Fiction
'Lehrter Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the 'Station' series and is set at the end of 1945 and early 1946. The heroes, John Russell and Effi Koenen are living in London with John's son, Effi's sister and nephew and an adopted Jewish girl. Russell is persuaded to return to Berlin to work as a double agent for the Soviets; Effi accompanies him as she is given a new role in a movie being made in the city. I have come to realise that action does not realise interest Downing. There are brief moments of excitement as Russell deals with his US and Soviet handlers and he and Effi uncover black market dealers in medicines. Russell follows a route getting Jews from Germany to Palestine but only as far as northern Italy and doing so uncovers an SS officer. He has to help snatch a scientist from the Soviets. However, the moments of action are largely that, moments and generally end after a couple of pages so Downing can return to his main focus of interest. Downing loves to simply show Berlin and other locations and to note in great detail the impact of the war on them. Many have made effective use post-war Germany/Austria as the setting for adventures, but this author prefers to have a historical travelogue. I do not know if that is what genuinely interests him or he simply cannot stop himself showing off all the research he has done. As a historian I find some of this interesting, however, if you are looking for a spy or adventure story set in this period read something by Philip Kerr or rewatch 'The Third Man' (1949).
'Seventy-Seven Clocks' by Christopher Fowler
Though this novel, the third in the Bryant & May series is set in 1973, Fowler fails really to communicate a sense of that period. Maybe he would argue that the upper class family portrayed would not behave in such a snobbish way now, but I feel you could put them into 2013 and they would act in exactly the same way. Fowler and his characters clearly love London and in the two preceding novels in this series we get lots of material of quirky details about the city; the mystery at the heart of this story involves and obscure guild and its buildings. When I started this series I had expected much more magic realism and actually when Fowler first wrote this particular novel it had a supernatural element that he later removed. Thus we get nothing more than quirky and given the oddities that many mainstream detectives have to deal with - they always get at least one story with a cult or an ancient mystery - Bryant & May do not stand out as much as I think Fowler would like them to.
I found this story moved more briskly than the previous two, perhaps because as a counterbalance to the grumblings of the two lead detectives. I found the perspective of the hangovers from colonialism which work better in 1973 than now, an interesting angle. Though at times the book has longueurs, I felt it was tighter than the two before it and I am hopeful that I will see an improvement overall as I got further through the series.
'Matter' by Iain M. Banks
This book ironically suffers from some of the same problems as 'Lehrter Station' even though it is set on alien planets and spaceships. I have enjoyed a couple of Banks's science fiction books, 'The Player of Games' (1988) and more recently, 'The Algebraist' (2004). However, this novel does not come close in quality to either of those. Perhaps it is because it is part of Banks's 'Culture' series of super-powerful utopian civilisation. The story features three siblings of a humanoid royal family that live on the eighth layer of an artificial hollow planet. The murder of their father by his chief minister sets the three eventually coming together to resolve the situation. It is a lengthy story (593 pages in my edition) with two of the characters travelling via numerous intelligent spaceships and worlds and getting mixed up with very diverse alien species. There are lots of interesting ideas here, but that is the problem, Banks seems determined to detail every single one of them. There are swathes of the book which are 'info dumps', emphasised by the fact that he has a long glossary of all the different names, even the types of spaceships, towards the end of the book. 'The Algebraist' communicated a complex, alien set-up well, without choking the action off with stopping to inform you how great Banks's imagination was. Another thing is that he baulks away from showing the death of leading characters, that all happens 'off stage'. There is also a jump from the climax to the happy ending of the story which makes it feel weak as we do not see how the apocalypse was averted. Banks had a wonderful imagination and created immense environments. However, with this novel, that overwhelms the story which as a result is diminished. I wanted the book to move on rather than hear more about how a particular spaceship configures with another.
Non-Fiction
'War Underground' by Alexander Barrie
This book covers an often neglected aspect of the First World War - the tunnels dug and the mines laid under trenches on the Western Front. It is very much from the British perspective, though Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders get a look in, the French and the far more efficient German efforts are only mentioned in passing. The story is one which will be familiar to anyone who has read British military history. The units, initially drawn from 'clay kickers' who excavated sewers, were cobbled together by the MP John Norton Griffiths, though largely in response to the work of the highly skilled German pioneer units digging under British trenches and then blowing them apart with explosives. There were mix-ups with pay and the chains of command.
The tunneller units were alternately sought by established units as defence against German tunnelling and dismissed as slackers taking good men away from the front. By the end of the way, combined they were the strength of a division though spread along the frontline in companies. The typical British chaos at war is shown, the low point being the delivery of three diving bells to the frontline. This is a brisk book which manages to balance focus on the individuals involved and the dangers they faced - not just being buried alive or blown apart, but in the skirmishes with revolvers and hand grenades that took place when German tunnellers were encountered underground. There is also technical detail of the mines and the tunnels that housed them. It is an interesting story and one that is often forgotten. However, it does make you wonder again how Britain ever manages to win a war, given the tendency for snobbery and simply poor organisation, to get in the way. I would certainly be interested to read a book telling of this kind of warfare from the German side.
Audio Book - Fiction
'Death of a Charming Man' by M.C. Beaton [Marion Gibbons]; read by David Monteath
Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that in recent months I have not been posting reviews of audio books. That is because I have been struggling to get through this one. I had heard of Hamish Macbeth as a result of the television series which ran for three seasons, 1995-97, though I had never watched any. Starting in 1985, so far 34 novels have been written in this series and this is the 10th in the series, published in 1994. Details in the story make it feel as if it is set much earlier and I had imagined it dated from the 1960s or 1970s. I have been aware of the concept of 'cosy crime' novels, but this takes the cosiness far too far and in fact murder only features very late in the book.
This is more a soap opera about a police sergeant rambling around parts of the North-East Highlands doing very little; he moans about things, he gets a woman to challenge her abusive husband, he looks at houses to buy and verges on having a relationship with a woman who is not his fiancee. His fiancee, an Englishwoman who works in the family hotel has attitudes that would have looked dated in 1964, let alone 1994 and that gives the whole feeling of this being pretty unreal, Beaton (1936-2019) would have been better off making this a historical crime novel set in an earlier decade. There are lots of old fashioned characters who dully spark off each other, but for large stretches the story does not move forward and you are actually glad when Macbeth dumps his fiancee from another time. This would have been dull at 3 hours as many crime audio books, but at over 6 hours it was very hard to get through. I certainly will not be going anywhere near Hamish Macbeth books again. If I wanted this kind of story I would watch 'Coronation Street'. Monteath does pretty well with Scottish and non-Scottish accents especially as he has to do a wide range of sour women.
Friday, 31 January 2020
Monday, 6 January 2020
What If Proportional Representation Had Been Used In the 2019 UK General Election?
This is something I have long done with UK elections, most recently in 2017: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-if-proportional-representation.html It is a counter-factual exercise which looks at what would have happened if proportional representation had been introduced to UK elections either in 1918 or under the Labour governments 1997-2010 which had it as a policy which was never enacted.
I use a simple system for my analysis, allocating the number of seats in Parliament on the basis of the share of the vote received. Of course, any proportional representation system cannot replicate purely the percentage figures but they tend to come close. Some systems, e.g. that of Germany, will not allow any party polling less than 5% of the total vote, to have a seat in parliament. However, I assume such a bar is not in place. Furthermore, if there was proportional representation, the choices of voters might be very different and smaller UK parties, notably the Greens, might receive more votes as they would be seen as more 'viable'.
I use a simple system for my analysis, allocating the number of seats in Parliament on the basis of the share of the vote received. Of course, any proportional representation system cannot replicate purely the percentage figures but they tend to come close. Some systems, e.g. that of Germany, will not allow any party polling less than 5% of the total vote, to have a seat in parliament. However, I assume such a bar is not in place. Furthermore, if there was proportional representation, the choices of voters might be very different and smaller UK parties, notably the Greens, might receive more votes as they would be seen as more 'viable'.
Given the large majority that the Conservatives secured in 2019, perhaps aided by the election unusually being held in the December, unlike the 2010 and 2017 elections, I would expect that there would not be vast differences if it had been through proportional representation, but the above analysis suggests the story is more complex and I thought it was important to verify or contest easy assumptions.
It is interesting to note that in 2017, the Conservatives got 42.45% of the vote but did not secure a majority but in 2019 got 42.4% of the vote but now have a majority of 80 seats. Interestingly, Boris Johnson did not secure a larger percentage of the votes than Theresa May did, but they were spread much more widely across the country. This highlights one challenge of the British system but is little compensation to May to know that overall she was no less popular with voters than Johnson, just that her support was much more heavily concentrated.
In fact, the turnout in 2019 was 67.3% compared to 68.8% in 2017, meaning Johnson not only secured a smaller percentage, but actually a smaller actual number, of votes. If they had remained as concentrated in certain areas as they had done for May, then he would have had an even smaller number of seats in parliament that she had. The big win for Johnson was to get a few voters in traditionally Labour seats to back him, rather than him being as popular as May had been in traditionally Conservative seats. This, however, is not how the media portrayed it and May will go down in history as an unpopular Prime Minister, though ironically from her own party, she could secure more votes.
Interestingly, support for Labour in 2019 as a percentage was almost identical to that in 2017. However, they suffered from a maldistribution of support in the way that May did. Johnson won not by securing more support, but from converting Labour supporters to his line. In many ways this is what Margaret Thatcher did in 1979 and 1983, which might suggest that, unless Johnson blows it badly, he could be in office for many years. However, given what his friend David Cameron did, staying in office for a decade now seems out of fashion and it is likely Johnson will leave in 2027, for a profitable retirement.
Note that despite long promised reduction in the number of seats and in the boundaries between constituencies, this has still not come into force. If it had done, then Labour were expected to have around 35 fewer seats anyway. There was an electoral pact between the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Plaid Cymru in certain seats so that they would not contest against each other. However, this does not seem to have had any impact on the results. Depending on the form of proportional representation used it might have done in this context.
In the details below, the text and numbers in square brackets are what the parties actually got.
2019: 650 Seats [Conservative Government]
- Conservatives (42.4%): 276 seats [317]
- Labour (40.0%): 259 [202]
- Liberal Democrats (7.4%): 47 [11]
- SNP (3.0%): 20 [48]
- Green (2.7%): 16 [1]
- Brexit Party (2.0%): 11 [0]
- Plaid Cymru (0.5%): 4 [4]
- DUP (0.8%): 5 [8]
- Sinn Fein (0.6%): 5 [4]
- Alliance Party (0.4%): 3 [1]
- SDLP (0.4%): 2 [1]
- UUP (0.3%): 2 [0]
With Northern Ireland, I have assumed that the 'left over' votes have gone to the two largest parties in terms of seats. The Alliance Party secured more votes than the SDLP though they were very close so the 'extra' seat might have gone either way. Constituencies in Northern Ireland can be very partisan. It is clear however, that the DUP was in part 'punished' for supporting Theresa May's government 2017-19, as, while they secured extra funding for the Province, the Brexit deal that began to emerge, ran counter to what their supporters had been seeking.
