context rather than alone. However, it does remind me that the 21st Century has seen Elric books published that I have not read yet.

'The Blood of Rome' by Simon Scarrow

Though over the last couple of decades I have been aware of the range of action novels set in Roman times, it was only when, finding this in my local charity shop and seeing it was the 17th book in Scarrow's Eagles of Empire series (the 20th book came out last year) did I realise the scale of some of these and presumably how many copies they sell. Scarrow has written a lot set in Britain, but I think I was drawn to this one featuring two officers he has followed throughout when they are despatched to help restore a Roman puppet king from Iberia (a region of the Caucasus not in southern Europe) to the throne of Armenia in eastern Anatolia as a buffer between the Roman and Parthian empires. While there is obviously a lot of back story, it was not too difficult to pick up the threads. 

It is no surprise that Bernard Cornwell feels Scarrow as a rival (or at least he says so in a quote on the cover) as he taps into that approach which worked so well for Cornwell with the Sharpe series, though Scarrow does use modern swearing which at times seems rather odd. The challenge of ordinary soldiers, often, especially in this novel, frustrated by politics and trying to keep some kind of decency in times of very brutal war, is a solid basis. I was rather frustrated by the wrangling with the puppet, Radamistus, a cruel and brutal commander, but this seems to be based on historical fact and his behaviour meant, as shown in the novel, after being put on the throne by the Romans, he was soon deposed. Otherwise the battles, with good, but not excessive, detail of how the Roman Army functioned are solid. It sweeps along briskly. While I was not left with an urge to read more, I certainly would not look away if any more books from the series came across my path in the charity shop.

'Crowner's Quest' by Bernard Knight

This is the third book in the Crowner John series and by the end, as this goes from December 1194 to January 1195, they have covered four months. Following tight after each other in this police procedural series does at times make it feel like a medieval equivalent of 'The Bill' (broadcast 1983-2010). Sir John De Wolfe the sole coroner for Devon, has just two assistants so he does feel a bit like (Chief) Inspector Morse who always seemed to be lacking staff for the tasks he needed to do. Knight is good on the historical detail and especially the legal complexities of the newly created role of coroner in relation to the existing sheriffs. The philandering nature of De Wolfe, though it brings in other characters, seems rather forced. In this story, though it is used against him when he is framed for a rape. 

There are some good elements, the finding of the hanged body of a canon reminded me of 'The Name of the Rose' (1980). However, certainly in contrast to the preceding book, 'The Poisoned Chalice' (1998), which had a tautness to it, this novel by Knight becomes rather overblown. De Wolfe becomes involved in a renewed plot to replace King Richard I with his brother Prince John and there is a rather madcap hunt for treasure buried by a Saxon lord. The book climaxes with a joust to the death. Though there have been incidents of combat in the novels, De Wolfe and his large henchman, Gwyn, being old crusaders, this rather epic tone sits rather uncomfortably with the series. I wondered if an agent or publisher had encouraged Knight to 'take it up a gear' in terms of drama. In contrast, I imagine many readers who might have come to this after Ellis Peters's Cadfael series would be looking for something more cerebral and slow-burning. However, I am conscious that Knight was writing at a time when there was a flurry of medieval detective novels, which I have not read, and so their nature may have impacted on his work. In addition, as with the philandering - two of De Wolfe's lovers feature in this book - I do feel at times as if it is the author, as an ageing man (he was 67 when the book was published) living out his fantasies through his character who is around 40, so old for the times.

It is not a bad book, but after a promising start, it went off in directions that stretched my credibility and that undermined my enjoyment of the attention to detail and the generally rich portrayal of 12th Century life, making use of real places and often actual people, of the time. I do have a number more of these books to read and hope they get back on track.

'City of Ashes' by Cassandra Clare

This second book in the Mortal Instruments pentalogy follows much the same pattern as the first, City of Bones' (2007). The heroine, Clary, while very much part of the Shadowhunter world, is still a beginner. In this book, her father, the evil Valentine, moves to seize the second of the Mortal Instruments, the Soul Sword which can compel Shadowhunters to tell the truth and can also summon and control demons. Valentine aims to carry out a ceremony to reverse the sword's alignment enabling him to create a demon army. For this he needs the blood of a werewolf, a vampire, a fae and a shadowhunter. Many of the characters from the first novel reappear, though Clary's mother is in a coma throughout the book and we are introduced to Maia a teenaged werewolf. Clary's special ability to create magic runes unavailable to most shadowhunters is also revealed. There is a lot of chasing around New York trying to recapture those Valentine has taken to sacrifice for his ritual. There is the usual bickering between the five main teenaged characters, the shadowhunters, siblings Alec and Isabelle their kind of adopted brother, Jace who is actually Clary's real brother; plus Simon her best friend and now boyfriend, who is turned into a vampire. Alec and Isabelle's mother turns up as does an Inquisitor who suspects Jace but actually muddies the water in the teenagers trying to reach Valentine.

