The Weight of the Dead - Brian Hodge

 A novelette, a work of fiction longer than a short story, shorter than a novella, typically between seven and seventeen thousand words: that is what Brian Hodge has written here.   It turns out to be the perfect length.   Less would have been inadequate, more would have been padding.   It is a form I really must experiment with myself.

The Weight of the Dead is not post-apocalyptic, it is post-frazzle.   Within living memory the Day the Sun Roared caused a power surge which burned out all electrics, instantly turning the Technological World into what survivors called the World Ago.   Without tech or transport humankind reverted to nomadic lifestyles.   A generation later they began to settle into fortified villages, like the one Melody Banks lives in.   Melody is fourteen; the male of the species is being to notice her.   One such, Ted Harkin, became inappropriate, causing Melody's father Grady to beat his brains out.   Now Grady must pay the price.

The villagers are not barbarians.   They do not have the death penalty.   Instead, Grady Banks must bear the weight of his crime - literally.   Harkin's corpse is fastened to him and he is banished into the woods outside the defences until such time as his burden is lifted, either by death or putrefaction.  Obviously Melody can go out and visit, take her father food and necessary supplies, but she cannot take anything that might free him of Ted's corpse.

The woods are not entirely safe.   Myths and rumours have already evolved about the people who wander out there and what they might have become...

A really skilful, beautifully written and controlled, example of short weird fiction.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years - John Scalzi

 Continuing the theme from my last post, 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, is not a novelette, it is a longish short story.   John Scalzi is an award winning American novelist.

The theme here is time travel, which has become a reality in the not-so-distant future.   This future is a continuation of our world, so naturally it has become commercialised.   Cost of the tech makes it an elite luxury, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience for others.   Our unnamed narrator is (apparently) the man who works the machine.

Scalzi takes the time to outline the process and its rules.   There are two chambers and two doors, one in, one out.   Customers go out to their chosen time, and come back a second later through the other door.   It is a second in our time but in theirs it has been either 3 days, 9 months, or 27 years.   These are the 'resonances' that have been found to work best.   It doesn't matter if they interact with their younger selves or successfully intervene in the assassination of JFK (the traditional rules of time travel fiction) because the moment they arrive in the past an alternate reality has been created, which then continues.   They can travel to any time in the past, near or distant, so long as it is longer than 27 years ago.   They cannot travel forward in time.   That is impossible because the future doesn't yet exist.   That is the official line.  But of course it is possible...

It is amazing how many ideas Scalzi gets into such a short work whilst carefully avoiding techno-babble or pontificting.   This is a thought-provoking read with a really effective twist.   I'm very impressed.

A Cold Wind from Moscow - Rory Clements

 The latest in the Tom Wilde series, A Cold Wind from Moscow is a particular rich example of what is best in a long-running series.   Time has moved on (to 1947 and the UK's coldest recorded winter), characters have developed and changed (Philip Eaton has apparently been outed as a 'useful idiot' for Stalin's Soviets) and new characters have stepped forward to take their place.   Freya Bentall, for example, is the de facto boss of MI5, albeit the former police gangbuster Percy Sillitoe is the nominal chief.   She asks Professor Wilde to take a short break from his university duties to try and identify which of three MI5 agents is possibly a double.   Meanwhile Uncle Joe Stalin has personal instructed his 'black work' specialist Lazar Lukin to go to the UK and stir up chaos in order to shield their prime nuclear asset Klaus Fuchs who, as Clement neatly points out, was the man who built the nuclear bombs of America, Britain and Russia.   Among Lukin's alloted tasks is the elimination of another veteran of Los Alamos, Basil Rheinhaus.   Reinhaus is a brilliant scientist with a gambling problem, which led Fuchs to try and recruit him as a Russian asset.   Reinhaus, however, preferred to report Fuchs to MI5 and is now in hiding.   One of Tom's suspects is Reinhaus' contact man.   He takes Wilde to an arty event at the home of the super-rich socialite Vivienne Chalke, at which Wilde recognises Reinhaus.   Then all hell breaks loose.

And, I almost forgot, the novel opens with the murder by ice axe of another MI5 agent in Tom's set at college.