Looking at the election overall, after a period in the 2000s and 2010s in which proportional representation would not have provided much benefit to Labour or the Liberal Democrats, we seem to have reverted to a pattern similar to that in the 1980s. The media portrayed the election as a great win for Johnson and highlighting how he swept into constituencies that have long been held by Labour. Conversely, Corbyn has been portrayed as a bad liability for Labour, wrecking their chances of coming to power. Yet, in terms of votes, the picture is not so clear. With proportional representation, even the AV system considered in 2011, Johnson would not have secured a majority.
This does not mean necessarily that a Labour-Liberal Democrat with or without the Greens and SNP, would have come to power. Before the election there had been tensions as the Liberal Democrats and Greens had wanted to reverse Brexit whereas Labour had been more ambivalent on the issue. The SNP was demanding a further referendum on Scottish independence within one year of a coalition involving themselves coming to power. The outcome is likely to have been either Labour would have to tack to being anti-Brexit which might have split the party or would have struggled on with support on certain issues. Ironically, to get a soft Brexit through they would have had to rely on Conservative support in the face of Liberal Democrat/Green/Plaid Cymru and probably SNP opposition. The trumpeted 'national unity' grand coalition may have come about though perhaps with Keir Starmer rather than Corbyn at the helm of Labour, under a soft Brexit Conservative, possibly Philip Hammond. A further general election in better weather would be a high probability, perhaps making the fourth election in six years.
With Brexit Party MPs in parliament, the Conservatives would be harangued to keep to a hard (perhaps even harder) line on Brexit and their failure again to secure a majority is likely to have been blamed on not doing this. It seems that not securing a majority again, Corbyn would still have had to leave. However, it would be on better terms than has proven to be the case. Added to that it seems likely that Labour left-wingers would be in a stronger position than in our situation rather than Labour feeling compelled to find someone more like Johnson, or at least like Tony Blair, as leader.
The 2019 election is a case which would give heart to those commentators who argue that proportional representation leads to unstable government. However, in part it simply highlights how diverse opinion is in the UK. The 2019 election, as it was run with the first-past-the-post system, does mark a return to the pattern of the 1980s, at the time called the 'elective dictatorship'. If Johnson wants to, he could still be in power in 2031, in the equivalent to Thatcher's experience. However, to him politics just seems to be a bit of a jape and just a component in his diverse career. It does mean that we will probably see history repeating itself. Unrest due to Conservative social policies and Labour adopting a glamorous leader effectively offering simply a watered down version of Conservative policies, which are already biting hard on natural Labour supporters. Though, as in 1983, it seems they are falling back on xenophobia to sustain them through tough times.
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
Books I Read In December
Fiction
'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman
I saw that they were televising a series of this book so I thought it might be an idea to read it. Despite being a long book not much happens. The story involves Shadow, an ex-convict who is employed by Odin to aid him in rallying other gods brought to the USA by settlers down the millennia. For much of the time Shadow lives in a small village by a lake when not being employed by Odin and encounters a range of interesting people as well as being bothered by his late wife who he inadvertently raised from the dead and who kills people who threaten him. There is an interesting concept that places and activities are imbued with belief and Gaiman features local attractions which become filled with power because people come to them. The basic concept overlaps with 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul' (1988) by Douglas Adams which was published 13 years earlier but relocating to dreary backwater towns in the USA gives Gaiman a chance to add the new twist of old gods against new gods of technology and other facets of contemporary society. While the plot drifts for far too long, there is a decent twist and above all, Gaiman writes interesting characters and portrays unexciting US settings well. Thus, despite the fantastical element there is a real lack of urgency about this book and it is, ironically, best read as a 'slice of life' novel. I cannot imagine this would make exciting watching unless you are a fan of Mike Leigh movies, but I see they are on to the third season of the TV series so I can only imagine they have long ago diverged from the novel.
'Now is the Time' by Melvyn Bragg
I once read an interview with Bragg in which he wished his novels were just a little more successful. He seems to get long listed for awards but very rarely wins. Having read this novel I can understand why. The novel is around the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Bragg shows it from various perspectives on both sides of the conflict and certainly you can learn a lot about what went on and who was involved. I particularly found the descriptions of London at the time very interesting. However, it is all written in an unsophisticated way with lots of telling rather than showing and somehow detached from the characters. Even when Wat Tyler's daughter is raped by London criminals released during the revolt, you do not feel the way you should about this. In many ways the book reminded me of novels by Henry Treece (1911-66) who wrote numerous historical novels for children. Thus, though there are points of interest, there is a lack of genuine drama in the novel and at the end you feel like you have read a lesson rather than a novel. Bragg should look to the work of Bernard Cornwell in how to add that dramatic element to scrupulously researched fiction.
'Aqua Alta' by Donna Leon
In this fifth book in the Guido Brunetti series, Leon returns to two characters from the first novel, 'Death at La Fenice' (1992), opera singer Flavia Petrelli and her female partner, archaeologist Brett Lynch. When Lynch is beaten up, Brunetti involves himself in the case which soon turns into one involving murder and faked archaeological artefacts. It is set against the backdrop of both the 'aqua alta', the flooding of Venice caused by high tides and heavy rain and the sense that those in privileged positions continue to get away with their crimes. This applies to Lynch as much as the antique collector. As noted with the previous novel, Leon appears to have got into her stride with these novels and they rise far about the first couple. The book is brisk, provides interesting details about both Venice and archaeology in China as well as setting the story in the amoral context of contemporary Italy that appears so attractive for crime novelists even those writing in English. I have five more of these novels to read. Leon continues churning them out and the 29th comes out in 2020.
'Counting Up, Counting Down' by Harry Turtledove
Around the time this book came out in 2002, I had been thinking of writing a short story about a man who travels back in time to try to improve his own life. Then I heard of the two stories at the start and end of this book, which in fact are the same story seen from the older and younger versions of the same man, Justin Kloster travelling from 2018 to 1999. The ending of these stories turns out was far more positive than the one I planned which would have ended up rather like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) movie. It brought home to me that especially if writing in a particular genre it is easy for authors to come up with similar stories of their own accord. The two stories are reasonable if a little frustrating. One interesting things are what Turtledove (originally writing this as a magazine story in the 1990s) got wrong about 2018, i.e. The Rolling Stones are still touring, 'South Park' is still very well known even by teenagers and the fad for body piercing has not waned in the slightest, in fact it has increased.
The rest of the stories in this collection are quite a mixed bag. Despite what I have been told about my alternate history short story anthologies, there is demand for such collections. Not all of the stories are alternate history, there is some science fiction and fantasy too. There is far more sex than I had expected from reading other books by Turtledove and with religion this is a key theme through the collection. 'Vermin' about a Christian community struggling as settlers on an alien planet is well done and highlights the grave consequences of seeking comfort just for yourself or your community. Other science fiction ones are oddities, 'The Deconstruction Gang' about philosophers discussing breaking up a road, 'The Green Buffalo' about cowboys slipping through a rift in time to kill a triceratops for food and 'The Maltese Elephant', a pastiche of 'The Maltese Falcon' (novel 1930; movie 1941) are alright but not hugely engaging.
'Ils Ne Passeront Pas' conjures up the Verdun front in 1916 very well, but then, for no clear reason, throws creatures from the Biblical apocalypse at French and German soldiers, ultimately without much changing. This like 'In This Season' a magical realist story about a small number of Jews escaping Poland following the German occupation in 1939 with the aid of a golem, again has religious elements that I probably miss out on. 'After the Last Elf is Dead' is more fantastical, but equally grim, seeing a world where the evil Dark Brother has been victorious and showing the challenges even for his loyal staff which reminded me of Stalin's regime and has a very unsettling conclusion which, though, does show the likely outcome if evil does win in a fantasy setting.
Seemingly more light-hearted than those grim stories is 'Honeymouth', a fantasy story about a disreputable rider of a unicorn and while sex features in the other stories it is right at the front in this fantasy one as the title might suggest. 'Miss Manner's Guide to Greek Missology #1: Andromeda and Perseus' is interesting in reversing the roles in the stories, but I always find attempts at humour in these situations is laboured and dates poorly. 'Goddess for a Day' despite sounding like a story title set to primary school children is the best of the fantasy stories, showing the challenges of a woman employed to act as Athena, in an actual event which occurred in the 6th Century CE.
Two reasonable stories focused on religion are set in Turtledove's Videssos fantasy setting, similar to the Byzantine Empire on which he was a scholar. The first, 'The Decoy Duck' about a missionary to a nordic style land will remind readers of a very similar sub-plot in the TV series, 'Vikings' (2013-20) and given it was written long before that may have been an inspiration for it. The second, 'The Seventh Chapter' is unexciting, largely a procedural that primarily tells us more about the world Turtledove has created and religion within it.
Of the alternate histories, 'Must and Shall' set in 1942 but one in which the Union was far harsher on the Confederate States following the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, is well done as detectives seek the German weapons being sent to southern states to trigger an uprising. 'Ready for the Fatherland' is set in 1979 in Croatia in a world where Field Marshal Manstein assassinated Hitler in 1943, held back the Soviet counter-attacks and crushed the Anglo-American landing in France so a stalemate developed across Europe with the Germans and their puppet states persisting. There is a nice reference to a scene from 'The Guns of Navarone' (1961) movie and a passing one to 'Force 10 from Navarone' (1978). 'The Phantom Tolbutkin' features another similar scenario but with Ukrainian resistance fighters in the occupied USSR and turns a good twist.
Non-Fiction
'Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War' by Nigel West [Rupert Allason]
'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman
I saw that they were televising a series of this book so I thought it might be an idea to read it. Despite being a long book not much happens. The story involves Shadow, an ex-convict who is employed by Odin to aid him in rallying other gods brought to the USA by settlers down the millennia. For much of the time Shadow lives in a small village by a lake when not being employed by Odin and encounters a range of interesting people as well as being bothered by his late wife who he inadvertently raised from the dead and who kills people who threaten him. There is an interesting concept that places and activities are imbued with belief and Gaiman features local attractions which become filled with power because people come to them. The basic concept overlaps with 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul' (1988) by Douglas Adams which was published 13 years earlier but relocating to dreary backwater towns in the USA gives Gaiman a chance to add the new twist of old gods against new gods of technology and other facets of contemporary society. While the plot drifts for far too long, there is a decent twist and above all, Gaiman writes interesting characters and portrays unexciting US settings well. Thus, despite the fantastical element there is a real lack of urgency about this book and it is, ironically, best read as a 'slice of life' novel. I cannot imagine this would make exciting watching unless you are a fan of Mike Leigh movies, but I see they are on to the third season of the TV series so I can only imagine they have long ago diverged from the novel.
