Books I Read/Listened To In November

 Fiction

'A Study in Murder' by Robert Ryan

This is the third book in Ryan's Dr. Watson (and indeed Sherlock Holmes) series, following on from  'Dead Man's Land' (2012/13) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html and 'The Dead Can Wait' (2014) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/09/books-i-read-in-september.html which I read earlier this year. At the end of 'The Dead Can Wait', Dr. Watson, serving as a major, was hauled from the wreck of a British tank and ended up in a German prisoner-of-war camp. This story continues through the latter part of 1916 and into early 1917. It features a number of characters from the previous books including Ernst Bloch, the leading German sniper from the first book and ruthless assassin Ilse Brandt, from the second and Georgina Gregson from both of them. Von Bork, a German agent from Conan Doyle's own story, 'His Last Bow' (1917) also makes an appearance. However, this is not the last book in the series, there is 'The Sign of Fear' (2016) though I have not been given a copy of that one.

On the instigation of Von Bork, not only is Watson refused leave to be exchanged into neutral Netherlands, despite his age, but he is sent to a far harsher camp, rather than close to the Dutch border, up in the Harz Mountains. It is called Harzgrund and is somewhat based on the real camp of Holzminden run to make a profit out of the prisoners. As with the previous two books, different threads run in parallel. In the camp Watson tries to find out why three prisoners killed themselves at a séance and then what is going on with supposedly escaped prisoners. Meanwhile back in Britain there are two schemes to exchange him, one involving for Sherlock Holmes and one for Ilse Brandt. There are some improvements on the previous two books. Sudden jumps in the character the story is being seen through, are generally avoided. There is one revelation that someone is not who they are pretend to be, but handled far better than in the previous book in particular in which three characters are revealed to be different people even though we have seen their thoughts.

As with the previous books, this is more a spy thriller than a detective novel, though Watson does unravel what is happening to "escaped" prisoners from Harzgrund. The story suggests that he comes to believe contact with the spirit world is possible, something Conan Doyle believed in very strongly. The main problem with the book is the build up to a preposterous climax at the fictional Knok bridge. This involves two sets of Britons, one bringing a German agent (freed using not only a hot air balloon, but a screen suspended in the air on to which a projection of an escaping woman is made and from the balloon a corpse of another is dropped!), one a German sniper and Sherlock Holmes, on one side and Watson, Von Bork and an UFA film crew on the other. The exchange at the bridge is far more suited to a Cold War spy novel than a First World War one. To add to the ridiculous nature of this stage of the novel, a British submarine - one designed but never built - emerges from the river.

I have no idea why Ryan felt obliged to pile on so many unbelievable elements. The book is not intended as a spoof as the brutal killings throughout make clear. Yes, authors do play around with time, but Ryan seems to do it far more than is necessary. He could have easily used a different Dutch bridge. There was no need for such extravagant, probably impossible, escapes in London and Venlo. He seems to be scrabbling around for details and is compelled to alter the naming of the Connaught Hotel to fit his story rather than finding some equivalent detail at that time.

I have a sense that Ryan is a better writer than he has shown in these three books. The short story Watson writes while in the prison camp, 'The Girl and the Gold Watches' and that maybe because he has distorted 'The Man with the Watches' (1922) and sent it back in time a bit. Ryan seems to get some pleasure in what he calls 'remixing' Conan Doyle stories, but unfortunately seems to learn little from that author's work, in terms of quality of story-telling as opposed to atmosphere. I wonder if he is blinded by his fandom. I certainly had far less difficulty with his 'Empire of Sand' (2008) which I read in December 2018: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/12/books-i-listened-toread-in-december.html  It looks like, as is increasingly common these days, that Ryan's success has bought him exemption from his work being properly edited as I am sure that any developmental editor would have questioned a number of Ryan's decisions. Perhaps one or two in isolation would have been fine, but in this book they accrete to make it seem silly really undermining what could have been a gripping book if only he had made more feasible choices in how it would run. Overall, a missed opportunity.

'The Long Cosmos' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

This is the final book in the 'Long Earth' pentalogy. Baxter finished it off alone after Pratchett died in March 2015. I do not know whether that explains why there is a bit more control over this book than the preceding ones. The death of a few major characters at the end of the fourth book, 'The Long Utopia' (2015) probably also helped. There is a little less jumping abruptly between perspectives. We mainly follow one strand developing a continental-wide computer 'The Thinker' and a sabbatical by Joshua Valienté, a character now 68, who we have followed since being a boy in the first book. There is a sub-plot of Nelson Azikiwe tracking down his grandson. However, all these threads come together, ironically given the chaos of so much of the series, in a very pat way.

The series has always struggled with plot. The main focus of the two authors has been the immense amount of ideas they had for their infinite variants on Earth, Mars and indeed the wider universes. Even in this book, you feel the disappearance of a couple of characters including Dan-Rod, Joshua's son are largely to take the characters to some interesting places, indeed in this novel, to see giant trees running on hydrogen. The exploration to the 'north' of the chain of Earths takes characters nearer to the core of the Milky Way galaxy. However, it is very under-developed. There is no great revelation of who has been contacting humans and other species along the long Earth to join them. They go and come back again. As with the previous books, it seems as if Pratchett and Baxter have dodged writing the climax that they have spent so long building up to.

Some of the most annoying characters were fortunately killed off in 'The Long Utopia' but there are still too many who spend a lot of patronising other people. I know it is a tendency of books in the 2010s to fill their pages with smug characters, lecturing others about how naive they are. I guess this reflects our society as you daily find such behaviour especially in social media but also in the news. It seems these days you cannot feel right in something unless you are telling someone else very vigorously how wrong they are - or often simply how wrong you assume they are. Yes, one or two characters like this is fine, but especially with science fiction in which the danger of simply slipping into a lecture is high, this becomes tedious. These are not only characters you feel no affinity for, but they are characters you do not want to be around. The reference of the elderly 'troll' Sancho, being a librarian and resembling an orang-utang is a nice reference to the librarian in Pratchett's Discworld novels, is a rare example of a character you feel you can engage with, even though he has limited dialogue.

While I was surprisingly underwhelmed by David Downing's 'Station' series, I have never felt so disappointed by a series of books as with the 'Long Earth' pentalogy. I know Pratchett's solo books got 'flabby' in the 21st Century, but teaming up with Baxter, who often overwrites anyway, made this tendency far worse. There were enough ideas in these books for the authors to have produced twenty or thirty well developed novels. However, they clearly felt obliged to pack in every last idea they had, not simply in terms of numerous versions of Earth, but species and political developments. As a result, rather than a coherent, engaging series of books, you end up with a scrapbook containing a morass of material which while interesting of itself, does not make successful novels. I certainly regret buying these books new, something I rarely do. I have stopped reading work by Pratchett and certainly will steer clear of anything by Baxter. This was really an expensive disappointment.

'The Witch of Portobello' by Paulo Coelho

Coelho is one of those authors like Thomas Pynchon or Gabriel García Márquez who you will have on the edge of your consciousness without really knowing what they have written. I bought this book, published in 2007 unread at a car boot sale last year, in part curious what kind of book it was. There are a lot of 'extras' at the back of this book as if it was a DVD, so you can find out quite a lot about Coelho, his career and beliefs. I had no problem with the first half of the book and in fact found it quite engaging. It is about a Roma woman who was put up for adoption in Romania the 1970s and was adopted by a Lebanese couple and given the name Sherine. The couple were later refugees to Britain where Sherine grew to adulthood and used the name 'Athena'. She had a short marriage resulting in a son, but there was divorced. She worked in a bank and then as an estate agent in the Middle East. Rather than a straight narrative, the book is written as a series of interviews with people who knew Sherine, including her adopted and birth mothers, neighbours and teachers. This bit is fine and engaging. Sherine returns to Romania and finds her birth mother.

Where I lost patience with the novel is when Sherine increasingly develops an engagement with New Age practices. Initially this is through dancing and calligraphy taught to her by amateurs. Then, however, she meets a Scottish woman, Deidre, who pretends to be some kind of spiritual guru. In fact she shows Sherine how she can take up a similar role as a charlatan through teaching things she actually has no idea about and wrapping them up in various jargon about the feminine side of God. Sherine ends up training actors and they form the hub of a growing cult around her until she faces opposition from church leaders and is murdered. I was bored by all the droning on about the spiritual aspects when we know Deidre and Sherine are in fact engaged in a confidence trick, largely for their own sense of self-worth. What I found worse at the end is that Coelho actually believes in much of the stuff he shows Sherine proselytising with a lack of any genuine knowledge and increasingly deluded. You really lose faith in the story. What is perhaps worse is the epilogue, suddenly a character mentioned in passing and constantly dismissed turns out to be a prime mover of the story, kept from the reader throughout.

Having worked through this book, I can understand why people stay away from literary fiction. The author does not play fair with the reader. Though he has skill in terms of characterisation and the structure of the plot is refreshing, half the book is basically a New Age sermon through the voices of two characters even though we have been shown they are charlatans. Reading more about the author it is clear these pseudo-religious texts are at the heart of his writing and I can understand why the original buyer/receiver of the book sold it on unread. Somewhere in this there is some skilled writing, but certainly the second half of the book is as exciting as listening to a sermon by a deluded fanatic. I will not be looking out any more books by Coelho and struggle to find what attracts readers to him. Ironically he seems to have become very much like the charlatan guru characters he portrays in this book.