The book moves along at a brisk pace, but you do feel it is a little formulaic. There is another climactic battle, this time in Valentine's boat on the river, full of a demon army. The most interesting character is camp warlock, Magnus Bane, who is now dating Alec. It all rather feels to have come out of the same 'factory' as the Harry Potter stories, with the young adult elements mixed in. There are unsettling references to underaged sex - Clary is only 14, much younger than show in the TV series - and there is clear signs of incest as she is deeply attracted to her newly discovered brother, Jace and is compelled to reveal these feelings by a faerie queen living under a pond in a New York park. There was enough to be going on with, with Clary being fancied by her best friend who is now a vampire and I am not sure why Clare felt compelled to add in these uncomfortable elements, though I gather from online commentary that they are kind of de rigueur these days for 'young adult' fiction, to distinguish it from children's books. The first book felt quite fresh, though it used familiar tropes. This book suggests Clare had already ran out of ideas. I have the third book and will see if she managed to pull it back or simply do yet another replica.

Non-Fiction

'African Profiles' by Ronald Segal

This book was published at the same time as 'A Short History of Africa' (1962) which I read last month; they were both part of a Penguin series of books. This one features 400 pen portraits of African male politicians which had been significant in the preceding 30-40 years. It starts with South Africa and is a good reminder of the roots of apartheid and then moves up the continent to finish with Egypt. Really only the Spanish colonies are neglected. Some countries are dealt with alone, others grouped with those ruled by the same colonial power or in other groupings. What is fascinating is, despite the diversity of countries, how many stories are so similar. So many of these men rose up through religious schools, a mix of Protestant, Catholic or Islamic. They often studied abroad and many became teachers or worked in civil service roles such as with the railways or post office and journalism was often a route for them to come to prominence.

While very dated, the book is a good reminder of elements of African history which have often been forgotten. I had not been aware of the extent of 'compelled labour' a modern form of slavery, in the Portuguese colonies or the fact that at various times South Africa had considered annexing many of its neighbouring states. The obsession with the federation of states, seen as a way to overcome the arbitrary borders imposed by colonisation, keeps coming out. Segal certainly seems to feel it is the only way for economic success, despite the failure of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria, let alone the federation, failing at the time of North and South Rhodesia [Zambia and Zimbabwe] and Nyasaland [Malawi]. There are even fantastical schemes mentioned such as the Rhodesias combining with Kenya, Uganda, Tanganiyka [part of Tanzania] and even Somalia. There is even belief of an entire continental federation. Yet, Segal highlights cannot fail to discuss the issues around tribalism and regionalism and is good on the break away of Katanga from the Congo and of course the Biafran crisis still lay ahead, though he highlights the challenges of regionalism in Nigeria.

Segal admits at the start of the book that he is partisan and his analysis of different leaders is very erratic as a result. He is certainly opposed to monarchs as in Ethiopia, Tunisia and Morocco. He seems unable to see, despite the evidence, how easily many nations were moving towards being one-party states with their leader of the time or a subsequent one, becoming leader for life, often over decades. Similarly he seems to even see potential in Nasser's military coup in Egypt without suspecting the military would end up running many countries across Africa for decades to come. He anticipates that apartheid would be short-lived and end in a violent uprising in South Africa.

Obviously we have hindsight and it is easy to see the author as naïve, yet his book itself provides clear evidence of the roots of these trends repeated in various manifestations right across Africa. He does seem unnecessarily apologist for some leaders, especially Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, perhaps because despite their rather ambivalent attachment to democracy they seemed to subscribe to his visions for Africa. The book is useful in reminding us of African leaders often now forgotten, at least in English, such as Holden Roberto, Ntsu Mokhehle, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Habib Bourguiba, Léopold Sédar Senghour, Sékou Touré and William Tubman. The book is an interesting reminder of Africa's development in the 1930s-50s and the people important in that process, though I imagine a book on this subject written today would not entirely leave out women as Segal does.