'Now is the Time' by Melvyn Bragg
I once read an interview with Bragg in which he wished his novels were just a little more successful. He seems to get long listed for awards but very rarely wins. Having read this novel I can understand why. The novel is around the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Bragg shows it from various perspectives on both sides of the conflict and certainly you can learn a lot about what went on and who was involved. I particularly found the descriptions of London at the time very interesting. However, it is all written in an unsophisticated way with lots of telling rather than showing and somehow detached from the characters. Even when Wat Tyler's daughter is raped by London criminals released during the revolt, you do not feel the way you should about this. In many ways the book reminded me of novels by Henry Treece (1911-66) who wrote numerous historical novels for children. Thus, though there are points of interest, there is a lack of genuine drama in the novel and at the end you feel like you have read a lesson rather than a novel. Bragg should look to the work of Bernard Cornwell in how to add that dramatic element to scrupulously researched fiction.
'Aqua Alta' by Donna Leon
In this fifth book in the Guido Brunetti series, Leon returns to two characters from the first novel, 'Death at La Fenice' (1992), opera singer Flavia Petrelli and her female partner, archaeologist Brett Lynch. When Lynch is beaten up, Brunetti involves himself in the case which soon turns into one involving murder and faked archaeological artefacts. It is set against the backdrop of both the 'aqua alta', the flooding of Venice caused by high tides and heavy rain and the sense that those in privileged positions continue to get away with their crimes. This applies to Lynch as much as the antique collector. As noted with the previous novel, Leon appears to have got into her stride with these novels and they rise far about the first couple. The book is brisk, provides interesting details about both Venice and archaeology in China as well as setting the story in the amoral context of contemporary Italy that appears so attractive for crime novelists even those writing in English. I have five more of these novels to read. Leon continues churning them out and the 29th comes out in 2020.
'Counting Up, Counting Down' by Harry Turtledove
Around the time this book came out in 2002, I had been thinking of writing a short story about a man who travels back in time to try to improve his own life. Then I heard of the two stories at the start and end of this book, which in fact are the same story seen from the older and younger versions of the same man, Justin Kloster travelling from 2018 to 1999. The ending of these stories turns out was far more positive than the one I planned which would have ended up rather like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) movie. It brought home to me that especially if writing in a particular genre it is easy for authors to come up with similar stories of their own accord. The two stories are reasonable if a little frustrating. One interesting things are what Turtledove (originally writing this as a magazine story in the 1990s) got wrong about 2018, i.e. The Rolling Stones are still touring, 'South Park' is still very well known even by teenagers and the fad for body piercing has not waned in the slightest, in fact it has increased.
The rest of the stories in this collection are quite a mixed bag. Despite what I have been told about my alternate history short story anthologies, there is demand for such collections. Not all of the stories are alternate history, there is some science fiction and fantasy too. There is far more sex than I had expected from reading other books by Turtledove and with religion this is a key theme through the collection. 'Vermin' about a Christian community struggling as settlers on an alien planet is well done and highlights the grave consequences of seeking comfort just for yourself or your community. Other science fiction ones are oddities, 'The Deconstruction Gang' about philosophers discussing breaking up a road, 'The Green Buffalo' about cowboys slipping through a rift in time to kill a triceratops for food and 'The Maltese Elephant', a pastiche of 'The Maltese Falcon' (novel 1930; movie 1941) are alright but not hugely engaging.
'Ils Ne Passeront Pas' conjures up the Verdun front in 1916 very well, but then, for no clear reason, throws creatures from the Biblical apocalypse at French and German soldiers, ultimately without much changing. This like 'In This Season' a magical realist story about a small number of Jews escaping Poland following the German occupation in 1939 with the aid of a golem, again has religious elements that I probably miss out on. 'After the Last Elf is Dead' is more fantastical, but equally grim, seeing a world where the evil Dark Brother has been victorious and showing the challenges even for his loyal staff which reminded me of Stalin's regime and has a very unsettling conclusion which, though, does show the likely outcome if evil does win in a fantasy setting.
Seemingly more light-hearted than those grim stories is 'Honeymouth', a fantasy story about a disreputable rider of a unicorn and while sex features in the other stories it is right at the front in this fantasy one as the title might suggest. 'Miss Manner's Guide to Greek Missology #1: Andromeda and Perseus' is interesting in reversing the roles in the stories, but I always find attempts at humour in these situations is laboured and dates poorly. 'Goddess for a Day' despite sounding like a story title set to primary school children is the best of the fantasy stories, showing the challenges of a woman employed to act as Athena, in an actual event which occurred in the 6th Century CE.
Two reasonable stories focused on religion are set in Turtledove's Videssos fantasy setting, similar to the Byzantine Empire on which he was a scholar. The first, 'The Decoy Duck' about a missionary to a nordic style land will remind readers of a very similar sub-plot in the TV series, 'Vikings' (2013-20) and given it was written long before that may have been an inspiration for it. The second, 'The Seventh Chapter' is unexciting, largely a procedural that primarily tells us more about the world Turtledove has created and religion within it.
Of the alternate histories, 'Must and Shall' set in 1942 but one in which the Union was far harsher on the Confederate States following the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, is well done as detectives seek the German weapons being sent to southern states to trigger an uprising. 'Ready for the Fatherland' is set in 1979 in Croatia in a world where Field Marshal Manstein assassinated Hitler in 1943, held back the Soviet counter-attacks and crushed the Anglo-American landing in France so a stalemate developed across Europe with the Germans and their puppet states persisting. There is a nice reference to a scene from 'The Guns of Navarone' (1961) movie and a passing one to 'Force 10 from Navarone' (1978). 'The Phantom Tolbutkin' features another similar scenario but with Ukrainian resistance fighters in the occupied USSR and turns a good twist.
Non-Fiction
'Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War' by Nigel West [Rupert Allason]
This book is probably unnecessary now, but when it came out in 1984 it proved a good corrective to the numerous books that had been appearing in the 1970s and early 1980s about spying during the Second World War. It showed me that 'Bodyguard of Lies' (1975) which I have on my shelf is riddled with errors. It also shows how without care historians can perpetuate mistakes through successive books. West looks at a number of claims in books of the time, among others, that a German spy in Orkney Islands allowed the sinking of HMS 'Royal Oak' when berthed there, that Admiral Canaris, head of German military intelligence provided material to the Allies but had also met Mata Hari, who was behind the Soviet spy ring in Switzerland during the war and whether Churchill had foreknowledge of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Most of the cases prove to be less dramatic than historians have made out and often came down to a combination of human, signals and codebreaking intelligence. As time had passed since the war, more identities of spies came out, also allowing corrections of misapprehensions.
This is another book which would have been better for me to have read when I bought it 30+ years ago. M.R.D. Foot, the historian of S.O.E. (who I met once) was rather sniffy about this book, in part I think because West highlights some mistakes Foot made. Thus, you rather feel this book is a bit of revenge by West against authors who have too easily accepted certain stories without doing the necessary cross-checking. Allason himself is now 68 and Foot died in 2012 at the age of 92, so that element is largely irrelevant now. What I would suggest is that this short book (166 pages) should be given to people starting History degrees to alert them to how easily it is not simply to make errors, especially when based on assumptions, but to perpetuate them. If like me you are working your way through old books on the Second World War, it is also useful to have this as an accompanying corrective especially to the more exciting claims made in those books.
Saturday, 30 November 2019
Books I Read In November
Fiction
'Clockwork Angel' by Cassandra Clare
Having read this book and given how little satisfaction I have received from much I have read this year, I have begun thinking I should simply read Young Adult steampunk/fantasy books. I had not connected this book with the Mortal Instruments series also by Clare, of which I have seen the movie, 'The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones' (2013) and this has many similar tropes, but set in 1878 London rather than contemporary USA. There is a secret organisation fighting the manifestation of demons in our world and having an ambivalent relationship with various vampires, werewolves and other supernaturals. There are eldritch and steampunk weapons and some combine both elements. It focuses on Tessa Gray, an orphan from the USA with the ability to slip into the form of another person, a skill highly valued by many of working in this demi-monde of London.
Though there are standard elements of kidnap, treachery, the poverty and dark streets of Victorian London and some very large battles, Clare handles it very well and you are really swept along by the narrative. While there is a plethora of tropes present, I also think her character building is pretty good and this really helps. As a mature reader, the honesty of Tessa's feelings, particularly towards potential love interests, plus her struggling to determine her identity, does come over in a very teenage way. However, this is largely counter-balanced by the politics of the underworld and the twists in the plot which lift it above other books in this kind of category. I am not certain if I would rush out and buy the two other books in this Infernal Devices series, but would be tempted to pick them up if they appeared in a charity shop.
'Potsdam Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the Station series and jumps from 1941 in the predecessor, 'Stettin Station' (2009) to the closing days of the Second World War in 1945. One of my complaints bout the previous books in the series is that the main character John Russell, a British-born American journalist based in Berlin, spends a lot of time simply travelling around. This shows off Downing's knowledge of Berlin and some other cities at the time, but really deadens the action rather than heighten it. This book takes that to the extreme. The point of view jumps between Russell, brought back to Berlin by Soviet authorities to find German atomic secrets, his girlfriend Effi Koenen who he left behind in 1941 and has become involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany and his teenaged German son, Paul, who has been conscripted into an artillery unit on the Eastern Front but is steadily driven back to Berlin. At times, the jump between the different points of view is abrupt and it can take some sentences to realise which character is being focused upon especially when they are all in different parts of Berlin.
Very little happens. The spy element is killed off very quickly and so you are left simply watching these three people wandering around ruined Berlin largely trying to stay alive. Russell tries to find the other two as well as people he knew four years earlier. There are points of tension especially when Effi is arrested as a Jew, but as in the previous novels, Downing is poor at communicating real jeopardy and I see this is something other reviewers have criticised him for. Ultimately this is really just an erratic guided tour of Berlin in the last days of the war. If you find that detail interesting then you might engage with this book, but otherwise it lacks the necessary elements even of a family wartime story let alone the (spy) thriller aspects which I once believed this series was supposed to be about.
'The Water Room' by Christopher Fowler
Despite what it says on the cover of my copy of this novel, it is in fact the second book in the Bryant and May series and the plot follows on from elements featured in the first, 'Full Dark House' (2004) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html The fact they were published in the same year may have led to some confusion. Initially I felt happier with this novel than its predecessor. It is set in the 2000s in a part of North London in a typically odd street left over from the chopping and changing down the decades. As you expect from Fowler there is a peculiar murder, an elderly Asian woman has been drowned in river water in her own home. It is followed by a number of murders which increasingly seem to be linked to the four ancient elements and to the various rivers of London which have been covered over down the centuries but still exist. The truncated close gives a set number of suspects and Fowler is good at developing these characters well.
We get more on Bryant and May, the octogenarian detectives, their assorted colleagues and eccentric helpers. The motive for the murder and a range of secrets is played out well, being both exotic but also credible. The prime problem is, especially after about the halfway point is that the book becomes slack. As with Downing, there is simply far too much going from place to place. Adding in the viewpoints of the two detectives' colleagues adds bulk without increasing tension. As a result by the resolution, which is interested, you are simply glad it is over. I have commented how these days with editing even by publishing houses, being less common some authors are allowed to simply drone on in quite a repetitive way and I feel Fowler has been allowed to do this. This novel could have shed 100 pages (it had 429 pages in the edition I read) and have been better for it. I have hope for the series because of Fowler's character development and detail on London. Do I ask too much in expecting my thrillers whether crime or spy to have tension and pace in them? Perhaps in the 21st Century where size for the sake of size in a novel seems more important that such elements, I am.