Audio Book - Fiction

'Dying Light' by Stuart MacBride; read by John Sessions

It was ironic that I chose to listen to this book when I did, just before John Sessions's death. He was born in Scotland but was moved to England when only 3. However, he proves very capable in his narration of providing a range of Aberdeen and some Edinburgh voices, both male and female and really making them distinctive from each other.

This book is only the second of those written by MacBride featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. That surprised me as there is a lot of back story. McRae has a pathologist as an ex, is dating a fellow police officer who has had her arm broken in a previous case, is under investigation as a result of the death of another officer during a raid he led and so on. It felt as if the character had been running for a number of books already. I guess that sums up MacBride's style. This book packs in four cases in parallel with McRae working to two inspectors as well as dealing with all the issues raised above. There is a murder of prostitutes, turf battles over drugs dealing, a missing husband, mutilated dog's bodies and corruption over a housing development. Some of these do begin to interlock, but you do really need to pay close attentions as McRae and his colleagues flit between the different cases. There is also a lot of jealousy and claiming the credit, especially in the media, is a big motivator for many of the various detectives' actions.

The book is very gritty with brutal murders, dismemberment and a range of torture. MacBride was clearly seeking to bring a 'hard-boiled' approach to Scottish crime writing and goes at it to an extent far harder than, say, Ian Rankin or Val McDermid - though her stories are often set in England. Overall it is not a bad story and while scenes will make you wince and feel frustrated, you have to admire the author for balancing a whole host of strands reasonably well. However, I think it is probably best to read rather than listen to this book, unless you can listen to the 6 hours in one stretch as there are occasions when you want to flick back to see who was doing what to whom, when a strand is picked up again. With that caveat I might be tempted to pick up more in this series if I see them in my local charity shop, preferring book form over more audio.

Non-Fiction

'The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation' by Ian Kershaw

There are probably few eras/events in history which have been so written about at an academic level as the Nazi regime, perhaps the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, could come in for the kind of scrutiny that Kershaw gives the Third Reich. As he makes clear at the start this is neither a history book, though he does mention some occurrences in the Nazi period, and though it references some hundreds of books and articles on the regime, it is not a historiographical book either, it is somewhere between the two. As the title suggests, Kershaw looks at how historians, some social scientists and political commentators, have interpreted what is known about all that occurred under Nazism. I read the second edition of the book which came out in 1990, five years after the book was published. However, from 1986 onwards there had been the so-called Historikerstreit - a row between various West German historians on how far the regime could be 'historicised', i.e. seen as part of ongoing, 'normal' history and how far those 12 years had to always remain treated as something almost outside history, disconnected from what went before and what followed after. This edition was expanded to encompass that row, which unlike most historical disputes, spilled out from academia into the media.

Throughout the book, drawing on extensive resources, Kershaw looks at the big questions around the Nazi regime, such as whether it was a form of fascism or something unique; whether the term 'totalitarian' is applicable to it; whether it was a centrally-driven regime or more a cluster of competing power blocs in Germany; how far Hitler drove or simply permitted radicalisation notably in persecution of the Jews; whether Nazi foreign policy fitted a plan perhaps developed a decade earlier or was primarily opportunistic; whether political or economic concerns drove the actions of the regime; whether the Nazis were a reactionary or a revolutionary force, holding up or advancing modernisation tendencies in Germany and whether the Holocaust must always been seen as something somehow apart from history or can be connected into trends beforehand and afterwards. Kershaw thoroughly analyses these lines and shows his own view on them, though also notes that the gaps between different 'sides' are not as extreme as the different viewpoints made out, even before 1986. He provides a refreshing hybrid approach, for example, arguing that while Hitler did not give direct orders for the extermination of the Jews, his rhetoric of racial hatred, his willingness to tolerate and even foster activities by the various blocs in his regime, created an environment where a steady progress to the death camps could occur, even if this had not been planned at the outset, and certainly not before 1941.

The book, now 30 years old, could seem rather dated. At the end, Kershaw notes the appearance of the ultra-nationalist Front National in France, but he did not foresee the populist leaders willing to bend democracy that have become such a feature of the world of the 2010s. Though these regimes today are not fascist, reading the book today, throughout you spot many small elements that seem to be echoed in contemporary political life such as creating and demonising the 'other' and bombastic claims for creating something so superior to what has ever come before. While still relevant in these times, the book has become a useful historical resource in itself. Kershaw was writing at a time when there were still two Germanies and he takes care to include the East German perspective and the views of marxist (he uses lower case for leninist too) of the time, which have largely now been lost from view in current discussions of the Nazi regime. Germany has moved on since then, not simply in terms of reunification, but in terms of the long shadow cast by the Nazis and almost characterising the Germanies simply as not-Nazi, rather than having intrinsic worth of their own. Thus, though dated, this remains a thorough, stimulating book asking questions that anyone, especially English-speakers studying the regime, can get a lot from.

As an aside, I met Ian Kershaw only once (he still lives, but is long retired) and that was in 1988. Funnily enough I cannot remember anything of what he said, instead all I can remember was that he wore a knitted tie, something I was unfamiliar with; it also ended in a straight line rather than a pointed one as is always the case in the UK and from the end hung a small metal button on a chain. To me he looked to be the archetypal West German scholar of the time, rather than British. My mind was obviously wandering if I paid so much attention to minute details and I imagine I missed out on stimulating input given he was updating this book at the time.

'A History of the Vikings' by Gwyn Jones

This book was published in 1968, though I have a 1973 edition. It approaches the history of the Vikings, effectively the peoples of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, 780-1070 though he connects into the history of Europe and indeed North America, before and after that period. What characterises a book of the time, is that whilst there is a lot of academic detail from sources in a wide range of languages, often listed in footnotes dominating the page, it is presented very much as a story. The text flows along briskly, sometimes, especially in the confusing wars of the 11th Century in Scandinavia and Britain, too fast. The narrative style, especially at the beginning with long lists, perhaps makes this book, despite its academic weight, more accessible to the general reader. Perhaps he makes more character judgements on the leading individuals than would be the case even with a popular historian writing nowadays let alone a semi-academic one. It is illustrated with those line drawn illustrations and maps, plus black-and-white photos, throughout and they often give flavour as much as information.

While broken up into three largely chronological blocks, sensibly Jones separates the social and artistic history from sections focused on developments in particular regions. This is sensible as especially the progress of the Scandinavians in Russia and the Middle East is far removed from developments in Iceland, Greenland and North America. At the time, the authenticity of the Vinland Map, found in 1965, was still under discussion. However, as Jones makes clear, it did not really matter as the archaeological record shows without doubt that Vikings visited and stayed some time in North America. One of the strengths is this linkage between what archaeology has shown and the history of these people and Jones keeps make useful connections between them, notably in terms of coins but also burials, uncovered towns and houses and especially carved stones.

Overall, though dated, this is a good introductory text to the full scope of Viking history and is particularly useful if you are interested in the history of Britain before the Norman Invasion. Though at times frenetic it helps sort out that period between King Alfred the Great's rule and 1066. Importantly the social history sections, including an additional one on the Danelaw region of England, not only goes beyond cosmetic portrayals of Nordic life, but shows how it was different in various regions and altered over time rather than being stuck in one model. The ebbing and flowing of Christianity impacts on this but also enters into the political history sections, reminding us not to fall into the trap of seeing Vikings as monolithic or unchanging, but in fact, in part due to how much of the western world they interacted with, a gauge of developments across many societies beyond Scandinavia itself.

Books I Read In September

Fiction

'Vagabond' by Bernard Cornwell

This is the second book after 'Harlequin' (2000) which I read in July: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html in the Holy Grail series. That book built up nicely seeing the hero, archer, Thomas of Hookton drawn into English campaigns in France and Brittany in the opening stages of the Hundred Years' War climaxing with the Battle of Crécy in August 1346. This book is much messier. Moved on by the very nebulous quest for the Holy Grail seems to really be simply a tool to get Thomas as part of two battles, many hundreds of miles apart, the Battle of Neville's Cross outside Durham and the defence of La Roche Derrien in Brittany. Unlike in many of Cornwell's stories, the women that Thomas encounters seem pretty disposable. So far he has got two women pregnant who have either been killed or abducted. He has returned to the third, Jeanette Dowager Countess of Amorica, who had previously abandoned him but now is back in La Roche Derrien. Thomas encounters various English and French lords who want to eliminate him or torture him to find out where the Grail is. There is a horrendous torture scene in this book. However, they are so pretty similar in nature that it is often difficult to tell them from their equivalents in the first book.