A Cold Wind from Moscow is the best of the Wilde novels I have read to date.   Several of the supporting characters are superb, Vivienne Chalke for instance, and East End ice-axe man Terry Adnams.   Tom's wife Lydia is training to be a doctor at St Ursula's in London and I missed her dry wit, and I didn't take to the young woman the Wildes have drafted in to look after their young son.   Other than that, I found only one misjudgement on Clements' part: there is an unnecessary appearance by three of the actual Cambridge spies in the epilogue.   Why?   Unless, of course, that is our clue as to what comes next in the series?   We shall see.

The Strings are False - Louis MacNeice

 An Unfinished Autobiography is the subtitle and something of an understatement.   A Scarcely Begun Autobiography would be more accurate.   What it is, in detail, is a conflation of two manuscripts left with his friend E R Dodds in 1941 (when MacNeice was only 34) and not touched again until after MacNeice's death in 1963.   It is then padded out with another account by MacNeice of his childhood and an essay by John Hilton who knew him well at school and university.

There is thus nothing about MacNeice's innovative and important radio plays, virtually nothing about his writing or his close association with W H Auden and Stephen Spender.   The other member of the circle, Cecil Day Lewis, only merits a single line in The Strings are False; it as if MacNeice barely knew him.   Indeed, why anyone who seems determined to say nothing revelatory about himself or his emotional life should want to even start an autobiography defeats me.   His divorce - his wife ran off to America with their lodger, leaving MacNeice to bring up their year-old son alone - warrants only slightly more detail than Day-Lewis.   He doesn't bother to tell us the lodger's actual name (Charles Katzmann).

That said, this is all there is - the only personal writing MacNeice ever did.   Before the war (the time I am reseaching) MacNeice seems to have been the perpetual absentee in literary circles - always somewhere else - but nevertheless making a name for himself as poet and lecturer.   If you want to know about Auden in the Thirties (and again, I do) you have to read The Strings are False.   If you have to read The Strings are False, it helps to know quite about poetry of the 1930s and MacNeice's place in it.

Blacktop Wasteland - S A Cosby

 I picked this up by chance in my local library - and what a treat it turned out to be!   I recently lost a week trying to cme to terms with William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolum (great writing but the action pushed so far back I simply couldn't engage).   Blacktop Wasteland is set in a similar landscape but seen from a very different viewpoint.

To start with, the majority of characters are (like the author) black.   Beauregard 'Bug' Montage learnt how to be a wheelman from his long-vanished father Ant.   Indeed he served a manslaughter sentence in youth detention for running down a bunch of crooks threatening to kill Ant.   Now he runs an auto repair shop in Red Hill with his cousin Kelvin and lives in a double-wide with his wife Kia and two boys.   But he still has the car he did the killing with and races it sometimes in outlaw muscle-car drags.

A rival repair shop has opened up in town.   Beauregard's business takes a hit.   Debts are mounting.   Then Ronnie Sessions turns up with a diamond heist for which he needs the best possible wheelman, which is Bug.   Everyone knows Ronnie Sessions is white trash.   He still owes Bug for the last job they did together.   But Bug is desperate for ready cash.   One big score will clear all his problems and allow him to refurbish his shop and thus see off the competition.   And it turns out the hit is much bigger than anyone thought.   Problem is, the jewelry store that held it was a front for mob moneylaundering.

The standout element of Blacktop Wasteland is the way Cosby handles the driving action.   He takes us all the way into Bug's mind as he's doing it, the rational decision-making process and the visceral thrill alongside.   We speed with Bug.   We become totally invested in the outcome.   Despite the brutality, the unsparing treatment of the ripples which spread out from his illegal actions, we want him to win.

Blacktop Wasteland is no mean debut.   I'm looking out for Cosby's next.

Middle Eastern Mythology - S H Hooke

 

I can never resist a Pelican blue.   This appears to have been published in 1963 when its author was 89.   That can't be right, surely?  I can find no source that gives an earlier date, and certainly this short overview presents us with a long lifetime's consideration of what became the root of three of the world's great religions.

It begins with a discussion of the elements of myth and ritual.   Hooke then moves on to Mesopotamian myths, which of course includes the Gilgamesh cycle which fascinates me.   Egyptian myth does not interest me so much and yet it has to be covered here because it clearly influenced the Jews that Moses led out of Egypt and Hooke is excellent in highlighting the links - for example, Moses being hidden to avoid the slaughter of the first-born in Egypt and Jesus being taken into Egypt to escape Herod's slaughter of the first-born.   I have no idea, even after carefully reading the chapter, where Ugaritic myths arose.   I have some very basic understanding of the Hittite cultural and at least know where it was based.