Non-Fiction
'The Old Country' by Jack Hargreaves
This book followed the success of 'Out of Town' (1987) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html and was similarly Jack Hargreaves outlining lost crafts and behaviours from rural England with quite a lot of reference to his own life. A lot of this book is about fish and angling techniques and even some of the ones he mentions as being contemporary in the late 1980s, have become obsolete due to new materials. He also speaks about wild birds, which of course have become rarer still with the loss of so many in the UK and odd things such as appreciation of time, accents and various travelling traders such as wool packers. It is a light easy read with some jarring moments when the conservatism of an old man breaks through with politically incorrect statements on race, though he is more sympathetic to Roma than many of his generation would be and in turn very dismissive of New Age Travellers. This is a good resource book if you want to set stories in rural England in the 19th and 20th centuries and draws your attention to facts that you might have overlooked or never realised. It is very much an old man telling you stories by the fire and as such I can understand why it is still in print, though sold at garden centres rather than in bookshops.
'Clockwork Angel' by Cassandra Clare
Having read this book and given how little satisfaction I have received from much I have read this year, I have begun thinking I should simply read Young Adult steampunk/fantasy books. I had not connected this book with the Mortal Instruments series also by Clare, of which I have seen the movie, 'The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones' (2013) and this has many similar tropes, but set in 1878 London rather than contemporary USA. There is a secret organisation fighting the manifestation of demons in our world and having an ambivalent relationship with various vampires, werewolves and other supernaturals. There are eldritch and steampunk weapons and some combine both elements. It focuses on Tessa Gray, an orphan from the USA with the ability to slip into the form of another person, a skill highly valued by many of working in this demi-monde of London.
Though there are standard elements of kidnap, treachery, the poverty and dark streets of Victorian London and some very large battles, Clare handles it very well and you are really swept along by the narrative. While there is a plethora of tropes present, I also think her character building is pretty good and this really helps. As a mature reader, the honesty of Tessa's feelings, particularly towards potential love interests, plus her struggling to determine her identity, does come over in a very teenage way. However, this is largely counter-balanced by the politics of the underworld and the twists in the plot which lift it above other books in this kind of category. I am not certain if I would rush out and buy the two other books in this Infernal Devices series, but would be tempted to pick them up if they appeared in a charity shop.
'Potsdam Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the Station series and jumps from 1941 in the predecessor, 'Stettin Station' (2009) to the closing days of the Second World War in 1945. One of my complaints bout the previous books in the series is that the main character John Russell, a British-born American journalist based in Berlin, spends a lot of time simply travelling around. This shows off Downing's knowledge of Berlin and some other cities at the time, but really deadens the action rather than heighten it. This book takes that to the extreme. The point of view jumps between Russell, brought back to Berlin by Soviet authorities to find German atomic secrets, his girlfriend Effi Koenen who he left behind in 1941 and has become involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany and his teenaged German son, Paul, who has been conscripted into an artillery unit on the Eastern Front but is steadily driven back to Berlin. At times, the jump between the different points of view is abrupt and it can take some sentences to realise which character is being focused upon especially when they are all in different parts of Berlin.
Very little happens. The spy element is killed off very quickly and so you are left simply watching these three people wandering around ruined Berlin largely trying to stay alive. Russell tries to find the other two as well as people he knew four years earlier. There are points of tension especially when Effi is arrested as a Jew, but as in the previous novels, Downing is poor at communicating real jeopardy and I see this is something other reviewers have criticised him for. Ultimately this is really just an erratic guided tour of Berlin in the last days of the war. If you find that detail interesting then you might engage with this book, but otherwise it lacks the necessary elements even of a family wartime story let alone the (spy) thriller aspects which I once believed this series was supposed to be about.
'The Water Room' by Christopher Fowler
Despite what it says on the cover of my copy of this novel, it is in fact the second book in the Bryant and May series and the plot follows on from elements featured in the first, 'Full Dark House' (2004) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html The fact they were published in the same year may have led to some confusion. Initially I felt happier with this novel than its predecessor. It is set in the 2000s in a part of North London in a typically odd street left over from the chopping and changing down the decades. As you expect from Fowler there is a peculiar murder, an elderly Asian woman has been drowned in river water in her own home. It is followed by a number of murders which increasingly seem to be linked to the four ancient elements and to the various rivers of London which have been covered over down the centuries but still exist. The truncated close gives a set number of suspects and Fowler is good at developing these characters well.
We get more on Bryant and May, the octogenarian detectives, their assorted colleagues and eccentric helpers. The motive for the murder and a range of secrets is played out well, being both exotic but also credible. The prime problem is, especially after about the halfway point is that the book becomes slack. As with Downing, there is simply far too much going from place to place. Adding in the viewpoints of the two detectives' colleagues adds bulk without increasing tension. As a result by the resolution, which is interested, you are simply glad it is over. I have commented how these days with editing even by publishing houses, being less common some authors are allowed to simply drone on in quite a repetitive way and I feel Fowler has been allowed to do this. This novel could have shed 100 pages (it had 429 pages in the edition I read) and have been better for it. I have hope for the series because of Fowler's character development and detail on London. Do I ask too much in expecting my thrillers whether crime or spy to have tension and pace in them? Perhaps in the 21st Century where size for the sake of size in a novel seems more important that such elements, I am.
Non-Fiction
'The Old Country' by Jack Hargreaves
This book followed the success of 'Out of Town' (1987) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html and was similarly Jack Hargreaves outlining lost crafts and behaviours from rural England with quite a lot of reference to his own life. A lot of this book is about fish and angling techniques and even some of the ones he mentions as being contemporary in the late 1980s, have become obsolete due to new materials. He also speaks about wild birds, which of course have become rarer still with the loss of so many in the UK and odd things such as appreciation of time, accents and various travelling traders such as wool packers. It is a light easy read with some jarring moments when the conservatism of an old man breaks through with politically incorrect statements on race, though he is more sympathetic to Roma than many of his generation would be and in turn very dismissive of New Age Travellers. This is a good resource book if you want to set stories in rural England in the 19th and 20th centuries and draws your attention to facts that you might have overlooked or never realised. It is very much an old man telling you stories by the fire and as such I can understand why it is still in print, though sold at garden centres rather than in bookshops.
Thursday, 31 October 2019
Books I Listened To/Read In October
Fiction
'Full Dark House' by Christopher Fowler
I realised once I had started this novel, that almost twenty years ago I had read three magic realist books by Fowler: 'Spanky' (1994) - far less lurid than the title and cover make out; 'Soho Black' (1998) and the best of these, 'Calabash' (2000). I was given a lot of the books from his Bryant and May series (I have no idea how he got to use the name of a match company). This one, published in 2004, was the first in the series which up to 2018 has so run through 15 novels and a short story anthology. I was disappointed by even the premise of the book. It features Arthur Bryant and John May part of the Peculiar Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police and madly employed from 1940 until 2004 when they are in their 80s. However, that is as far as the fantastical goes. The crime they investigate is at a theatre during wartime, with May looking back on the crime from some seventy years later. I have no idea why crime authors feel readers like to have so many mysteries set in theatres. I guess it is somewhat to do with the confined space in which to operate. However, it is now such a common trope, and especially with me having recently read Donna Leon's very similar 'Death At La Fenice' (1992), I found this pretty uninspiring.
There is mystery and conspiracy. However, a lot of it feels very laboured even when confined to the wartime. The abrupt jumps back and forth from the 2000s are confusing as it will often take a few sentences to know what time period the narrative has flitted onto. Too much simply seems odd but without adding spark. Both Bryant and decades later, May make use of mediums, but this adds little. In many ways it is too peculiar to be acceptable as a straight forward crime story and yet insufficiently uncanny to fit with what one would have expected from Fowler. I would have liked an outcome closer to 'Calabash'. I do have a lot of these books to read and can only hope, as with Leon, 3-4 books into the series Fowler will have found his feet with the characters and settings resulting in a step up to something with more life than this first entry in the series.
'The Windup Girl' by Paolo Bacigarlupi
This book reminded me of the books by Ian McDonald set in a cyberpunk future India: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html Bacigarlupi's novel is also a kind of cyberpunk but set in Thailand in mid-21st Century. Through genetic modification by various mega-companies a lot of the world's food plants have been destroyed by subsequently released diseases many of which have proven fatal to humans as well. The climate crisis has continued despite the running out of oil, with sea levels rising and the return of sailing ships and some vehicles run on liquefied coal that remains. There has been mass migrations and conflicts. There has also been genetic modification of humans and animals to create the vast megodont elephants and the hazardous cheshire cats. The 'windup' girl of the title is a Japanese bred personal assistant modified to resemble a clockwork doll in her skin and her motions, largely for sexual purposes.
Like McDonald, Bacigarlupi has a pretty frantic story seen from a number of perspectives, though fortunately he kills a few off along the way to reduce the complexity which was a real difficulty with McDonald's novels. Like McDonald he puts in both local language words and future jargon, but I feel, for most of the time he keeps a better control of these so you are not left with something which is incomprehensible to an English-language reader of today. Much of the story revolves around different parts of the Thai government trying to gain power and either keep out or welcome in neo-colonial efforts notably by US corporations.
The book balances all the different pretty well, though it need not have been so long. The coup at the end seems to over-long. However, throughout, there are interesting ideas and believable characters in a future version of the world that seems feasible. This is a good step in the 21st Century move from the US-centric cyberpunk of the 1980s and buries it in South Asian culture without this seeming, to me at least, as cultural appropriation. Notably the behaviour of the characters, influenced by Buddhism and to some extent Islam, is different to if they had all been American or European characters, so this shows us how the different culture would react to this changed world. I have no idea how accurate Bacigarlupi's details are but he seems to have taken a lot of appropriate guidance. While on the same lines as McDonald, Bacigarlupi is more in control of his novel and so while challenging readers it is no surprise it has been multi-award winning.
'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini
I usually try to avoid this kind of novel. The closest thing I came to it was 'The Bridge Across Forever' (1984) by Richard Bach which a friend urged on me and I read over 30 years ago. I had two friends who read particularly pretentious books and it was a challenge to try to dodge what they pressed on me. I am not sure how much of this book is based on Hosseini's life and how much is fictional. There are some scenes, especially the way he escapes so easily from the Taliban, which seems unfeasible. In that situation he would have simply been shot and dumped by the road. Despite the fictional elements, overall this comes off like a 'misery memoir'. There is so much misery in this book from mothers dying in childbirth to childlessness to crippling illnesses to child sexual abuse to brutal executions; even the kite flying cuts the children's fingers on the glass-coated wires. Erratically it covers the first person narrator's life in 1970s Afghanistan and his interaction with his father's servant and that man's son. This is reasonably interesting, showing a society richly, including the eponymous kite running.