Cornwell is always good on the battle scenes, no matter the era. He manages to make use of the actual history and weave in his fictional characters among the historical ones. The two battles in the book went the opposite way to what would have been predicted so do make gripping scenes. The trouble with this book, though, is the 'workings' are rather to visible; what motivates Thomas to be in various locations at particular times seems much  more forced than, say, in the Sharpe novels. The women and Thomas's opponents, similarly are more obviously part of the story telling mechanism than they were in the first book and in most of Cornwell's other novels. The Grail quest is thin and while I accept that in the mid-14th Century it did drive people on irrationally, the main characters seem able to take it or leave it as their mood takes them, so it seems more of a device than it otherwise might have been. I do have the third book, 'Heretic' (2003) but not the fourth, '1356' (2012) to read and only hope it at least gets back to the quality of  'Harlequin', if not to the level of Cornwell's best books.

'The Dead Can Wait' by Robert Ryan

This is the second book in Ryan's Dr. Watson series set during the First World War. I read the first, 'Dead Man's Land' (2012) back in July: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html This one is set in 1916 and sees Watson back in Britain having recovered from the damage he sustained especially in no man's land during the first novel. He is once again employed by Winston Churchill. Georgina Gregson, former suffragette and VAD and finally Sherlock Holmes are also involved. Having promoted blood transfusions in the previous book, Watson is now working on the 'talking cure' what we would now term counselling, to help soldiers recover from shell shock. From May 1916, Churchill was back in Britain after the merging of his unit and was simply a backbench MP. However, his earlier involvement with 'landships', i.e. tanks, when First Lord of the Admiralty means he continues and interest in their development and he sends Watson to dig into deaths at Elveden in Suffolk where they are being hurriedly tested.

The book is far less a murder mystery than spy novel. Ryan is a bit better in control of what he is covering than in the first book. However, he does leap point of view very regularly, sometimes in the middle of a piece of action only to return to it later. A new author would certainly be chastised for doing that. In addition, as a reader we are constantly lied to about the identity of characters, even those whose eyes we are seeing through. Yes, the revelations are a climax, but Ryan uses this technique three times in the book which is over-working it. Added to that there seem to be German spies all over Britain, far more successful than was the case in reality.

Ryan is a little better than in the previous book in jamming in all the history he wants to include, but his frustration, shared by specialists at the time, that tanks were not used more effectively, comes through rather as preaching. I have seen one review that likens this book to a Bulldog Drummond novels by H.C. McNeile ('Sapper') or indeed the Chandos books of Cecil William Mercer ('Dornford Yates'). I know some of the Sherlock Holmes stories were spy orientated, but this one especially the action scenes, despite the age of the protagonists, owes more to those thrillers of the 1920s and 1930s. If that is what you are looking for, then that is fine. However, Ryan needs to refine his art in writing this style of books. Unlike his unwieldy novels, those were tight and brisk. You have to admire his research, but it does tend to weigh down the books when he could leave much more to reader. I know however, that modern readers welcome, even insist on 'info dumps' than those of the past. It is not a bad book, but with serious editing and improved structuring it could have been a lot better.

'The Long Utopia' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Given that this book, published in 2015, fourth in the 'Long' series, suffers from many of the same problems as 'The Dead Can Wait' (2014), I am wondering if unwieldy books, dumping loads of ideas and information without properly digging into them and hurtling around between lots of character points of view is not the style that publishers are looking for. Perhaps I am too old to deal with this approach but to me it seems unfinished as if readers are being given perhaps the second draft and not a book that has been edited to the final point. All the 'Long' books are bursting with ideas, all most too many for even two authors to control.

The reader is bombarded by these, flitting from one view to another and then having the characters jumping across almost infinite worlds. In amongst all of this are some interesting stories, but this novel is like two books put into one with a lot of extras around the outside. We see many of the characters from the previous books like Joshua and Sally, natural 'steppers' between worlds and Lobsang and Agnes, now consciousnesses in robotic bodies. There is reference to the Next, the arrogant super-intelligent people who left our Earth and the nearby ones, in the previous book.

The most interesting part was the stories of the natural steppers in the mid to late 19th Century and while this provides background to the characters we see in the mid-21st Century settings. The other main story is about sinister aliens who have interceded in one of the idyllic forested versions of Earth to essentially rip it apart in order to power their expanding empire which is at war with another species. The problems with this book as with the others, is that Pratchett and Baxter take a lot of time to build up the potential jeopardy only to veer away or report the outcome from a distance. You almost feel that there are actually alternate versions of these books in which the characters deal with the various crises that we miss out on. The constant jolting may be to instil pace but spread over 400+ page books any momentum is lost. At least in this book we see the cataclysmic climax, but the decisions of certain individuals to sacrifice themselves there to save the rest of the Long Earth is really skimped over rather than providing tension.

Added to these issues, there is the ongoing problem that you struggle to find any sympathetic characters. There are a couple like Rocky, the friend of Stan a Next who is effectively setting himself up as a messiah and Nelson Azikiwe, a priest from South Africa who is employed by Lobsang, and these are minor characters. Everyone else is terse, arrogant and patronises everyone else as much as possible. There are still lingering elements of the US frontier self-righteousness of the earlier books and this time we see nothing outside the American perspective, bar references to parts of Europe where the climate has changed by the volcanic winter brought about by the Yellowstone eruption on our version of Earth. Maybe in the age of social media when everyone insists that they are right and all must acknowledge how right they are and commend them for enlightening us, these are the sort of characters young readers want. However, as a mature reader, it is a slog wading through yet another character that treats everyone else as if they are scum that need to be lectured at length about how wrong they are in everything.

I am beginning to think, maybe I need to only read books written before the 2010s when authors were unafraid to write characters we could feel some affinity with and while flawed were willing to acknowledge that rather than blame someone else. Fiction does reflect the society we live in and unfortunately, while looking at lots of alternate Earths, Pratchett and Baxter show very painfully how twisted our society is with unlikeable people to the fore.

Non-Fiction

'The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain' by Tony Bunyan

This is an edition of the book produced in 1976 and it is another of those I should have got around to reading some decades ago. My untouched new copy had sat in storage for many years. The book does pretty much what it says on the label. It outlines the background and development of all those British agencies that could be considered the political police of Britain, primarily Special Branch and MI5. At times it is tedious in going on about all the structure and the numbers of different departments; it is quite repetitive too. The book also looks at how law across the UK, especially conspiracy law, has developed to counter domestic unrest and to monitor and detain those seen as a threat to the capitalist status quo of the country. For a modern reader, the explicitly Marxist angle that Bunyan brings to what he is writing would probably seem quite unusual. I attended university at a time when some lecturers would identify themselves as Marxists but even then, I find Bunyan's dogmatism distorts what he writes. Of course, it is easy for people now to look back with hindsight, but even in 1976, I feel he could have been challenged in some of his assumptions, even by those on the Left.

Though Bunyan was writing at a time when industrial unrest had come out of a period of great turbulence of the early to mid-1970s, he keeps on insisting that British capitalism has been in crisis for almost the entirety of the post-war period. This is despite the prosperity especially during the 1950s and 1960s, which despite the industrial unrest and the oil price 'shocks' actually continued into the 1970s, with, for example, 1975 marking a new peak in car sales. Ignoring this means that he can only see Conservative governments as a result of them holding on to power through nefarious means, especially through control of the police and military. He makes passing reference to consumerism and to how a few working class people felt benefit from policing, but is unwilling to shake his view that the police are primarily there to protect property and suppress the working class, ethnic minorities and drug users, especially in terms of political activity. However, he makes the crude assumption that all workers have a left-wing class consciousness without seeing that many were instead ardent supporters of consumerism and anything that would be done to protect that.

In Bunyan's world, there are no working class Conservatives at all, when in fact they were to sweep Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 and keep her the Conservatives there for 18 years. He makes lazy assumptions on the numbers who would volunteer to aid the state in the case of a crisis, somehow assuming 300,000 would volunteer simply from the property-owning classes without seeing that there would be ardent working class volunteers too, though in smaller numbers than he expected. Political apathy is absent from Bunyan's thinking too, despite its prevalence in Britain at the time even if simply showing by turn-out at elections, when, say, compared to France, Italy and West Germany. Despite his faith in the strength of the left-wing working class and their uniform consciousness, in fact the trade unions had unleashed their power most against a Labour government in the winter of 1978/79, though I guess Bunyan would have argued that Callaghan who replaced Wilson as prime minister in 1976, was hardly a real Labourite, given his personal closeness to the police and his willingness to move towards monetarist polices.

There are some things on which Bunyan did make accurate predictions. He saw the importance of computerisation which was beginning to develop in the mid-1970s. He also foresaw how the police would monitor and control political protest as they did in the 1980s, especially during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85, for example stopping people suspected of travelling to demonstrations when even hundreds of miles away. However, the cause of these things was less his anticipated crisis in capitalism and more the New Right economics which while begun in 1976 were adopted in full force in the 1979-83 period.

The greatest use for this book now is that it is good if you are setting a drama in the 1960s or 1970s featuring Special Branch or MI5. It is also a reminder of various trials and political campaigns, such as the Stop The 70 Tour and against the visit of Portuguese Prime Minister, Marcello Caetano, which had generally been forgotten from the popular consciousness. The recent focus back on the Mangrove 9 of 1970, shows, though that there is something to learned still from the incidents of that era. This could have been a better book if Bunyan had been able to write it without feeling he had to squeeze everything into his very dogmatic view of British society, which objectively did not fit his story of it. As a result he leaves out things that would have explained situations he was surprised by and would have helped better contextualise the developments he highlights. Instead the reader has to add in that context themselves and see that Bunyan is blind to many trends and indeed types of people, that did not fit his world view.