The Books I Listened To/Read In October

Fiction
'Tooth and Nail' by Ian Rankin
Before I review the book, I have to say how frustrating it is in the editions of these books I am reading, published in the 2000s to have Rankin's foreword outlining how he went about writing the books.  In contrast to all the strict 'rules' that authors are told they must to adhere to by agents, publishers or general commentators, he seems to have bumbled through writing his books and not making any particular effort to make them successful.  I guess if he had started publishing books today rather than thirty years ago he would be the recipient of tens of comments about how he was doing it all wrong. It is rather galling and makes me wish that I had tried harder to get my books out when it was clearly a lot easier and you were not being harangued by people at every turn telling you how wrong your writing was.

Unlike the other Inspector Rebus stories, this one sees him going to London to investigate a serial killer and it is clearly based on Rankin's own experiences of people struggling comprehending his accent in the capital, though the Edinburgh accent, in contrast to some other Scottish ones, is not too much of a challenge for people in southern England.  He makes much play of the friction between Rebus and the Metropolitan Police officers that he is working alongside who feel patronised by him being brought into assist.  However, the developing relationships with these officers and the psychologist who becomes associated with the case, are well handled.  We see from the perspective of the criminal as well as Rebus, something which seems common these days as with the Val McDermid story I listened to recently, but it makes the criminal credible, though as a reader you do feel rather misled at the end and I found the closing revelations rather bewildering as they seemed to jar with what had been uncovered up until then.  Aside from that sense of a jump near the end, I thought it was pretty well handled with a couple of reasonable twists and Rankin does well characterising the grottiness of London which will be familiar to anyone who has lived there.

'Transition' by Iain Banks
Having enjoyed 'The Algebraist' (2004) by Banks, under his science fiction tag, Iain M. Banks, I was drawn to this book.  While not designated as science fiction, with its story of alternate versions of Earth, to me, it seemed to fit into that kind of category.  It is a well worked theme.  Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter produced the 'Long' series based on the premise, so I was interested to see what Banks would do with it.  I must say that I was disappointed.  He has multiple characters, some of whom may be the same person simply at different times.  However, rather than develop them fully, he flits between them.  I like the concept of an organisation, the Concern, trying to police people jumping between alternatives; individuals having a range of powers associated with the different worlds and an internal battle between people with such powers.  Yet it is all fragmented into small pieces which often do not advance the story; one character spends almost all their time doing very little in a hospital.

Some of the longer sections, such as the assassination of one character's companion in Venice, are suitable as short stories in themselves, but the rest is too insubstantial.  The book reminded me of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius series with repeated characters flitting between various alternatives and with a lot of unnecessary sex.  Aside from 'The Final Programme' (1968), I found these tiresome, but they had the advantage of being short, usually around 150 pages.  Banks, in contrast in my edition goes on for 469 pages.  At times I wondered if he was trying an extended pastiche of one of Moorcock's books.  In summing up, there were some good ideas here and the basis of a good novel; there are some well executed scenes.  However, the books is very much less than the sum of its parts and all of these good attributes are wasted in what turns out to be a real mess.

Non-Fiction
'Medieval People' by Eileen Power
I was recommended this book over thirty years ago and finally got around to it.  I found it far better than most books I am recommended to read.  It was first published in 1924 and I was reading a 1939 edition.  Power was effectively making the case for the study of social history at a time when it attracted minimal attention in the UK.  She did this by focusing on a number of medieval people as the title suggests and showing to the readers how a range of sources can be used to explore the lives of such people.  In particular she looked at government and church records of the time, which were often neglected, especially outside local history research.  By focusing on a mix of well known people, Marco Polo in one chapter, the Prioress from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales', Madam Eglentyne with the far lesser known such as Bodo, a French peasant; a Parisian house wife and two merchants in the wool and cloth trade, she highlights what can be revealed.  Of course, especially since the 1960s and 1970s, social history has become a legitimate focus of study, but this book is a key marker of the start of the discipline.