The narrator flees the country on the invasion of the Soviets and then the book jumps decades ahead showing him living in the USA and doing very little to advance the story before returning to Afghanistan to rescue the son of the servant's son in Afghanistan now controlled and terrorised by the Taliban. Not only do we get long tracts of misery throughout the latter part of the book including executions by stoning; even in the supposed 'golden age' sections of earlier in the book, the narrator witnesses the homosexual rape of his friend and for much of the book perceives himself as a terrible being, even decades later, for not having intervened. Even minor characters like a friend of the narrator's father and the narrator's wife are compelled to suffer. The book is fragmented and very laboured. Even among the grim scenes portrayed the narrator keeps on flogging himself mentally about his failings. The book is interesting in the insights it gives to Afghanistan over two decades and what it experienced. However, the book is so fragmentary as at times to be incoherent and is too contrived to even be convincing as realistic fiction let alone as semi-autobiographical. I will certainly take more care to stay away from such books in future as twice in 30 years is too frequent to have to wade through such material.
'A Venetian Reckoning' by Donna Leon
This is the fourth book in Leon's Brunetti series and as I noted with the previous one, 'The Anonymous Venetian' (1994) the author appears to have got into her stride. The novel revolves around the killing of three leading businessmen in various locales out from Venice. The reader, though not the detectives, from the start know this is connected with the death of women being trafficked in a Romanian lorry. While she has referenced how corruption inhibits investigations in Italy and how the privileged are protected, that aspect comes to the fore in this novel and it is actually an exploration of how an individual seeking some kind of justice may act in that context and how even the compromised may have certain standards of their own. This novel feels tighter than the first two books and while Leon still slips in references to the geography of Venice and various locations, there is less of the detailed description of Brunetti making his way down various alleys, on particular boats and stopping at bars for coffees and drinks. Leon seems able now to be in control of her material while still providing the flavour of the places she sets the stories that I imagine that some readers really relish. I found myself pleased to recall places around the Rialto Bridge that Brunetti passes near where I stayed in Venice in 2003. I got through this book quickly and while it has very brutal scenes, I found it a satisfying read and thought the reveal was both unexpected and handled well. I have less apprehension about reading the other books in this series that I have been given compared to when I read the first in the series 'Death at La Fenice' (1992) back in March of this year.
Non-Fiction
'Out of Town' by Jack Hargreaves
Hargreaves was a former vet who presented a television programme called 'Out of Town' on ITV 1965-81. I remember seeing episodes of it on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s. It was a nostalgic look at rural life. He was a popular celebrity and so well known in British culture that 'The Fast Show' (1994-7; 2000; 2014) gently spoofed the series with their character Bob Fleming and his programme 'Country Matters', you had to be of my generation or older to know what they were ridiculing.
This book covering Hargreaves's childhood on a dairy farm in Yorkshire up to 1929 and referring back to memories of his parents and grandparents. Each chapter takes a different aspect whether it be horses or dogs going to market or hunting. The text meanders between memories and is a very gentle read. It brings up names for things and skills that have often been forgotten and is a fascinating read. Only occasionally does the modern world intrude. Hargreaves though from a richer family than his neighbours and going on to study at veterinary school, was very dismissive of social class and indeed, ironically, social mobility. His attitudes to race are painfully dated. He adheres very much to the concept of 'station' and people remaining in what they had been born to. Writing the book in 1987 he believed that there would never be a Labour government in Britain ever again. He is very supportive of the Roma community but scathing of New Age Travellers. He seems ambivalent towards fox hunting seeing it as ineffective way of controlling foxes but wanting it to continue as part of country culture.
Aside from these jarring moments, I enjoyed the book and found it both an easy read and informative. It is certainly a useful resource if you want to set a novel in late 19th century/early 20th century rural England, especially as he compares what he knew in Yorkshire with examples from other regions that he learned of through presenting his programme. If you have right-wing attitudes to British society then even what intruded for me will probably be unnoticed by you as anything wrong.
Audio Book - Fiction
'You Only Live Twice' by Ian Fleming; read by Martin Jarvis
In sharp contrast to the movie version of the previous James Bond book I listened to back in July, 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963), the movie for this one was utterly different. It would actually be hard/tedious to make a movie close to the book as for much of the story, James Bond is primarily a tourist in Japan and the action is contained entirely in the last fifth or sixth of the book. Unlike his movie persona, but building on the troubles he has suffered in preceding books, Bond is depressed following the murder of his wife at the end of the previous book and is contemplating resignation. He is sent on a supposedly hard mission to Japan to win co-operation of the Japanese intelligence services so that they will provide Soviet messages broken by their Magic 44 decryption system to Britain directly rather than via the CIA. Bond spends much time with 'Tiger' Tanaka, head of the Japanese intelligence service, trying to prove the British are worthy of such provision.
Fleming never conceals his feelings about countries in his books. He loves Jamaica and is very scathing of the bloated, tawdry nature of the USA. With Japan, he much prefers the samurai and Second World War kamikaze traditions over Japanese society and culture as they were in 1964 when the book is set; the year of the Tokyo Olympics. In part, this is because he is highly conscious of how much the US occupation has impacted on Japan. It is an alternate 1964 because USA President John F. Kennedy is still alive with the publication of the book in March 1964, Fleming presumably having delivered the manuscript ahead of his assassination in December 1963. As Jarvis outlines in the interview that follows his reading, Japan in 1964 would be a fascinating place for British readers. Fleming does not hold back from his criticisms of an enfeebled Britain, a problem he lays at the feet of the trade unions who he sees as demanding ever rising pay for lowering productivity, though he has Bond emphasise some positive points. Given Fleming's social background it is perhaps no surprise and you can imagine him shuddering in October 1964 when the first Labour government for 13 years came to power.
We see Bond going around various traditional Japanese locations in Tokyo and on the Kyushu. Ninja are introduced, a novelty for English-speaking readers of the time. While Bond at times ridicules Japanese manners, there is a respect for the old ways. Finally he is dispatched to eliminate Dr. Guntram Shatterhand who has set up a castle on Kyushu with grounds full of poisonous plants and deadly creatures as well as making use of volcanic fumaroles, to provide a location for those Japanese wishing to do so, to commit suicide. Despite the Japanese view of suicide the government is becoming concerned about the numbers making use of the facilities and in return for Magic 44 decrypts ask Bond to kill Shatterhand, who turns out to be Ernst Blofeld, the man who murdered Bond's wife in the previous novel. This all seems a little contrived. However, the closing section of the book is brisk and while successful Bond is left injured and without more than fragmentary memory of his previous life. This is not really an action book, it is more a travelogue giving a conservative writer of the mid-1960s a chance to reflect on various countries and how the modern world was erasing the values he felt were important, if bloody, to cling to.
At first, realising Jarvis would be providing Japanese accents I worried it would be a caricature. However, he does provide voices that sound like genuine Japanese people speaking in English. He decent Australian and Swiss accented English too. As he notes in the interview in no other context than an audio book would he have the chance to play such a range of male and female characters and I think his acting experience shows through.
'Full Dark House' by Christopher Fowler
I realised once I had started this novel, that almost twenty years ago I had read three magic realist books by Fowler: 'Spanky' (1994) - far less lurid than the title and cover make out; 'Soho Black' (1998) and the best of these, 'Calabash' (2000). I was given a lot of the books from his Bryant and May series (I have no idea how he got to use the name of a match company). This one, published in 2004, was the first in the series which up to 2018 has so run through 15 novels and a short story anthology. I was disappointed by even the premise of the book. It features Arthur Bryant and John May part of the Peculiar Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police and madly employed from 1940 until 2004 when they are in their 80s. However, that is as far as the fantastical goes. The crime they investigate is at a theatre during wartime, with May looking back on the crime from some seventy years later. I have no idea why crime authors feel readers like to have so many mysteries set in theatres. I guess it is somewhat to do with the confined space in which to operate. However, it is now such a common trope, and especially with me having recently read Donna Leon's very similar 'Death At La Fenice' (1992), I found this pretty uninspiring.
There is mystery and conspiracy. However, a lot of it feels very laboured even when confined to the wartime. The abrupt jumps back and forth from the 2000s are confusing as it will often take a few sentences to know what time period the narrative has flitted onto. Too much simply seems odd but without adding spark. Both Bryant and decades later, May make use of mediums, but this adds little. In many ways it is too peculiar to be acceptable as a straight forward crime story and yet insufficiently uncanny to fit with what one would have expected from Fowler. I would have liked an outcome closer to 'Calabash'. I do have a lot of these books to read and can only hope, as with Leon, 3-4 books into the series Fowler will have found his feet with the characters and settings resulting in a step up to something with more life than this first entry in the series.
'The Windup Girl' by Paolo Bacigarlupi
This book reminded me of the books by Ian McDonald set in a cyberpunk future India: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html Bacigarlupi's novel is also a kind of cyberpunk but set in Thailand in mid-21st Century. Through genetic modification by various mega-companies a lot of the world's food plants have been destroyed by subsequently released diseases many of which have proven fatal to humans as well. The climate crisis has continued despite the running out of oil, with sea levels rising and the return of sailing ships and some vehicles run on liquefied coal that remains. There has been mass migrations and conflicts. There has also been genetic modification of humans and animals to create the vast megodont elephants and the hazardous cheshire cats. The 'windup' girl of the title is a Japanese bred personal assistant modified to resemble a clockwork doll in her skin and her motions, largely for sexual purposes.
Like McDonald, Bacigarlupi has a pretty frantic story seen from a number of perspectives, though fortunately he kills a few off along the way to reduce the complexity which was a real difficulty with McDonald's novels. Like McDonald he puts in both local language words and future jargon, but I feel, for most of the time he keeps a better control of these so you are not left with something which is incomprehensible to an English-language reader of today. Much of the story revolves around different parts of the Thai government trying to gain power and either keep out or welcome in neo-colonial efforts notably by US corporations.
The book balances all the different pretty well, though it need not have been so long. The coup at the end seems to over-long. However, throughout, there are interesting ideas and believable characters in a future version of the world that seems feasible. This is a good step in the 21st Century move from the US-centric cyberpunk of the 1980s and buries it in South Asian culture without this seeming, to me at least, as cultural appropriation. Notably the behaviour of the characters, influenced by Buddhism and to some extent Islam, is different to if they had all been American or European characters, so this shows us how the different culture would react to this changed world. I have no idea how accurate Bacigarlupi's details are but he seems to have taken a lot of appropriate guidance. While on the same lines as McDonald, Bacigarlupi is more in control of his novel and so while challenging readers it is no surprise it has been multi-award winning.