Books I Read In July

Fiction

'Friends in High Places' by Donna Leon

Perhaps it is because she is an American that Leon has an interest in issues around social class. Her protagonist, Guido Brunetti is the son-in-law of a Venetian count. Social standing and protecting it is an element of a number of her books, but becomes very apparent here. By this stage in the series, this is the ninth book, Leon had become very adept at starting with disparate threads, in this case informing us of the rules around construction in the restricted space of Venice and the associated corruption. However, with a bit of a jolt we then find how Brunetti's problems with his own apartment connect into murder. It comes together well and it is a little refreshing to have a different kind of motive which while it appears initially to be more Italian corruption, is one we can believe motivates people even more now twenty years after this book was published. I have the tenth book to read and then some other random ones from the series I have picked up from charity shops. However, I must say, despite sometimes the narrative seeming to jump a little or spend too long on unimportant aspects, these are easy to read crime dramas which come up with often refreshing solutions.

'Kaleidoscope' by Harry Turtledove

This is another collection of Turtledove's short stories, published in 1990 with stories dating back to 1984, it is older than 'Counting Up, Counting Down' which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html  'And So to Bed' features an alternate world where earlier versions of humans co-exist with homo sapiens and have found refuge on North America which, as the story is set in 1661, is being opened up by Europeans. The story is told from the perspective of Samuel Pepys and shows how the existence of these other versions of humans allow him to propose evolution some three hundred years earlier. 'Bluff' is an interesting science fiction story set on a planet where humans arrive to find a humanoid species which sees their inner thoughts as being the voice of their gods. This is a fascinating premise and is handled well. It is a good reminder to those writing science fiction that alienness is not simply physical. 'A Difficult Undertaking' is a straightforward story of a siege in Turtledove's Videssos setting, a kind of Byzantine Empire and is pretty entertaining. '

The Weather's Fine' takes an interesting premise that time is like weather and so different parts of North America on different days can be in different 20th Century decades. The protagonist had a good relationship with his girlfriend in the 1960s but not in the 1970s so it is about how they work around this. Time conditioning can keep a building at a certain decade. I think more could have been done with this story and it was a bit depressing that the couple could not work through their issues or separate properly but were condemned to live in fixed behaviours dependent on the decade they were in. 'Crybaby' is a horrible story, a typical demonic child one which really would fit better in a 'Tales of the Unexpected' setting than here. Apparently, Turtledove's wife will not read this story and I can understand why.

'Hindsight' set in the 1950s about a science fiction author who is writing stories before the authors have managed to complete them and is revealed to be a time traveller who is trying to steer the USA down better paths than it followed in our 1960s and 1970s. The story is well handled, not just in terms of the technology, but the different behaviour of someone from the 1980s to those from thirty years' earlier. The blurred line between science fiction and science writing is well done too. A nice story all round. 'Gentlemen of the Shade' is another good one. Turtledove is always sharp when he brings a new spin on vampires as can be seen in his 'Under St. Peters' which is available to read free online now. In this story a club of vampires in late Victorian London hunt down Jack the Ripper who is one of their kind. It is well handled in terms of practicalities and in terms of the atmosphere of the time and place.

'The Boring Beast' is a silly spoof fantasy story which annoyed me. 'The Road Not Taken' is an interesting exercise in looking at how a species might acquire some technology that we see as hyper-advanced but lack technologies that we see as mundane. The encounter with alien invaders equipped for war as if it was the 17th Century is interesting and again reminds writers not to go down easy or lazy paths when portraying alien civilisations. 'The Castle of the Sparrowhawk' is a kind of fairy tale/parable about a challenge in a Middle Eastern land, which did not appeal to me; 'The Summer Garden' is very similar with the protagonist paying a bitter price for their 'victory'. There is a lot less sex in this book than in 'Counting Up, Counting Down' but 'The Girl Who Took Lessons' - it is actually a woman not a girl - is sordid and feels more like a 'joke' a man would tell in a bar. It is a pity it was included in this collection.

'The Last Article' is the other main alternate history story, featuring the German invasion of India in the 1940s, having defeated the British, and coming up against the passive resistance of Gandhi and Nehru. It might be controversial these days to paint British colonial rule as any better than Nazi hegemony, but Turtledove cleverly does highlight the differences and why that would enable the Nazis to defeat Gandhi when the British authorities failed to do so.

Overall an interesting collection with some great highlights. Importantly I would recommend it to science fiction writers to remind them where you can go when portraying aliens similar but different to us.

'Harlequin' by Bernard Cornwell

This is the first in a trilogy set during the early phases of the Hundred Years' War in the 14th Century. It follows an English archer, Thomas of Hookton from fighting a raid by the French on his home village on the south coast of England through battles in Brittany and Normandy coming to a climax at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. As you would expect with Cornwell the portrayal of life at the time and the battles are rendered very well. Unlike some historical authors who cover wars, Cornwell is also good at including a range of interesting female characters with distinct motives. I am concerned though that one who becomes Thomas's 'wife' towards the end of the book is clearly stated to be 15. He might argue it was seen as appropriate at the time but it is uncomfortable to see as a modern reader.

There is a lot of intrigue with lots of people out to kill Thomas, though he also makes friends among the opposite side. This is a strength of Cornwell's writing in that while combat plays an important part he does not skimp on characterisations which make his books that much richer. The sub-plot about seeking the Lance of St. George, let alone the Holy Grail, seems unnecessary and I can only think he included this either as a McGuffin or because publishers asked for it. I have the other two books in the trilogy and am looking forward to seeing what the characters do next.

'Dead Man's Land' by Robert Ryan

This novel features Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson solving a series of murders on and behind the frontline of British forces in Belgium during the First World War. Ryan has done meticulous research but unfortunately at times, especially in the early parts of the book, he tends to 'info dump', given immense detail about the hierarchy of treatment of the wounded rather than revealing it to us. The date when the novel is set is difficult to pin down. The book starts with Watson being commissioned as a major in October 1914, but as the book progresses, with reference to the Gallipoli Campaign (February 1915 - January 1916) and Winston Churchill serving as a lieutenant colonel on the Western Front (November 1915 - May 1916) as well as references to particular gases and aircraft, it is not clear when the action is happening. Given the involvement of Churchill and particular weaponry, notably poison gas, this is important and this uncertainty was an irritant as I was reading.

At times the book feels fragmented, in part because of the serial killing in different parts of the front. Added to that Sherlock Holmes makes odd appearances back in England and these elements are not integrated well into the story. They make him appear even more of a deus ex machina that would be the case anyway. The same can be said for the German sniper. We read about his attempts to assassinate Churchill and his various roles. However, he is not really a full part of the story and his role in the denouement could easily have been filled by an unknown character. The sections covering these two characters feel bolted on. Overall, however, the book improves as it goes on and Ryan provides a good motive for the killings fitting with the time. It could have been a much stronger book if the structure was streamlined and in other places what was happening, when, was made more explicit. The detail of the medical provision, especially the conveyor belt for the wounded, was fascinating especially at times when Ryan shows these things rather than lectures us on them.

'The Long Mars' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

There is a comment on the cover of this book from a reviewer at 'SFX' magazine saying '"Pratchett and Baxter ... skipping along their quantum string like giddy schoolboys ...'" That sums up the problem with not just this book but its predecessors http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/05/books-i-read-in-may.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/06/books-i-read-in-june.html  Pratchett and Baxter seem to have a thousand ideas for alternate versions of worlds and as more of the characters travel into many tens of millions of variants away from our Earth, they get to look at many of them. However, in large part it is like flicking through a catalogue and we only see them briefly. The action when it happens is like a number of vignettes which are only distantly connected to each other. In fact with three characters exploring alternate versions of Mars, even less exciting as most versions are desolate deserts, there is a real detachment between the returning characters. 

As in The Long War when we seem to be building to an important climax, the authors turn away. We just hear reports of them not finding the team they left on an Earth which is a moon of a larger planet; we see nothing of them deciding to bring The Next - a group of arrogant super-humans back to our Earth and minimal detail of how imprisoned Next are got out and get away to some unknown version of Earth. It is as if the most gripping elements of the story have been cut out so as not to distract from the beauty of all the geological, even astronomical variants, the authors could think up. I think they would have done better to have anthologies of short stories in different contexts rather than piling them all into what is supposed to be a single novel.

The other problem that continues from the previous books is how unsympathetic so many of the characters are. In this book smug Russians are added to smug Americans and smug Chinese. Then the Next come along and they are very smug humans who feel it is their right to enslave the 'dim-bulb' population which encompasses the rest of humanity. While it is good to have irritants and antagonists, when even the supposed 'heroes' are not people you could tolerate spending five minutes with because they would constantly patronise you, it is difficult for the reader to get a handle on the story. Again it is like flicking through the brochure or, even, someone else simply flicking through in your sight, expecting you to be invested in something that does nothing really to engage with you.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Modern France. Volume 2: 1799-1871' by Alfred Cobban

As I noted when reviewing Volume 1, for Cobban it seems that Louis XIV was the perfect leader of France and anyone else will struggle to come close to him in ability. I suppose that it is no surprise that a history written in the mid-20th Century focuses has a 'great man' history perspective. However, as Cobban judges so many of the country's leaders harshly, even ridiculing them at times, it really distorts what he is trying to cover. He views Napoleon Bonaparte as a Corsican bandit who could do nothing good for France. He sees Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe as ineffectual, muddle-headed rulers. He gives a little to Napoleon III but then sees him as ineffective from quite an early period in his reign and as in fact utterly marginalised in the closing years of his rule. Cobban outlines all the political manoeuvring but seems impatient with it as if frustrated that no-one in France could appoint an effective king. 