At times the book shows its age, Power speaks of the 'crafty Jew' and refers to the Mongols as 'Tartars'.  She is also unquestioning of whether Marco Polo actually reached China or just picked up stories from other travellers there, despite highlighting the glaring gaps in his account.  However, despite these flaws, she provides wonderfully crisp vignettes of the individuals which give a good insight into the time periods and what was going on, especially in terms of wool and cloth trade, part of the largest industry of the time.  She counteracts the patronising attitude of people towards the past in outlining how complex relationships of all kinds were and what motivated people.  There are interesting sections on the functioning of inspections of convents, the economics of marriage and the complexities of trading internationally with all the issues around currency exchange and quality control, which are faced today.  Overall, an engaging book, despite its age.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Dead Man's Footsteps' by Peter James; read by Neil Pearson
This is the fourth book in James's Roy Grace series; I read the previous three back in 2016.  Unlike many authors who seek to make it unclear when and where their novels are set, James goes right the other way, with specific settings in the 2000s and in very specific places in and around Brighton in southern England.  This story jumps between two time periods, events around the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and 2007 Brighton where a woman is being threatened and a skeleton had turned up.  Grace is struggling against a colleague being favoured by his boss who seems keen to dig up anything on Grace's missing wife.

I am never keen on stories featuring the 11th September attacks as I feel the incidents have been used very inappropriately and as a justification for attitude and actions that were not right.  Also being someone who grew up in a country plagued by terrorism throughout my life, the sense of many that terrorism somehow only appeared in the Western world in the 21st century.  However, I can see why James made use of it as it provided a great opportunity for people wanting to cover their tracks and much of this novel is about people not being who they seem to be and others exploiting that situation.  James typically had strands which seem unrelated but slowly come together.  In this novel, that seemed to take far too long compared to some of the others.  The theme of high-value stamps feels rather levered into the novel but I can understand why it interested James as they are a way of moving a lot of money around easily.   There are some good dramatic scenes and given that James is not afraid to kill or injure his principal characters, you have a real sense of jeopardy.

I found it rather unsettling to have Pearson reading the book as I have recently been listening to the Martin Beck series of plays in which he appears as recurring detective.  He is not too bad as the voice of this novel, but is too well known for you to detach from envisaging him rather than him acting all the characters as an audio book narrator needs to do effectively.  Overall, this book was not bad, but in some ways I did not feel it was the best of the series.

'Dead Tomorrow' by Peter James; read by William Gaminara
This is the fifth book in the series and follows on some months after the one reviewed above.  Fortunately the two most annoying characters in that book have moved on.  As is common with the series, James has apparently disconnected threads, including street children in Romania, a Brighton teenager needing a liver transplant and bodies found off the coast of Sussex.  Though at times pretty gruesome, I felt this story, which revolves around the trafficking of people for organ harvesting was much tighter than 'Dead Man's Footsteps'.  The story felt credible and less convoluted.  Again you feel, though, that the jeopardy is genuine and I am glad James does not let off characters who we might sympathise with, especially not in bending the law on compassionate grounds.  We find out more about Roy Grace's missing wife who popped up incongruously at the end of the previous book.  However, Grace not stumbling across evidence he needs at a crucial time in regard to her seemed terribly contorted.

Overall, this is a gritty novel with no easy answers to the moral dilemmas.  If you dislike sustained scenes of surgery then it is best avoided.  I much prefer Gaminara in reading these books to Pearson, maybe because I am not as familiar with his voice.  He does tend to make some of the younger police officers sound older than we know they are.

'Dead Like You' by Peter James; read by William Gaminara
This is the sixth in the series and again is set not long, though not immediately after the previous book.  Again it jumps between the present, i.e. 2009 and the past, 1997.  James's last three books have seemed to have a theme: stamps and organs, in this book it is shoe fetishes.  However, despite initially feeling this was a kind of 'McGuffin' especially as the stamps had been, in fact, James uses it much better.  As is common in his books we see through the eyes of the killer, but in this one there are three candidates, all shoe fetishists, and it is intriguing when seeing through their eyes to work out which is truly the killer, who is the rapist and who is trying to go straight but on the edge of the other two men's crimes.  This is a very gritty novel in the series, in part because we get the sordid nature of the men and their disgust at women coming from three sources rather than one.  The victims themselves do not simply lie down in the face of their attackers and the climactic battle between the final woman and the murderer is well handled.  As usual, James ties his stories to very specific times and places, you could walk around many of the locations for real.  I like the fact that he does not try to make them slightly timeless as authors are often encouraged to do.  It does make it possible for him to reflect on current developments and he seems hooked on connecting them to others over the decades too.