'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini
I usually try to avoid this kind of novel. The closest thing I came to it was 'The Bridge Across Forever' (1984) by Richard Bach which a friend urged on me and I read over 30 years ago. I had two friends who read particularly pretentious books and it was a challenge to try to dodge what they pressed on me. I am not sure how much of this book is based on Hosseini's life and how much is fictional. There are some scenes, especially the way he escapes so easily from the Taliban, which seems unfeasible. In that situation he would have simply been shot and dumped by the road. Despite the fictional elements, overall this comes off like a 'misery memoir'. There is so much misery in this book from mothers dying in childbirth to childlessness to crippling illnesses to child sexual abuse to brutal executions; even the kite flying cuts the children's fingers on the glass-coated wires. Erratically it covers the first person narrator's life in 1970s Afghanistan and his interaction with his father's servant and that man's son. This is reasonably interesting, showing a society richly, including the eponymous kite running.
The narrator flees the country on the invasion of the Soviets and then the book jumps decades ahead showing him living in the USA and doing very little to advance the story before returning to Afghanistan to rescue the son of the servant's son in Afghanistan now controlled and terrorised by the Taliban. Not only do we get long tracts of misery throughout the latter part of the book including executions by stoning; even in the supposed 'golden age' sections of earlier in the book, the narrator witnesses the homosexual rape of his friend and for much of the book perceives himself as a terrible being, even decades later, for not having intervened. Even minor characters like a friend of the narrator's father and the narrator's wife are compelled to suffer. The book is fragmented and very laboured. Even among the grim scenes portrayed the narrator keeps on flogging himself mentally about his failings. The book is interesting in the insights it gives to Afghanistan over two decades and what it experienced. However, the book is so fragmentary as at times to be incoherent and is too contrived to even be convincing as realistic fiction let alone as semi-autobiographical. I will certainly take more care to stay away from such books in future as twice in 30 years is too frequent to have to wade through such material.
'A Venetian Reckoning' by Donna Leon
This is the fourth book in Leon's Brunetti series and as I noted with the previous one, 'The Anonymous Venetian' (1994) the author appears to have got into her stride. The novel revolves around the killing of three leading businessmen in various locales out from Venice. The reader, though not the detectives, from the start know this is connected with the death of women being trafficked in a Romanian lorry. While she has referenced how corruption inhibits investigations in Italy and how the privileged are protected, that aspect comes to the fore in this novel and it is actually an exploration of how an individual seeking some kind of justice may act in that context and how even the compromised may have certain standards of their own. This novel feels tighter than the first two books and while Leon still slips in references to the geography of Venice and various locations, there is less of the detailed description of Brunetti making his way down various alleys, on particular boats and stopping at bars for coffees and drinks. Leon seems able now to be in control of her material while still providing the flavour of the places she sets the stories that I imagine that some readers really relish. I found myself pleased to recall places around the Rialto Bridge that Brunetti passes near where I stayed in Venice in 2003. I got through this book quickly and while it has very brutal scenes, I found it a satisfying read and thought the reveal was both unexpected and handled well. I have less apprehension about reading the other books in this series that I have been given compared to when I read the first in the series 'Death at La Fenice' (1992) back in March of this year.
Non-Fiction
'Out of Town' by Jack Hargreaves
Hargreaves was a former vet who presented a television programme called 'Out of Town' on ITV 1965-81. I remember seeing episodes of it on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s. It was a nostalgic look at rural life. He was a popular celebrity and so well known in British culture that 'The Fast Show' (1994-7; 2000; 2014) gently spoofed the series with their character Bob Fleming and his programme 'Country Matters', you had to be of my generation or older to know what they were ridiculing.
This book covering Hargreaves's childhood on a dairy farm in Yorkshire up to 1929 and referring back to memories of his parents and grandparents. Each chapter takes a different aspect whether it be horses or dogs going to market or hunting. The text meanders between memories and is a very gentle read. It brings up names for things and skills that have often been forgotten and is a fascinating read. Only occasionally does the modern world intrude. Hargreaves though from a richer family than his neighbours and going on to study at veterinary school, was very dismissive of social class and indeed, ironically, social mobility. His attitudes to race are painfully dated. He adheres very much to the concept of 'station' and people remaining in what they had been born to. Writing the book in 1987 he believed that there would never be a Labour government in Britain ever again. He is very supportive of the Roma community but scathing of New Age Travellers. He seems ambivalent towards fox hunting seeing it as ineffective way of controlling foxes but wanting it to continue as part of country culture.
Aside from these jarring moments, I enjoyed the book and found it both an easy read and informative. It is certainly a useful resource if you want to set a novel in late 19th century/early 20th century rural England, especially as he compares what he knew in Yorkshire with examples from other regions that he learned of through presenting his programme. If you have right-wing attitudes to British society then even what intruded for me will probably be unnoticed by you as anything wrong.
Audio Book - Fiction
'You Only Live Twice' by Ian Fleming; read by Martin Jarvis
In sharp contrast to the movie version of the previous James Bond book I listened to back in July, 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963), the movie for this one was utterly different. It would actually be hard/tedious to make a movie close to the book as for much of the story, James Bond is primarily a tourist in Japan and the action is contained entirely in the last fifth or sixth of the book. Unlike his movie persona, but building on the troubles he has suffered in preceding books, Bond is depressed following the murder of his wife at the end of the previous book and is contemplating resignation. He is sent on a supposedly hard mission to Japan to win co-operation of the Japanese intelligence services so that they will provide Soviet messages broken by their Magic 44 decryption system to Britain directly rather than via the CIA. Bond spends much time with 'Tiger' Tanaka, head of the Japanese intelligence service, trying to prove the British are worthy of such provision.
Fleming never conceals his feelings about countries in his books. He loves Jamaica and is very scathing of the bloated, tawdry nature of the USA. With Japan, he much prefers the samurai and Second World War kamikaze traditions over Japanese society and culture as they were in 1964 when the book is set; the year of the Tokyo Olympics. In part, this is because he is highly conscious of how much the US occupation has impacted on Japan. It is an alternate 1964 because USA President John F. Kennedy is still alive with the publication of the book in March 1964, Fleming presumably having delivered the manuscript ahead of his assassination in December 1963. As Jarvis outlines in the interview that follows his reading, Japan in 1964 would be a fascinating place for British readers. Fleming does not hold back from his criticisms of an enfeebled Britain, a problem he lays at the feet of the trade unions who he sees as demanding ever rising pay for lowering productivity, though he has Bond emphasise some positive points. Given Fleming's social background it is perhaps no surprise and you can imagine him shuddering in October 1964 when the first Labour government for 13 years came to power.
We see Bond going around various traditional Japanese locations in Tokyo and on the Kyushu. Ninja are introduced, a novelty for English-speaking readers of the time. While Bond at times ridicules Japanese manners, there is a respect for the old ways. Finally he is dispatched to eliminate Dr. Guntram Shatterhand who has set up a castle on Kyushu with grounds full of poisonous plants and deadly creatures as well as making use of volcanic fumaroles, to provide a location for those Japanese wishing to do so, to commit suicide. Despite the Japanese view of suicide the government is becoming concerned about the numbers making use of the facilities and in return for Magic 44 decrypts ask Bond to kill Shatterhand, who turns out to be Ernst Blofeld, the man who murdered Bond's wife in the previous novel. This all seems a little contrived. However, the closing section of the book is brisk and while successful Bond is left injured and without more than fragmentary memory of his previous life. This is not really an action book, it is more a travelogue giving a conservative writer of the mid-1960s a chance to reflect on various countries and how the modern world was erasing the values he felt were important, if bloody, to cling to.
At first, realising Jarvis would be providing Japanese accents I worried it would be a caricature. However, he does provide voices that sound like genuine Japanese people speaking in English. He decent Australian and Swiss accented English too. As he notes in the interview in no other context than an audio book would he have the chance to play such a range of male and female characters and I think his acting experience shows through.
Sunday, 20 October 2019
Against the Devil's Men: 'What If?' Novel of Greater Success of the Mongols in Europe in the 13th Century
This is my first book published via Sea Lion Press: https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ I approached them in the summer of 2017 with 'Eve of the Globe's War' (2017): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2017/09/eve-of-globes-war-what-if-novel-of.html but very foolishly pulled out of the arrangement, I am not certain now why I did that. However, I was glad that Tom Black, head of Sea Lion, gave me a second chance with this book. I had always been interested in having a story about what if, in 1242, the Mongols had not simply turned back from Europe following the death of their great khan, Ögedei Khan. This had been stimulated, as had the title, by the non-fiction book, 'The Devil's Horsemen' (1979; revised 2003) by James Chambers. I had picked up a copy remaindered in the mid-1980s though it was not until many years later that I read it, as is often the case with non-fiction books I buy.
My first shot at a story along these lines had been with a novella which is now encompassed as 'Facing the Devil' within 'Déviation: What If? Stories of the French' (revised 2015): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00L45ATYC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i12 That story covers events later than 'Against the Devil's Men' being set in 1272 and based in northern France. The story was not well received especially by one reviewer who is an advocate of the medieval Mongol expansion and feels that any story of the time which is shown from any perspective that is non-Mongol, must be like a project for primary school children. However, I thought, for myself, it highlighted how western European states might have dealt with the Mongols if they had continued progressing farther west. I envisaged that trying to cling on to the European enclaves in Palestine and Syria would have to be abandoned, but that the various crusading orders would have turned their focus on fighting the Mongols. I also saw that the Papacy, under threat in northern Italy and with southern France at risk too, would have withdrawn to the Iberian Peninsula. Given that the threat would have involved numerous Christian states, and indeed Muslim ones too, I imagined that the Papacy would have 'weaponised' much of western European society with both religious and military orders focused on repelling the existential threat.
Thus, from these ideas, I began to decide how I could make a full novel. I settled on three characters to enable me to give different perspectives on what was happening. I wanted to emphasis just how cruel the Mongols were and how unlike other enemies European soldiers had faced, were so destructive no matter whether their victims were Christian, Muslim or Pagan. Thus, I came to include a Cuman horseman, Captain Braçayda 'Barc' Ulas. The Cumans are interesting people who were pushed westwards by the Mongols and received somewhat of a warm reception in Hungary. The Magyars themselves had been a similar nomadic people who had previously settled on the Hungarian plains and become what we know as Hungarians. I also wanted someone who could fight to give action for the story. I also wanted to show the impact of the Mongols on the people in the areas in which they settled, so this led to Sister Aurea of the Mercedarians. She is a half-Mongol, half-Italian woman born as a result of rape who fled into 'France' from Mongol held northern 'Italy'. The Mercedarians were a bold order that were willing to risk their lives for imprisoned Christians; she also provided a way in for what I saw as an undercover mission among the Mongols. Then, finally, to represent how the weaponised clergy was used, I included Brother Cataldo, a Trinitarian friar originally from Venice. The states of Venice and Genoa were known to be flexible in relations with the Mongols and I saw that as liable to grow as the invaders' power extended.
All that remained was to determine what these Papal agents would do and this led to lots of exploration of diseases among horses and how these could be spread. With all these factors in place, my trio - though the story is primarily seen through the eyes of Cataldo - were ready along with a band of soldiers and later some sickening horses to go on their mission. Their journey allowed me to show the complexity of society at the time, especially the multiple states in what is now southern France. There is room for jealousies of both secular and clerical authorities and to look at some of the stunning towns in the region though those in northern Italy, as happened elsewhere the Mongols went, have been reduced to ruins. Along the way the characters encounter people showing what impact the grim threat of people many genuinely believed to be demonic, would have, so there are heretics and millennial cults arising. The Cathars were strong in the region even in our version of the history and have continued when an even greater threat to Christendom has taken priority.