This level of subjectivity and the repeated derogatory comments on the various rulers and politicians not only makes reading the book irritating, it weakens his accounts of the complex situations of what was happening in this period. The best parts of the book are when he (occasionally) steps away from the peak of the political system and looks at societal and economic aspects. With these he does reasonably well in showing the exceptionalism of France, why it did not modernise the way some neighbouring states did and its population stagnated through the 19th Century when others were growing sharply. Completing the book, I felt I had learnt little especially on the post-1815 period which tends to be neglected in general histories of Europe. Allowing Cobban to judge so much on the basis of his particular animosity to certain men, really undermined this book.

Books I Read In June

Fiction
'The Victoria Vanishes' by Christopher Fowler
This was originally, when published in 2008, the final book in the hexalogy of Bryant and May novels, though ultimately he has gone on to write another 11 novels and 2 anthologies. I have no idea why these books are popular. They have curiosity value, but really lack life. The fact that in four of the original six, this one included, the protagonists, heading a peculiar division of the Home Office but in their 80s, means a lot of time is spent with them discussing old age rather than advancing the story. Why he did not write more set in decades when they were younger, I have no idea.

The bones of this plot, that a serial killer is injecting a poison into middle-aged women in various London pubs, but a conspiracy involving chemical warfare behind it, sounds like a decent television thriller of the 1980s. Fowler clearly loves London and fills the books with immense details about its history, in this case eccentric pubs. Of those he lists I have actually visited about a quarter so I know their appeal. However, such nostalgia does not make for a gripping crime story. It is probably best to treat these novels rather as a kind of slice-of-life book around the lives of some odd police officers. Fowler has won awards for the humour of his novels. However, I have struggled to find it. They are whimsical rather than funny. Though this one has a decently interesting crime at the heart of it, as with the previous books in the sequence, I found this novel stodgy and a little dull; certainly lacking energy.

'The Long War' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
This is the second book in the pentalogy and as with the  first: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/05/books-i-read-in-may.html there are wonderful ideas in the book, but neither of the authors seem to know what to do with them. We do see the perspective of some Chinese explorers which tempers a little the US-centricism of the first book, though not much. Too often you feel you are reading a survivalist novel with a string of characters being smug about how much better they are at existing in the multiplicity of alternate Earths than every one else they meet. There are some bursts of real cruelty especially when humans interact with canine humanoids that are particularly nasty.

As with the first book, there is a lot of simply tramping about across all these versions. The 'war' of the title is more a sit-down protest which gets skipped over in an unsatisfying, pat way. The problem of the 'trolls', gentle hivemind humanoids who are fleeing from human-occupied versions is again not really resolved and a overly simple solution is delivered. Overall this book is like sight-seeing with a party of insufferably smug individuals. There are brief moments of tension, but for most of the time, it is people lecturing each other in a very self-righteous way and passing through a string of variants with very little actually going on.

'Imperium' by Robert Harris
I have read 'Fatherland' (1992) and 'Enigma' (1995) - both of which have more effective endings in the movie versions than in the books; 'Archangel' (1998) and I have listened to the audio book of 'Munich' (2017), without being overly impressed by Harris novels. The dramatisations tend to have a better narrative especially at the end. This novel, published in 2006, the first in a trilogy, is the best book I have read this year. It focuses on the career of Roman lawyer and politician Marcus Cicero (106-43 BCE) in two periods of his rise to power, seen from the perspective of his slave secretary, Tiro (perhaps 103-4 BCE). You might imagine a novel about Roman court cases and political manoeuvres would be very dry. However, Harris succeeds in bringing the range of characters vividly to life and he has a knack of explaining the complexities of the Roman Republic's legal and political systems almost without you noticing. Added to that, he has mastered the necessary skill of historical authors of making you feel real jeopardy when in fact you know the outcome. The fact that, unlike some reviewers, I never had to translate the speeches of Cicero at school may have made it fresher for me than those who were forced to dig deep into Classics. Overall, it was a really engaging book with far more life than the other novels I read this month and indeed throughout 2020. I will certainly look out for the second and third books in the series.

Non-fiction
'The Penguin History of Medieval Europe' by Maurice Keen
Keen points out at the start of the book that he cannot encompass all of Europe. In fact his focus is narrower than that. Scandinavia, Russia and Ireland never get a mention. England really only features due to the Hundred Years' War. There are brief mentions of Spain and Portugal and of Eastern Europe and the Byzantine Empire only in connection to Ottoman advances. The prime focus of this book is on France, the Holy Roman Empire and parts of Italy, mainly the Papacy and its territory. In large part that is due to the narrative thread binding the book, which runs from the start of the 9th Century to the mid-15th Century. This thread is how Europeans went from viewing their region as a super-state, Christendom to having a far greater national identity and how the various secular rulers effectively won out over Papal hegemony. Within these constraints, the book works effectively. It features all the political events but contextualises them well with views of the economic, social and intellectual background to what was going on. Given its focus on over 600 years, it is good at showing the long-term developments as a counterpoint to the rapid conflicts and religious disputes. Despite its age - published in 1968 - it remains a reasonable introduction to the period at the heart, if not the periphery, of Europe.

'A History of Modern France, Volume 1: 1715-1799' by Alfred Cobban
This is the first in the version of Cobban's book when he had expanded it to three volumes. Having been reprinted in 1965, even when I bought it as a student in the mid-1980s it was old. Since then many of the gaps in the history of the period have been filled. However, as I continue clearing out the numerous history books that I bought in the 1980s and 1990s, I felt obliged to read it.

It is not a bad book, though it is overshadowed by Cobban's love for King Louis XIV and his reign. That king's death opens the book, but throughout you can clearly see that he was disappointed that none of his successors either as monarchs or running the republic, could come close to that glory. He does not even rate Napoleon Bonaparte highly though the book closes with him coming to power as First Consul. The most effective parts of the book are in outlining the demographic, economic and philosophical developments that preceded the Revolution. He shines a light on those areas, such as the last few years of the 1780s before the outbreak of revolution, which still seem to get neglected. He is good at showing how foreign adventures and internal corruption weakened the regime of Louis XVI so much as to make some serious changes inevitable.

The book is weaker on the Revolution. Though Cobban does well at puncturing the myths about Robespierre, as he does earlier with those around Madame de Pompadour, like too many general history authors he careers through the chopping and changing of the revolution far too frantically. He provides sufficient detail but as a long lump, rather than breaking it down effectively into the multiple phases he runs through. Segmenting the account of the Revolution would have made it have greater impact. Instead as is too often the case the reader simply has a picture of chaos with constantly changing faction and politicians' names. Ultimately, Cobban finds the Revolution as not as revolutionary as might be expected and while nothing for him can match the golden era of Louis XIV, he notes that what follows the Revolution is highly conservative with many of the attitudes it threw up, fading very quickly.

There are good elements to the book, especially in the pre-1789 period. However, overall the hand of the author is far too apparent throughout and you are left with the sense that the book is largely bemoaning the fact France could not get back to the state it had under Louis XIV and that is not the way a good history book should be written.

Books I Read In May

Fiction
'The Long Earth' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
This is the first book in the 'Long' pentalogy by Pratchett and Baxter. It works on the common science fiction basis that there are an infinite parallel universes and people can travel between them. However, in contrast to many books on this them, not least 'Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen' which I review before, the different versions of Earth are devoid of humans. Many of the differences are biological - the main one being that humans are on just one version of Earth. Some of the differences are geological/geographical, but even these are not particularly noticeable in 'near' versions of Earth, i.e. people can still mine gold in exactly the same place as on Datum Earth, our Earth. As the book goes on some other humanoid species, usually with the ability to 'step' between the different versions are encountered and finally after lots of quite tedious travelling the threat to them is encountered.

The trouble with the book is that it is like a bag of ideas that have not really been worked up into a successful story. At a distance we see how the ability to step can aid criminals and terrorists, how so many people leaving our Earth impacts on the economy and the backlash to the whole ability to step - about one fifth of people cannot do it. We get a scrap about a First World War soldier thrown into a different Earth and a bit about a girl growing up in a new settlement in one of the alternate Earths, but very little is done with them. The main story is about a natural stepper and an airship run by an artificial intelligence, Lobsang, which has gained human status basically touring through Earth after Earth, seeing a few things and trying to work out various jeopardies. It is interesting to see these but it is not really a gripping story.