Gaminara is in his stride reading this book.  He does well in voicing sordid characters, but also being convincing as the women under threat.  In the moments of fear, he is good at communicating this, the energy and the reactions from both sides, so does very well as a reader of James's take on the police procedural.

'The Novice' by Trudi Canavan; read by Samantha Bond
This is another book with a different reader to the previous one in the series.  This is the sequel to 'The Magicians' Guild' which I heard last month, but read by Kellie Bright.  Bond is far better known not simply in the UK but globally.  She does very well in voicing the spectrum of characters and is in large part close to Bright's interpretation, though they do pronounce some of the names differently.  This book follows Sonea now that she is a student in the Guild and all the bullying she faces as a result of being brought up in the slums.  She also faces danger from what she knows of the High Lord the head of the Guild and the practices he undertakes.

I guess all books about magic colleges/universities end up sounding like British boarding school novels of the 1930s because of the set up and the old fashioned nature of magic users.  I also worry that the High Lord is becoming rather like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, though Canavan was writing these before he was fully revealed in published books.  What is different in these books is what is happening elsewhere in Canavan's world a character from the previous book, Lord Dannyl travels the world trying to uncover the background to the High Lord's powers and comes to understand his own homosexuality.  Canavan does go out of her way to try to subvert a lot of fantasy tropes.  At times it can feel that these, as with suppression of the lower classes in the first book, are rather plastered on, but I concede that might be because we do not see them often in fantasy books and I read far fewer these days than in my youth.  The arena scene at the end of the book is very well done and leads to a great climax.  I do hope that Sonea does not spend too long in the guild university and gets out into the wider world once again.

I must say I do like how Trudi Canavan handles magic in these stories.  It is a force that is a kind of mix of mental and physical power, with the magicians envisaging what they want to achieve in their minds, but it still draining them physically.  Little is said of the alchemy studies, but this is generally a magic system without magic potions or ingredients, not even magic words and somehow this makes it seem 'credible' even though it is something fantastical.

'The High Lord' by Trudi Canavan; read by Samantha Bond
Coming to the third book in the trilogy I was beginning to feel that each of the three had been written by a different author.  The character of Sonea seems to alter so much.  There is a complete flip around in this book and I know Canavan is trying to spring surprises on the reader, but these are so severe that it reduces confidence in the characters.  In this book we find that Sonea is now 20, even though it has been only three years since 'The Magicians' Guild' was set when she seemed to be a younger girl, probably no more than 15, if not younger.  The two readers have voiced her that way, so it is rather startling when she is suddenly naïve, despite growing up in the slums, but sexually active in this book. I am not convinced by her change in loyalties.  To draw a Rowling parallel this would be like Hermione Granger running off with Professor Snape, if not Lord Voldemort himself. The book has some good scenes.  In this series Canavan has always been strongest in writing about people charging through the city, so the battle to defend it, is as good as the first two-thirds of 'The Magicians' Guild' when Sonea is hiding in the city.  Her wandering around the wastelands is far less interesting.  In fact too many people wander around too many wastelands and the magicians in general turn out to be pretty pathetic.  The action scenes are good but not the bits in between.  The three love interests are not really resolved.  In many ways I admire what Canavan has done with the series, but it has been far too erratic in nature for me to enjoy.

Samantha Bond does the voices well, they are now established.  However, I feel she, like the reader has been caught out by Sonea suddenly leaping to being 3-5 years older than envisaged and so she still sound 14 even when she declares she is 20.

'First Contact' by J.M. Dillard; read by Gates McFadden
I saw the movie this novel was based on some years ago but had forgotten enough of the plot for this to be alright to listen to without me knowing what was going to happen next.  It is a 'Star Trek' story featuring Captain Jean-Luc Picard fighting against the Borg, a cyborg race that travel back in time in an attempt to stop the first test flight of a faster-than-light drive by humans which attracts the attention of the Vulcans and then the humans' integration into the Federation.  What is rather surprising is the development is made in the mid-21st century after the world has suffered a nuclear war, so there is an element of a survivalist story in here, probably the most unlikely context for the development of such technology especially given that the lead scientist is an alcoholic living in a tent in Montana.  There are parallel developments involving different members of the crew of the Enterprise, working on Earth and battling through the space ship in an attempt to dislodge the Borg from it.