I hope readers appreciate all the details, of food, clothing, weapons, horses, towns and different groups. I was pleased with what I felt was a rich experience with numerous points of tension and scenes of action as well as reflections on the political and religious developments of the time. Some pressed me to include things like sex between Cataldo and Aurea, despite an 18 year age difference between them and both being sworn to chastity. However, I am glad I resisted this and that one reviewer has picked up on the fact that I have been careful to show characters following the views of the time rather than me including anachronistic attitudes from my own. This includes showing people, whether in religious orders or following a heresy or simply fearful of the Mongols, sincerely believing the views of the time; accepting the supernatural and the reality of the Devil and his agents. As such, I hope that while providing an interesting exercise in alternate history story-telling, readers can also enjoy exploring a rich historical context based on extensive research. Of course, if you spot some error, please let me know first before emblazoning them across Amazon reviews.
Monday, 30 September 2019
Books I Listened To/Read In September
Fiction
'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova
The title sums up this novel pretty well, because while it is actually a vampire story, tracking down Dracula across south-eastern Europe and Turkey, much of 'action' takes place in a series of archives. Having spent much of my youth researching in archives, I know how unexciting places they can be even when fellow readers are discussing how they would kill the pro-Nazi historian who has started attending. You have to admire Kostova's willingness to challenge what readers now seem to demand in terms of narrative structure. She has the narrative running in three parallel time periods: 1931, 1954 and 1972. Much information is provided through letters and accounts and it is typical that you are following what is happening in one of these phases but primarily gathering what has happened in an earlier one. To some degree this renders telling the three stories unnecessary and she could have simply gone with found resources. She portrays the various locations very well and is adept at showing the different social mores of the time she is showing, aided by two romances and the fact that a lot of events occur in Communist-era Romania and Bulgaria.
There is some fun with young people having to sneak around in the various locales, searching out lost relatives and enlisting the aid of a Turkish secret society but the book is far too long (704 pages in my edition) and too much is simply about working in archives. Even with secrets about vampires to be found, this cannot, as I know from personal experience, inject excitement into archival research. The final denouement ironically is far too terse. Overall it is a good idea but it has been taken to the extreme so deadening what could have been distinctive about this novel. If it had been 400 pages shorter it would have been crisp and with a greater degree of excitement but still able to contain the non-linear narrative and a different approach to vampire hunting.
'Stettin Station' by David Downing
This is the third book in the 'Station Series' featuring British/American journalist John Russell and German movie star Effi Koenen. It is set late in 1941 with the lead up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which shuts off Russell's last chance to remain in Berlin as a neutral American. The fact that I thought this was the fourth book in the series, I think highlights some of the problems with it. The book follows the pattern of the previous two. Russell spends a lot of time travelling back and forth to places whether around Berlin or, as in this book, back to Prague.
This allows Downing to show great research and knowledge of Central Europe at this time. He is good on the food shortages Germany was already facing two years into the war. However, too often these books are rather like the old Usborne Time Traveller books of the 1970s (the 1990s anthologies of them are now very collectable) in that simply showing what life was like back in the time visited is deemed enough. A spy novel needs more. Russell does lots of things with a kind of half-hearted nature. He gains information and statistics of the trains of Jews already being sent to Eastern Europe for their execution but really does nothing with what he has found. He works for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, in making links to US intelligence, but it falls through. He makes contact with the remnants of the German Communist organisation in Germany, aided very much at arm's length by the Soviets and he eats, drinks, goes to press conferences and travels around, occasionally picking up secrets or finding out the fate of someone.
The best bit of the novel is when Russell knows he has to escape Germany and is aided to get all the way to Riga and then on to a neutral Swedish ship, at much cost along the way. However, even then we do not feel invested in the people he meets. They are gone, arrested, tortured and executed almost as quickly as we have been introduced to them. Downing had excellent resources with which to work, but there is a spark missing in these novels. Russell is very prepared; Koenen even more so and somehow you never feel they are at real jeopardy and Downing fails to connect you to those who end up victims of the machine. To some degree the immense detail deadens the plots and we see far more of Russell on public transport or in cafes than we need to if the novel was to be gripping. The novel is not uninteresting, but it lacks the edge one would expect from a spy novel whatever time period it is set in.
Non-Fiction
'Worktown' by David Hall
This book is about one part of the first years of Mass-Observation an amateur social research project that later developed into working for the government and then became a company. This book focuses primarily on the work done in Bolton 1937-39, i.e. 'Worktown'. It was led by an anthropologist Tom Harrisson [sic] who developed a kind of cult of individuals, typically middle class young men, but some women and some local people who went round observing and interacting with the people of Bolton whether in the workplace, particularly the cotton mills of Bolton or social settings, notably the pub, churches, the cinema and dance halls, often noting obscure things like how long they took to drink a pint of beer or how long people spent buying something. Harrisson was oblivious to sociology and its practices, continuing to believe that he was creating something very new but lacking structure to what was done, a lot of effort achieved nothing.
There was a second branch in Blackfriars, London headed by Charles Madge which used a panel of people noting down their own activities. At times artists and a photographer also became involved. Harrisson was incredibly self-centred and certainly behaved like a cult leader, being lazy in himself but expecting volunteers to labour for long hours; raising some money for the project but leaving the volunteers short of food and running up unpaid bills with local suppliers while gallivanting off to Paris at great expense and using telegrammes when letters would do. As a result of his character, much of the mass of information gathered was never processed and the books promised especially to Gollancz, never appeared. The archive fortunately was saved and transferred to the University of Sussex but much of it remains unanalysed.
Hall's book is fascinating. Despite his focus on the Bolton end, he does give a history of the movement as a whole. However, the book itself is almost a reflection of the chaos of the Worktown project. Particularly in terms of assertions, such as this being an encounter with working class life for middle class participants, Hall repeats not just points, sometimes more than once, but even the same phrases. Even on a single page he flits between topics, going back and forth between telling the story of Harrisson's group and their findings. The chapters are titled as if they are going to cover specific themes but in fact have a very bumpy passage through the material. The book could have been much better organised either simply telling the story first and then looking at the findings in thematic sections of having distinct chapters about the lives of interesting people involved kept distinct from the findings. The group proved to be largely bohemian, drinking heavily and being very promiscuous.
The best bits of the book are the quotations from the observers' reports on a wide range of topics from behaviour in churches, pubs and factories to doing the football pools or attending all-in wrestling, a popular pastime in Bolton. These remind us that while some of the viewpoints seem dated, others are of the kind we would expect now - breast feeding in public being a notable one - and the struggles of working people to afford all the costs of living are familiar today. This is an interesting book, but it could have been a whole lot better with serious editing, but that increasingly seems to be absent in published books, including non-fiction, properly referenced history books like this one.
Audio Books - Fiction
'Trick of the Dark' by Val McDermid; read by Haydn Gwynne
McDermid is a strong crime writer who happens to be a lesbian. This novel features three lesbian and one bisexual characters, but what she has done successfully is make that not matter. This is not a novel making a point, it is one simply featuring some lesbians. Though there are murders involved, the focus of the book is really a psychological investigation when Charlie Flint is called upon by a former tutor to investigate the woman her daughter is seeing who may or may not have been involved in a number of deaths. Flint is able to call on police contacts, but goes about the investigation in an intellectual way rather than like the police. Her lust for one of the suspects, despite being married to another woman, complicates matters. This story could have been set up on a heterosexual basis, it just happens to be that it is not. It is a taut read and generally feels modern. I do wish, though, that McDermid had had a different university to Oxford to be the setting. The UK has 132 universities but too many authors come back just to Oxford (and not even Oxford Brookes). I guess it sells better internationally, but it would be nice to see characters with a university experience not subjected to the oddities of Oxford and Cambridge. This is a one-off story and proved to be well-written and satisfying. Haydn Gwynne had a wide range of people to voice but did the accents pretty well and was very suited to the Oxford ones, even those of an American lecturer.
'A Killing Kindness' by Reignald Hill; read by Anonymous
So far I have been unable to find the name of the man who read this audio book. It is the sixth of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels set in Yorkshire and was published in 1980. You can feel the age of it in the text; Pascoe is very generous in giving 50p pieces to children who feature in the book and the technology with which we are now familiar is absent or primitive, in the case of the computers. Even the use of linguists and psychologists by the police, a graduate in sociology as a detective and a gay detective, all something common now, are seen as innovative/distinctive. It is a traditional crime drama about the murder of various young women, not mutilated but left as respectfully arranged corpses. An added element of gypsies, a flying club and a clairvoyant confuse matters and the looting of a corpse complicates matters. Superintendent Andy Dalziel plays a rather stereotypical gruff Yorkshireman still willing to use intimidation in investigations counterbalanced by the modern, liberal Inspector Peter Pascoe with his feminist wife Ellie, member of various women's organisations; she has a baby during this novel. The aged nature of the novel gives it some charm and it is sufficiently complex to engage without bewildering; the explanations at the end do seem overlong. The anonymous reader does well with a diverse cast and handles the various Yorkshire voices well, as far as I know, living far from the county.
'The Creeper' by Tania Carver [Martyn & Linda Waites]; read by Martyn Waites
I know that publishing houses now cannot afford to employ editors to work thoroughly on novels with the result that you see grammar errors let alone weaknesses in styling and structuring. However, I find it difficult to understand how any publisher let this novel through. It is the second in the series of eight books published 2009-16 featuring Inspector Phil Brennan and his wife, psychologist Marina Esposito. The premise is fine. There is a stalker who penetrates women's houses and unnerves them with 'gifts' before abducting them, holding them and ultimately murdering them. As is common for crime novels now we see through the perpetrator's eyes and get to understand motivations well ahead of the detectives. In this novel there is an added element that the main perpetrator does not work alone. So far, so good.
To start with, one flaw is that, despite Brennan and his pregnant wife supposedly being the leads, we see the story through a wide range of people's eyes. Many of the police have very strong motives themselves; some of those involved are almost comically incompetent and there are whole sub-plots that are pretty petty in nature about police disadvantaging colleagues. Many of them behave in a very over-exaggerated manner in how they speak and act, not aided by Martyn Waites's own narration of the novel he has co-authored. The breathlessness of the text is taken further by Waites's reading of it and simply wears you down. Genuine tension is actually decreased by the insistence that it is a tense scene. The exposition at the end of the book goes on for far too long, sapping any of the tension that remains.