Another challenge for non-American readers is the American focus of the book. I know Pratchett and Baxter came up with the idea while at a convention in Wisconsin and used the locale as the basis for some of the characters' experiences. However, it means that the book gets rather filled up with the kind of American frontier myths that populate survivalist fiction. You can only stomach so many people being smug about how much more they know about living in the wilderness than others, let alone the self-righteousness in building a 'better' society, in fact simply replicating white domination of North America once more in a hundred different locations.

Despite the fact that stepping is open to four-fifths of the world's population, we only see one Briton using it inadvertently and no people from other nations doing so. Though the lead character Joshua Valienté spends much time hovering over parts of Central Asia and Europe, we do not see how people from those nations are using it, let alone from highly populated Asian states or those with dictatorships rather than democracy. Even when focused on North America, there is not even coverage of how black people, Hispanics and indigenous Americans might have used the ability to make a different America in one or more of these alternatives. The white Pilgrim Fathers/Frontier mentality/narrative is almost painful in being so dominant in this story.

There are some good ideas in this book. However, in too much of the text little happens. Certainly though some of the questions of this effect are discussed, many are overlooked and instead the book lazily falls back on simply assuming that the frontier mentality would reign supreme once again, trapping you in a book which is like being stuck next to an American on a plane lecturing you on how little you know about how to survive. Overall, despite the good premise, this was disappointing.

'The Fort' by Bernard Cornwell
In contrast to some of Cornwell's other books, this one has a very tight focus on the so-called Penobscot Expedition during the American War of Independence and covers only a few weeks. The book is informed throughout with letters and accounts of the battles. The campaign was around the British attempt in 1779 to establish a port as the basis of a new British colony of New Ireland in what is now eastern Maine, but was at the time part of Massachusetts. The fort of the title is Fort George, established on Majabigwaduce Peninsula by a small British force and despite being initially outnumbered by the 44-ship armada sent against them was able to hold on until a British fleet arrived trapping the American ships and destroying many of them.

Cornwell shuttles back and forth between the American and British perspectives, showing how in campaigns egos and cunning can have such an impact and can counterbalance numbers. The Americans were hampered by incessant arguing between the army and navy commanders and as a result of the ego of Paul Revere, who, despite his subsequent reputation was lazy and arrogant, and unwilling to yield to superiors. As with all Cornwell's books we get a range of perspectives of men serving at different ranks and in this case of some of the locals, whether loyal to the British or the American side. There are good skirmish scenes and, if you do not know the specific history, tension over which side will be reinforced first. Overall, it is an interesting microcosm which shows how the attitudes of commanders and their soldiers can have such an impact. My only complaint is that once the final naval battle is engaged it all ends abruptly and there is a long discourse by the author, some of which add nothing to this story.

'Fatal Remedies' by Donna Leon
Sometimes with Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti novels - this one, published in 1999 was the 8th in the series - it is uncertain what she wants the focus to be. Sometimes she manages to pull disparate elements to make a stronger whole. However, at other times, this process is a little less successful. This novel is an example of the latter. For much of the first third of it the focus is on Brunetti's wife, Paola who, in a protest against a local travel agency that is providing sex tours to the Far East to allow paedophiles to exploit children there, twice vandalises the agency's window. Guido himself is put in a difficult position and there is some pressure for him to resign. However, then, quite abruptly, this point of tension seems to evaporate and the rest of the novel focuses on a more straight forward Leon plot around the illegal selling of expired and placebo medicines to African and Asian states and murder to cover this up.

The two parts are not really well integrated. The element of Paola and her belief in calling out corrupt business is interesting, but is not really resolved. The jeopardy for Guido's career and the tension between the couple is not followed up. I accept it might be laying the ground work for developments in subsequent novels - at present there are 21 more in the series - but if that was the case it should have appeared as a sub-plot rather than a kind of different plot with only very loose connection to the other plot in the novel which becomes its main focus for the latter two-thirds of the novel. This is not a bad novel, but it could have been far better with some restructuring to blend the two streams rather than having them effectively abut against each other.

'Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen' by H. Beam Piper
Published in 1964 (in my edition, but apparently not actually out until the following year), this short (192 pages in my edition) novel starts from the same basis as 'The Long Earth' (2012) reviewed above, i.e. that there are parallel versions of Earth that people can inadvertently or intentionally travel between. In this case, however, the bulk of these versions are filled with humans, though at very varied stages of development and with diverse distribution across Earth. I do not know if Pratchett and Baxter felt this approach had been looked at in so many books that they should leave humans out of theirs. Anyway, in this book, the different Earths are policed by the Paratime organisation in part to prevent the planet being used up fully as happened in their own stream. However, passing between the different strands in vehicles, means that sometimes people are caught up and dumped in a different version.

In this story, Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police, a veteran of the Korean War is accidentally dumped in a version of Pennsylvania with sort of 16th Century technology. In this world, Aryans left south Asia and migrated eastwards into North America rather than westwards to Europe, so a series of petty kingdoms are now founded along the Atlantic seaboard. In this version of Earth a religion controls access to gunpowder and uses this to hold power over the various princes. With his more technological knowledge, Morrison manages to break this monopoly and through a serious of wars rises up to be king of the region. For some reason the paratime authorities, rather than preventing him from altering the history of the region actually help him, contrary to their precepts.

Piper clearly had an agenda with this novel, which started as a short story and was a context later taken up by other authors. The main one is that he wants to show that the 'great man' view of history is not wrong. At one stage one of the paratime officials even feels Morrison's achievements disprove the emphasis on steady societal changes. This mirrors arguments in Piper's own time, especially against Marxist historical interpretations. Piper clearly believes one man can alter history and emphasises the role that warfare plays. Indeed much of the book is taken up with complicated battles. It is very hard to follow these without a map. For most readers, references back to the local geography of Pennsylvania does not help. Piper also clearly wanted to portray his state's police in a positive light too, with one character saying they are among the best ten forces on Earth.

As a fantasy battle romp, the book is not bad. However, you do feel that the character has it his own way for too much of the time as if Piper was keen not to admit any weakness in his thesis. Maybe that was acceptable in the early 1960s but I imagine would jar with many readers of contemporary fantasy. I suppose the book is useful as an artefact in the development of parallel worlds, which as the 'Long' series discussed above shows, remains a popular one for writers even fifty years later.

'The Good Earth' by Pearl S. Buck
I only became aware of this book when it was re-released in 2004 and did not realise until reading it that it had been published in 1931. It was a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and was followed by two sequels. Buck was an American missionary who spent much of her life as a child and young woman in eastern China. The book focuses on the family of an initially poor farmer, Wang Lung as it grows and he faces many travails but eventually becomes wealthier to the extent that he and extended family replace the local gentry encountered at the start of the book. The most effective bits of the book are when Buck is describing when the crops fail whether due to drought or flood.

The book is set in Anhwei [Anhui] province. During a famine, Wang Lung and his family flee 'south' by steam train to a town named Kiangsu [Jiangsu], but that is a province to the East of Anhui, so it seems likely she meant Soochow [Suzhou] or perhaps Nanking [Nanjing] itself. While there, it appears that they witness some of the incidents of the 1911 Revolution. This seems to occur when Wang Lung is in his early 20s. However, the time frame is awkward as towards the end of the book when Wang Lung is explicitly a man in his 70s there is talk of another revolution. Things which might count as this: the uprisings, the appearance of the Chinese Communist Party and then the Great Northern Expedition of the Nationalists, falling in the 1920s would occur while Wang Lung was still young or middle aged. If it were not for the railways which were not constructed in the region until 1908-09, one might assume the first 'revolution' was the Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64 which included Anhui. Thus, Buck is either projecting into the future beyond her own time, correctly expecting China to have another revolution, which it did, or effectively much of the story is 'out of time'.

While the book uses vocabulary which we understand, a lot of it is more complex than we would use commonly nowadays. The tone of the book seems very influenced by what Buck would have read and often sounds like a parable. There is no explicit judgement of the mistakes Wang Lung makes, his treatment of different people, for example, how he buys slaves and a concubine; neglects his hard working wife and effectively tries to kill his uncle and aunt through plying them with opium. It is left to the reader to make decisions. I guess this should be welcomed rather than Buck imposing  judgements on a different culture, even one which sees girls in particular sold into slavery or killed at birth.

Wang Lung's mentally disabled daughter is neglected except by her parents. No-one, bar perhaps O-lan, his wife, is a hero. Wang Lung behaves in an appalling manner at different stages of the book and many of the people around him are deeply unpleasant. However, I guess this willingness to show people with all their flaws is one attraction of the book. Above all, it highlights life in a rural region of central China, which despite references to steam trains and bayoneted rifles, was the way it had been for millennia and presumably opened the American audience's eyes to the country they knew little about, though with the Japanese invasion of North-East China in 1931, effectively starting the 14-year long Pacific War, it was to be in the news for the next two decades. Buck is far from being a work of propaganda and as result, as you will see noted in commentary, despite its success did nothing to improve the American perception of China. Ironically missionaries and Christianity do not feature in the book at all.

Overall it is an intriguing book which to some degree shows realities of life in rural China in the early 20th Century and if you are willing to accept the distorted chronology and the tone of the book you might find it engaging. It is very much of its time and no-one like Buck could write such a book now without being accused of cultural appropriation and being patronising to the people it features. Consequently despite the flare up in popularity in the mid-2000s it is more likely that readers nowadays would be happier reading 'Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China' (1991) by Jung Chang, instead.