I guess one extra element that you get from the book are the thoughts of Picard and other characters.  These are very important in the captain's case because as a former prisoner of the Borg he gets more than an inkling of what they are going to do and this helps him fight back.  Overall, it was rather a workerlike story rather than one with great moments of tension because those who are lost and assimilated by the Borg are not characters that have been developed beyond their names.  To enhance the drama the producers of the audio book have added in a lot of sound effects.  McFadden's voice is often moderated, beyond her acting the voices of the different characters.  There is music which is sometimes too loud to hear the text, laser blasts, explosions, engine sounds and worst of all squelchy sounds of surgery.  Overall, I feel these detract rather than add to the book.  McFadden, otherwise, does pretty well in capturing the full spectrum of characters.  I had not realised that she was the actress who played the character, Chief Medical Officer Commander Beverly Crusher in the Next Generation stories of  'Star Trek'.


'The Bourne Deception' by Eric Van Lustbader; read by Jeremy Davidson
I have seen the first three movies of the Jason Bourne series, but have read none of the original books by Robert Ludlum nor these successor ones by Eric Van Lustbader though I did read a martial arts adventure by him twenty years ago which I thought a friend of mine was giving me as a recommendation to read, but it turns out he disliked it and thought I was better placed to dispose of it!  Reading this book, I realised why the source of some gripes from readers of my own novels.  The majority of the readers who contact me are right-wing men from the USA.  It is clear now that they expect their books all to be written this way, especially if dealing with warfare.

The language is incessantly bombastic, but with the most contorted similes you could imagine.  Furthermore, it keeps stopping to give a highly technical read out of the weaponry being used.  When a man is seeking to shoot Bourne we get a whole slew of data about the gun and the telescopic sight he is using.  Later there is a description of the three calibres of the different ammunition on board a helicopter.  Thus, you have a breathless style which is interrupted by likening things at length to other things, often utterly unrelated and a manual on whatever machinery a character is using.  I could not write this way even if I wanted to and think it is a rather mind-numbing and certainly unsubtle approach, which actually reduces any genuine sense of jeopardy.

The sense of jeopardy is further reduced by the fact that Jason Bourne himself seems invincible, to the extent that this is even commented upon by characters.  In contrast others, especially the women, seem disposable.  I accept there has been some attempt to include women as agents and controllers, but at times they seem particularly vulnerable and too many carry sexy sounding guns in thigh holsters for it to seem feasible.  A further weakness is how twisted the plot is.  The attack on Iran seems contemporary as does featuring 'security' consultancies working for the US government but to their own agenda.  However, there are too many threads and especially too many people in prosthetic disguises to really get your head around.  It also distances Bourne from the action for much of the book and instead we see things largely through disposable characters.  I guess, however, this is how people expect action novels to be written these days and they are intolerant of anyone who tries anything marginally different.

Davidson does a good job with the voices of the different character of both genders.  He manages Russian and Egyptian accents pretty convincingly, but struggles with the Australian and New Zealand ones.  I have no idea why Van Lustbader has such an aversion to Munich; his description of the city is terribly misplaced and erroneous, he could have picked scores of other German cities that would have fitted better.

'Attention All Shipping' by Charlie Connelly; read by Alex Jennings
Though written by a Briton, this is very much in the Bill Bryson area of writing.  Feeling nostalgic for the daily radio shipping forecast, Connelly decided to travel to all of the zones mentioned in the broadcast, along the way visiting the locations of some interesting people and recounting to readers about how the structure of the forecast came about and developed.  The trouble is that many of the zones are simply chunks of sea and Connelly made no effort to even visit one oil or gas rig, though he did get to Sealand.  Many of the other zones cover bleak islands or soggy coastal regions, so a lot of what he articulates is about being depressed in a rundown place.  It is quite stunning how ill-prepared Connelly is for many of his journeys especially to the more remote places, so a lot of the time he comes across as a really pathetic character, a little xenophobic when he finds things are different to back home, both in the way Bryson did in some of his earlier books.  There are highlights, primarily when he is outlining his family history, the achievements of a particular individual from the town or about the story of some light houses.  Overall, there was insufficient of interest to make this journey worthwhile and so recounting it is naturally lacking in substance.

I now know Alex Jennings well as a reader of audio books.  This is one of those where the reader seems so close to the author, that you feel he is almost that man.  That helps a little, though it just emphasises how desultory the whole project was and largely how ill-prepared Connelly was for it.  Thus, there is little to admire, bar what he read up on about local heroes.