The greatest problem with the book, however, is the language. It really sounds what you might get from an undergraduate who has not studied a creative writing degree. It is chock full of clichés which is bad enough, but then the authors repeat them. I counted two 'heads will roll', two 'heart skipped a beat' and two 'heart hammered' and lost track of how often many others came around. Adjectives are piled on, sometimes four to a single noun. A joke about 'Finding Nemo' referencing the children's movie and a make of van, dates the story very quickly and is repeated, adding to the sense that the characters are poor at their jobs and obsessed with the trivial rather than what should be at the heart of the story. All of this, I understand, is supposed to make the book seem contemporary and gritty like the best of current US crime thrillers, but has the opposite effect, making it seem very amateurish, with language and styling that would be criticised at a writers' group and should have been stopped by the publishers. It is frustrating when there is so much great crime fiction out there which does not get highlighted that a book of such poor quality could have been accepted instead by a publisher and the authors encouraged to continue working in this low standard way.
'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova
The title sums up this novel pretty well, because while it is actually a vampire story, tracking down Dracula across south-eastern Europe and Turkey, much of 'action' takes place in a series of archives. Having spent much of my youth researching in archives, I know how unexciting places they can be even when fellow readers are discussing how they would kill the pro-Nazi historian who has started attending. You have to admire Kostova's willingness to challenge what readers now seem to demand in terms of narrative structure. She has the narrative running in three parallel time periods: 1931, 1954 and 1972. Much information is provided through letters and accounts and it is typical that you are following what is happening in one of these phases but primarily gathering what has happened in an earlier one. To some degree this renders telling the three stories unnecessary and she could have simply gone with found resources. She portrays the various locations very well and is adept at showing the different social mores of the time she is showing, aided by two romances and the fact that a lot of events occur in Communist-era Romania and Bulgaria.
There is some fun with young people having to sneak around in the various locales, searching out lost relatives and enlisting the aid of a Turkish secret society but the book is far too long (704 pages in my edition) and too much is simply about working in archives. Even with secrets about vampires to be found, this cannot, as I know from personal experience, inject excitement into archival research. The final denouement ironically is far too terse. Overall it is a good idea but it has been taken to the extreme so deadening what could have been distinctive about this novel. If it had been 400 pages shorter it would have been crisp and with a greater degree of excitement but still able to contain the non-linear narrative and a different approach to vampire hunting.
'Stettin Station' by David Downing
This is the third book in the 'Station Series' featuring British/American journalist John Russell and German movie star Effi Koenen. It is set late in 1941 with the lead up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which shuts off Russell's last chance to remain in Berlin as a neutral American. The fact that I thought this was the fourth book in the series, I think highlights some of the problems with it. The book follows the pattern of the previous two. Russell spends a lot of time travelling back and forth to places whether around Berlin or, as in this book, back to Prague.
This allows Downing to show great research and knowledge of Central Europe at this time. He is good on the food shortages Germany was already facing two years into the war. However, too often these books are rather like the old Usborne Time Traveller books of the 1970s (the 1990s anthologies of them are now very collectable) in that simply showing what life was like back in the time visited is deemed enough. A spy novel needs more. Russell does lots of things with a kind of half-hearted nature. He gains information and statistics of the trains of Jews already being sent to Eastern Europe for their execution but really does nothing with what he has found. He works for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, in making links to US intelligence, but it falls through. He makes contact with the remnants of the German Communist organisation in Germany, aided very much at arm's length by the Soviets and he eats, drinks, goes to press conferences and travels around, occasionally picking up secrets or finding out the fate of someone.
The best bit of the novel is when Russell knows he has to escape Germany and is aided to get all the way to Riga and then on to a neutral Swedish ship, at much cost along the way. However, even then we do not feel invested in the people he meets. They are gone, arrested, tortured and executed almost as quickly as we have been introduced to them. Downing had excellent resources with which to work, but there is a spark missing in these novels. Russell is very prepared; Koenen even more so and somehow you never feel they are at real jeopardy and Downing fails to connect you to those who end up victims of the machine. To some degree the immense detail deadens the plots and we see far more of Russell on public transport or in cafes than we need to if the novel was to be gripping. The novel is not uninteresting, but it lacks the edge one would expect from a spy novel whatever time period it is set in.
Non-Fiction
'Worktown' by David Hall
This book is about one part of the first years of Mass-Observation an amateur social research project that later developed into working for the government and then became a company. This book focuses primarily on the work done in Bolton 1937-39, i.e. 'Worktown'. It was led by an anthropologist Tom Harrisson [sic] who developed a kind of cult of individuals, typically middle class young men, but some women and some local people who went round observing and interacting with the people of Bolton whether in the workplace, particularly the cotton mills of Bolton or social settings, notably the pub, churches, the cinema and dance halls, often noting obscure things like how long they took to drink a pint of beer or how long people spent buying something. Harrisson was oblivious to sociology and its practices, continuing to believe that he was creating something very new but lacking structure to what was done, a lot of effort achieved nothing.
There was a second branch in Blackfriars, London headed by Charles Madge which used a panel of people noting down their own activities. At times artists and a photographer also became involved. Harrisson was incredibly self-centred and certainly behaved like a cult leader, being lazy in himself but expecting volunteers to labour for long hours; raising some money for the project but leaving the volunteers short of food and running up unpaid bills with local suppliers while gallivanting off to Paris at great expense and using telegrammes when letters would do. As a result of his character, much of the mass of information gathered was never processed and the books promised especially to Gollancz, never appeared. The archive fortunately was saved and transferred to the University of Sussex but much of it remains unanalysed.
Hall's book is fascinating. Despite his focus on the Bolton end, he does give a history of the movement as a whole. However, the book itself is almost a reflection of the chaos of the Worktown project. Particularly in terms of assertions, such as this being an encounter with working class life for middle class participants, Hall repeats not just points, sometimes more than once, but even the same phrases. Even on a single page he flits between topics, going back and forth between telling the story of Harrisson's group and their findings. The chapters are titled as if they are going to cover specific themes but in fact have a very bumpy passage through the material. The book could have been much better organised either simply telling the story first and then looking at the findings in thematic sections of having distinct chapters about the lives of interesting people involved kept distinct from the findings. The group proved to be largely bohemian, drinking heavily and being very promiscuous.
The best bits of the book are the quotations from the observers' reports on a wide range of topics from behaviour in churches, pubs and factories to doing the football pools or attending all-in wrestling, a popular pastime in Bolton. These remind us that while some of the viewpoints seem dated, others are of the kind we would expect now - breast feeding in public being a notable one - and the struggles of working people to afford all the costs of living are familiar today. This is an interesting book, but it could have been a whole lot better with serious editing, but that increasingly seems to be absent in published books, including non-fiction, properly referenced history books like this one.
Audio Books - Fiction
'Trick of the Dark' by Val McDermid; read by Haydn Gwynne
McDermid is a strong crime writer who happens to be a lesbian. This novel features three lesbian and one bisexual characters, but what she has done successfully is make that not matter. This is not a novel making a point, it is one simply featuring some lesbians. Though there are murders involved, the focus of the book is really a psychological investigation when Charlie Flint is called upon by a former tutor to investigate the woman her daughter is seeing who may or may not have been involved in a number of deaths. Flint is able to call on police contacts, but goes about the investigation in an intellectual way rather than like the police. Her lust for one of the suspects, despite being married to another woman, complicates matters. This story could have been set up on a heterosexual basis, it just happens to be that it is not. It is a taut read and generally feels modern. I do wish, though, that McDermid had had a different university to Oxford to be the setting. The UK has 132 universities but too many authors come back just to Oxford (and not even Oxford Brookes). I guess it sells better internationally, but it would be nice to see characters with a university experience not subjected to the oddities of Oxford and Cambridge. This is a one-off story and proved to be well-written and satisfying. Haydn Gwynne had a wide range of people to voice but did the accents pretty well and was very suited to the Oxford ones, even those of an American lecturer.
'A Killing Kindness' by Reignald Hill; read by Anonymous
So far I have been unable to find the name of the man who read this audio book. It is the sixth of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels set in Yorkshire and was published in 1980. You can feel the age of it in the text; Pascoe is very generous in giving 50p pieces to children who feature in the book and the technology with which we are now familiar is absent or primitive, in the case of the computers. Even the use of linguists and psychologists by the police, a graduate in sociology as a detective and a gay detective, all something common now, are seen as innovative/distinctive. It is a traditional crime drama about the murder of various young women, not mutilated but left as respectfully arranged corpses. An added element of gypsies, a flying club and a clairvoyant confuse matters and the looting of a corpse complicates matters. Superintendent Andy Dalziel plays a rather stereotypical gruff Yorkshireman still willing to use intimidation in investigations counterbalanced by the modern, liberal Inspector Peter Pascoe with his feminist wife Ellie, member of various women's organisations; she has a baby during this novel. The aged nature of the novel gives it some charm and it is sufficiently complex to engage without bewildering; the explanations at the end do seem overlong. The anonymous reader does well with a diverse cast and handles the various Yorkshire voices well, as far as I know, living far from the county.
'The Creeper' by Tania Carver [Martyn & Linda Waites]; read by Martyn Waites
I know that publishing houses now cannot afford to employ editors to work thoroughly on novels with the result that you see grammar errors let alone weaknesses in styling and structuring. However, I find it difficult to understand how any publisher let this novel through. It is the second in the series of eight books published 2009-16 featuring Inspector Phil Brennan and his wife, psychologist Marina Esposito. The premise is fine. There is a stalker who penetrates women's houses and unnerves them with 'gifts' before abducting them, holding them and ultimately murdering them. As is common for crime novels now we see through the perpetrator's eyes and get to understand motivations well ahead of the detectives. In this novel there is an added element that the main perpetrator does not work alone. So far, so good.
To start with, one flaw is that, despite Brennan and his pregnant wife supposedly being the leads, we see the story through a wide range of people's eyes. Many of the police have very strong motives themselves; some of those involved are almost comically incompetent and there are whole sub-plots that are pretty petty in nature about police disadvantaging colleagues. Many of them behave in a very over-exaggerated manner in how they speak and act, not aided by Martyn Waites's own narration of the novel he has co-authored. The breathlessness of the text is taken further by Waites's reading of it and simply wears you down. Genuine tension is actually decreased by the insistence that it is a tense scene. The exposition at the end of the book goes on for far too long, sapping any of the tension that remains.
The greatest problem with the book, however, is the language. It really sounds what you might get from an undergraduate who has not studied a creative writing degree. It is chock full of clichés which is bad enough, but then the authors repeat them. I counted two 'heads will roll', two 'heart skipped a beat' and two 'heart hammered' and lost track of how often many others came around. Adjectives are piled on, sometimes four to a single noun. A joke about 'Finding Nemo' referencing the children's movie and a make of van, dates the story very quickly and is repeated, adding to the sense that the characters are poor at their jobs and obsessed with the trivial rather than what should be at the heart of the story. All of this, I understand, is supposed to make the book seem contemporary and gritty like the best of current US crime thrillers, but has the opposite effect, making it seem very amateurish, with language and styling that would be criticised at a writers' group and should have been stopped by the publishers. It is frustrating when there is so much great crime fiction out there which does not get highlighted that a book of such poor quality could have been accepted instead by a publisher and the authors encouraged to continue working in this low standard way.
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