Non-Fiction
'Europe 1780-1830' by Franklin L. Ford
This is another of those books from my collection that I should have come to far sooner. I bought it in 1987, four years after it was reissued and it has largely remained in storage since. That is a shame because it is a brisk but comprehensive study of Europe over fifty years, that deftly explains a very complex period without losing the reader. Ford achieves this by taking a thematic approach, not simply, for example, looking at society or population, but when he turns to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This enables him to disentangle the complexity of these times, for example, keeping apart Napoleon's reforms in France from narrative of the conquests. I think his description of the phases of the French Revolution are some of the clearest I have read in a general history of the period. I also like that he contextualises the events within longer-term economic, demographic and intellectual shifts. He is also willing to take time out to look at how things may have gone differently, so pushing against the sense that anything of what happened was 'inevitable'. These acute, perceptive approaches to the mess of the period effectively allows him to show how while this was a period of great change it also had strong strands of continuity. Overall, this is an engaging read and a refreshing perspective on a period that is detailed but because of its approach never allows the detail to choke up the progress of the book.

The Books I Read In November

Fiction
'A Body in the Bath House' by Lindsey Davis
This is a book from the long-running Falco series of books, featuring the eponymous Roman detective active in the 1st century CE.  I read the first in the series 'The Silver Pigs' (1989) many years ago.  This is the 13th book of 20, published in 2001.  Davis has moved on to writing stories featuring Falco's daughter.

This novel was not at all good.  The books are written in the first person with Falco looking back on his life.  However, despite Davis's work in terms of ensuring historical accuracy, Falco's manner is far too late 20th century/early 21st century.  The complexities of Falco's family and connections are complex and add little to the story except for confusion and coincidence later in the story.

This story mainly focuses on Falco resolving issues at the construction of the palace at Fishbourne in southern England.  Thus, Davis puts in far too many jokes about unreliable builders and uses construction jargon from modern times.  The jokes are very feeble and not humorous if you have never had an extension built.  The key problem with the book is that it progresses with minimal direction.  Various people die whether from accidents or murders but there is little sense of urgency.  Ultimately murders both in Rome and in Britain are resolved almost by accident.  Overall this book seemed to be a waste of effort.  There were interesting components but they were assembled in a way which was listless and not engaging.  I am unlikely to read any more of Davis's books.

'The Time Ships' by Stephen Baxter
Down the years friends have often recommended me to read certain books.  Typically I have loathed the recommendations and as a consequence if someone suggests I should read a book, let alone says I 'have to' read it, then I go out of my way to avoid it.  This book was lent to me by a friend and running short of science fiction or fantasy books, I turned to it.  It is billed as 'The Authorized Sequel to The Time Machine'.  It is not clear who authorised it, but I imagine it was the estate of H.G. Wells.  As we know from the difficulties that 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (2003) movie faced in trying to feature the lead character of 'The Invisible Man' (1897), the estate guards these things very assiduously.  'The Time Machine' (1895) is a novella and at over 600 pages, I feel Baxter has lost some of the essence of the original.  The tone is pretty well replicated of a Victorian character written in the first person.  However, Baxter does tend to betray his own era especially in portraying the superstructures created by the advanced Morlocks and then the Universal Constructors that seem to be physical manifestations of the internet.  Baxter's problem is that he simply has too many ideas that he feels compelled to jam into the book.  This is in contrast to Wells who maintained a tighter focus, exploring a concept per book.

Wells's book first appeared as a magazine serial and it is ironic that because of the multiplicity of ideas that Baxter feels compelled to include his book ends up being very episodic.  Any block could have been a book in itself.  There is travel to the advanced Morlock society in which a vast sphere has been built around the Sun.  There is a brief episode in which the time traveller meets his younger self.  There is an alternate 1938 and 1944 caused by time travel and involving an enduring First World War.  This seems to have been caused by the Kaiserschlacht of March 1918 succeeding and an assassination of a leading Allied general in Paris, I assume Marshal Foch.  There is a return to the Paleocene era; a journey to an Earth wrecked by a perpetual ice age brought on by climate change from pollution and a return to the original future of Morlocks and Eloi envisaged in the original novel.  Any one of these would have been sufficient for Baxter to explore his ideas of parallel realities allowing time travel and changes to history shifting the traveller into an alternate rather than actually changing that line of history; plus the sense that humans are almost doomed to becoming Morlocks or Eloi in one way or another.  I am never happy with beneficent super-powerful creatures with vast constructs and Baxter manages to get two of these in.  The visits to the alternate mid-20th century and the prehistoric period are much more tolerable.

I enjoyed this book more than I anticipated.  However, I feel it is too long.  I feel that it should not be perceived as a sequel to 'The Time Machine' but something simply using the tone of that book.  It might appeal more to readers who are fans of 'hard' science fiction.  Steampunk fans may enjoy the middle element of the book.  However, this is clearly a segmented novel and ultimately it is less overall than the sum of its parts.  I have been ambivalent about Baxter's work and this hardly encourages me to seek out any more.  However, in contrast to other book recommendations I have received, I am not angry with my friend for proposing this book.

'The Daydreamer' by Ian McEwan
My book choices recently have proven to be so poor that I almost feel I should start up a separate blog entitled 'Books Not to Read'.  Given how harsh and dismissive a large portion of online reviews are, I feel at least I am fair in my portrayal of the books.  I do wonder, sometimes, how these people managed to get their books published.  As someone once said to me, it is clear that it is not the book which gets it published, it is the person.  This is one reason why established authors, let alone celebrities, get poor quality books out there and why sales of Robert Galbraith's book, 'The Cuckoo's Calling (2013) rose by 156,866% when it was revealed that they were written by J.K. Rowling.

As you can imagine from this lead-in, I was not pleased with 'The Daydreamer' (1995).  I bought it about the time I read 'The Innocent' (1990).  That was a gritty thriller set in 1950s Berlin; was well researched and engaging.  I was irritated with reviews of the 1993 movie of the novel, as there was criticism that Isabella Rossellini was told old to play Maria in the movie.  She was 40 years old at the time and the character is 36 in the book.  Critics made the lazy assumption that innocent had to be the female character rather than Leonard played by Campbell Scott.

That aside, 'The Daydreamer' comes nowhere close to the earlier book by McEwan.  It is a conceit.  It is supposed to be a book written for children that adults can enjoy.  It features a number of episodes from the life of Peter Fortune between the ages of 10-12.  He daydreams himself into a number of scenarios, quite a fair portion of which envisage him swapping bodies in order to learn a lesson.  Yes, it is written in language which could be comprehensible by children of that age and could be seen as a collection of modern fables.  However, even if you accept these aspects, it is highly flawed.

It appears to be as nastily autobiographical as Martin Amis's work and, as regular readers know, I think Amis is highly over-rated.  It is set in a world that only exists in the mind of Michael Bond.  Aside from the occasional references to computer games, it could be inhabiting that stylised third quarter of the 20th century; it barely scrapes into the fourth quarter.  It is as if white middle class southern urban England has been distilled to its fullest.  This is the kind of context that the grandchildren of Enid Blyton's characters would have ended up living in.  As such, this is more unrealistic than the fantasies Peter ends up in.  It would have been more refreshing set on a fantasy island.  I have no idea why McEwan wrote this book, it seems to have been an utter waste of his time.  I have been reminded of the lesson of not to fall into the trap of assuming that if an author can write one good or even decent book, that others they produce will come anywhere close.

I have another of McEwan's slim volumes on my pile which I will read, but then it might be time to give up on him entirely.

Jess Nevins's Steampunk Generations

When writing about the Frank Reade steampunk stories of the 19th century recently I mentioned a writer Jess Nevins (a man) who has some excellent webpages about steampunk sources. He wrote the 'Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana' (2005) the bulk of which seems to be online. He is an academic at Sam Houston State University and he is a leading annotator of steampunk works and has also collaborated with Alan Moore. He is incredibly knowledgeable about 'Edisonades' comic-book stories written for young people in the 19th century, including the Frank Reade stories, which focus on using steampunk inventions on the frontier of the American West and once that had been conquered fully by the end of the 19th century how this strand moved into modern science fiction. He rightly teases out the difference between the strand for young readers and that focused more at adults such as from Verne and Wells, whilst recognising a great deal of crossover between the two especially in terms of technology.

To some degree, though Nevins highlights the difference between the youthful and adult strands and shows the heavy American focus of the former, this does tend to lead him to overlook the difference in culture between Europe and the USA. It was apparent in the 19th century and is apparent today in contemporary movies. The USA has an enduring enthusiasm and a belief in technology. Even in post-apocalyptic scenarios there is a far more positive slant, the sense that it will be like the World after the Flood and a better society will rise from the ashes, whereas in Europe to coin a phrase: 'we're doomed' was more the slant. This may be because of the experience of warfare in the last two centuries. Even in the USA's worst war, the American Civil War, you could always escape by fleeing West or into the wilderness, as seen at the end of Ang Lee's wonderful 'Ride with the Devil' (1999). In Europe you had to live among the ruins and try to put back together what had been there before, from the Napoleonic Wars, the First and Second World Wars have all ravaged Europe with the latest technology. I believe we are still conscious of that difference and unsurprisingly it is reflected in popular culture. Hence the work of Verne and Wells is more uncertain and more morally ambivalent than was the case with American equivalents.

This was one reason why the Cyberpunk stories of the 1980s had such an impact. William Gibson who is seen as the father of the genre is a very 'clunky' writer you can see his plots moving slowly into place. However, he had a good technological imagination, though even there you could argue he grew out of the foundations laid by Walter Jon Williams. What shook up the USA in particular is that Gibson dared show that technology and large corporations could be bad at a time when 'greed is good' was the slogan. He seemed a heretic, a revolutionary even. Of course, to some degree he was only reflecting the experience of the bulk of the USA's population in the world of the 1980s, not benefiting at all from the fast economy and instead living in decaying urban settings. Gibson was not a writer of social problems, but he was awake enough to know that they were not going to improve even with new shiny technology. To some degree 'The Difference Engine' (1990) written by Gibson and Bruce Sterling (a far stronger novelist of many genres) marked the end of Cyberpunk as a fad. It showed that technology had caused problems no matter what the century.

Anyway, the reason why I decided to come back to Nevins is because I was recently given 'Steampunk' ed. by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (2008) a collection of steampunk authors. Nevins has an essay in the front of the anthology, which covers much of what he has written about the Edisonades. However, he then puts forward a perspective which I have more problems with and am going to focus on in this posting. He sees two 'generations' of steampunk writing. The first beginning in the 1960s, notably with 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' by Ronald W. Clark (1967) which is about the development of an atomic bomb in the 1850s. He then sees 'The Warlord of the Air' by Michael Moorcock (1971) as the next key milestone in the post-1914 steampunk genre. He sees the ending of the 'first generation' of steampunk coming with 'The Difference Engine' in 1990, which most people consider to be the start of the steampunk genre of the late 20th century. Nevins's complaint is that the 'second generation' of steampunk fiction has lost the critical, self-reflective edge of the first generation and as such is falling back into the overly positive, even bigoted Edisonade genre. To see such a sharp division, to me, is heavily flawed and I will explain why. In addition, I will argue why his so-called second generation of steampunk is not as poor in its viewpoints as he makes out.

Two books do not make a genre and to some degree it is wrong to see Clark's and Moorcock's books as being part of an ongoing evolution. Both men wrote for their own reasons. Clark's novel is very much of the age of nuclear war. Many of the issues he tackled about the use of nuclear weapons and the danger of radiation were as current to 1960s readers as climate change is to us today. People find 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' staid and that is because Clark wrote it in the style of Victorian accounts of conquering empire. He is a good pastiche of that style, which I imagine Clark had read. It shows that as a superpower the British would have faced similar challenges to the USA and USSR were at the time with their nuclear weapons. The testing of the bomb causes biological damage and the bomb cannot be used effectively either against a great power, Russia or against African tribespeople. The novel may have steampunk wrappings but it is a 1960s novel written in a style that Clark and many of his original readers would have been very familiar with.

Michael Moorcock is a force unto himself. He has written scores of novels over a career now stretching over 50 years. He has a vast over-arching view of his 'multiverse' and so many of his different characters appear in different novels as if all woven together in a spider's web. Counter-factual has always been a large element of Moorcock's writing, in some books, just a page outlines some particular twist in history. However, Moorcock is also custodian of a great deal of the history of imaginative fiction. This is shown very clearly by his two anthologies of Victorian/Edwardian 'science fiction': 'Before Armageddon' (1975) and 'England Invaded' (1977) and his non-fiction analysis of the genres, 'Wizardry and Wild Romance' (1987; reissued 2004).

In addition, in his novels Moorcock is unapologetic about his fascination for other writers' work. In 'The Warlord of the Air' and its sequels, the hero is Oswald Bastable, a character from E. Nesbit's 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers' (1898) and its two sequels. By doing this Moorcock established a pattern of using other people's fictional characters in his steampunk novels, something taken to the maximum in Alan Moore's 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. Of other Moorcock novels, 'Gloriana' (1978) is a homage to Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queen' (1590). He has been very influenced by the work of Mervyn Peake (like David Bowie) especially the Gormenghast triology and you can see that in so many of his lonely anti-hero characters, let alone the architecture they walk through. As I have noted before, once MCG supplied the missing piece for me, 'The Warlord of the Air' (and the two other books of the triology, 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981)) are heavily influenced by the work of George Griffith. Of course, interestingly, 'The Land Leviathan' envisages an invasion of the USA by a vast tank, which seems to turn the Reade stories on its head.

As with Clark, we have to think about what times Moorcock was writing in. He was at the cutting edge of science fiction and fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s and in many stories, especially the Jerry Cornelius series, there is a great deal about the influence of drugs and hallucination, topics which are of less interest to writers today than then. This was an era when society and its assumptions were being challenged and Moorcock was not alone in doing this through science fiction writing. He edited 'New Worlds', 1964-71 and 1976-96, and its anthologies, and if you read the 1960s/70s collections today, the obsessions seem as quaint to a modern reader as those of the 1890s. However, at the time they were radical and challenging, even the phrase 'New Worlds' summed up a sense of potential. Moorcock like liberal-left writers of the time, of course, looked at the established system and sought to invert it. He created Elric, an anaemic, amoral, fantasy anti-hero as an antidote to the muscle bound Conan stories. Probably his most famous novel is 'Behold the Man' (1967), still a really fascinating, excellently crafted story that suggests that 'Jesus' was actually a Jewish time traveller from our times who stepped into the sandals of the son of Joseph the carpenter who was mentally subnormal. Moorcock went after every established bastion. He did not discard it, he just encouraged his readers to think about the assumptions they were making.

The thing that marks Moorcock out from his contemporaries in science fiction writing of the time, and funnily is what has led him to endure and be rediscovered, is his almost childlike love of the early imaginative writing. Moorcock started his career editing magazines carrying Tarzan and Sexton Blake stories. As is shown in the excerpt from 'The Warlord of the Air' which is included in 'Steampunk', he loved the vastness, the excitement of what the technology could do, the elegance of airships. He refers in this novel not only to 'The Outlaws of the Air' but also to 'The War in the Air' by H.G. Wells, most notably in the Fei-chi flying motorcycles which also appear in Wells' novel used by Chinese pilots in their attack on the USA. These are featured in the first novel of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' too. Of course Moorcock shows how technology can be used by the revolutionaries as well as by the authorities. Moorcock is taking from a particular strand which was uncommon even when it was produced. In his career Moorcock has been like Griffith, taking imaginative fiction and putting it to the use of socio-political commentary.

So, Nevins complains that the 'punk' has gone out of steampunk. I would argue it had already gone by the time of 'The Difference Engine'. There is nothing radical in there, nothing challenging society, it is about the dangers of addiction to gambling and hope in new technologies. The reason why there might be no 'punk' in contemporary steampunk is that there is no punk in contemporary society. As I have noted recently, even with the global economy collapsing and environmental change, revolutionaries or even simple protestors are pretty thin on the ground. There are probably authors out there challenging society in their writing but they are unlikely to get any further than their blog pages, certainly not into print. I would suggest Nevins is looking in the wrong place for challenging literature these days, he is more likely to find it in the form of electronic zamzidat work.

Another more fruitful area for more radical writing is in graphic novels. This has probably been the case since the advent of 'Watchmen' (1986/7) though to some degree that reflected 1970s sensibilities. I can see why Nevins works with Moore, because the latter is probably the only 'punk' in popular culture, with the 'V for Vendetta' series (1982-8) and in aspects of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' especially the second series recasting 'The War of the Worlds' but also addressing biological warfare and genetic engineering.

Nevins seems to expect all people writing in a genre to challenge the status quo and that never happens. It is not going to happen in historical drama, detective novels, romance, whatever genre you pick, except with a handful of authors. He seems disappointed that steampunk, somehow has not set itself up as a revolutionary genre, and yet what genre is revolutionary especially in the highly culturally conservative times we have been living in since the mid-1970s? Yet, look at a writer such as Stephen Baxter, and say, his 1993 novel 'Anti-Ice' which references Clark's work, especially with the element in the Crimea, but is probably of the more excited, enthusiastic steampunk pattern that Nevins condemns. It might not tackle things the way Clark did, but neither does it subscribe to the racism and western domination theories that 19th century writers did, it could not in our times. There will always be people at the cutting edge of writing and of particular genres, but following on behind them are more mainstream writers who sustain the genre and make a living out of it. Many readers want to relax with a novel, not constantly be challenged. Novels do inform and challenge but they are also entertainment, and that latter type is much more appealing to publishers.

There have been no generations of steampunk, just different writers at different phases of their careers going in and out of a particular genre. The only generations I see are 1860s-1910s and 1960s-now and even then this might be stretching both periods a little. Two novels does not make a genre as I say, because there are always writers who step outside the currents in writing and Moorcock has always sought to do that whilst simultaneously grounding himself in work he loves. Nevins, I advise, to stop whining about the missing 'punk' especially when the society this work is appearing in, totally lacks such critiques itself. Look for good quality writing and accept, as with all fiction, it reflects the context from which it comes.