Hooke then moves on to Hebrew mythology which, as a white Englishman who won all the prizes at Sunday school, is also my mythology.   Hooke is downright brilliant here (he was the editor in chief of a Bible in 'basic' English which I must get hold of).   He definitely added to my knowledge, particular in relation to Joshua and the myths of Elijah and Elisha.   He devotes a short but separate chapter to the Book of Daniel, which is outright brilliant.   He rather boldly, I think, for 1963, ends by following the myths into the New Testament.   Here, my personal interest lies in the four gospels and their authors; Hooke covers them but shies away from John (which I consider to be the most reliable) because it contains the least myth and almost no ritual.

Excellent book, highly readable and strikingly modern, especially when we remind ourselves that S H Hooke was born in 1874 and was a grown man when Queen Victoria died.

The Honorary Consul - Graham Greene

 A major novel from 1973, The Honorary Consul is Greene at his very best.   On the Argentinian border with Patagonia, Charley Fortnum, a mate farmer who has never been to his father's homeland (and never much cared for his father), has somehow become the Honorary Consul for the few, the very few, locals who can claim British protection.   It's a pleasant title that means nothing, albeit Charley has managed to persuade local customs that he is entitled to the diplomat's perk of a new car every couple of years, which he promptly sells on.

The US ambassador is in Argentina and wants to visit Charley's patch.   Charley's deep local knowledge is useful, and he does speak the local languages.   He has recently married a young Argentinian girl (she is eighteen at most, Charley is sixty) and she is pregnant.   All is looking good for Charley.

But then Charley is kidnapped by Patagonian rebels who mistake him for the US Ambassador.   An unlikely go-between with the kidnappers and the Argentinian security services is Dr Eduardo Plarr, a Patagonian exile, who was at school with one of the kidnappers, drinks with Charley, and is the father of Charley's much anticipated child.

Eduardo's English-born father has been a political prisoner in Patagonia for more than a decade.   He is one of those to be freed as part of the kidnappers' demands.   Even that has been bodged.   One of the kidnappers was in the same prison and saw Plarr senior shot down dead trying to escape.   The whole thing is hopeless from the outset.   Britain isn't going to pull out the stops for a consul who is only honorary.   The general who rules in Patagonia is on holiday in Argentina and may not even know what has happened.

Eduardo's old schoolfriend Leon is a former priest.   Thus the main characters end up in a native hut, the forces of law and order closing in, discussing the role of God in the modern world and the true nature of male honour.   Fascinating, compelling, ingeniously constructed, and absolutely brilliant.   If you only read Greene's early work, good though that is, you might wonder how come everyone thought he should be in the running for the Nobel Prize.   This is why.

The Night Wire - (ed) Aaron Worth

 I have long been a devotee of these British Library anthologies of forgotten writing of the weird.   Many of them are reviewed elsewhere on this blog.   They are always a mixed bag and one cannot expect to find them all of equal standard.   The Night Wire, which on the face of it should be exactly my milieu being focused on weird media (cameras, telegraphy, radio and television, all of them my specialty) sad;y turned out to be the exception.   A couple of them caught my attention.   Unfortunately none thrilled me in any way or sparked my imagination.   Even Rudyard Kipling, describing the early experiments of Marconi and possible contact with the Other Side, turned out to be a beautifully written dud.   Sorry, just not up to the usual standard.

Other Paths To Glory - Anthony Price

 Anthony Price won the CWA Silver Dagger for his debut, The Labyrinth Makers (reviewed here earlier this year).   He won the Gold Dagger for this in 1974, which was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, the best of the last fifty years.   It is really quite something.

Price sticks with the unlikely hero of The Labyrinth Makers, the eccentric polymath Dr David Audley of Military Intelligence.  But he is not what might be called the front line protagonist here.   That is Paul Mitchell, a young researcher who is making himself an expert on certain aspects of World War 1.  Mitchell is researching at the Imperial War Museum when he is approached by Audley and Colonel Butler.   They want academic assistance - something to do with the Somme.   Mitchell refers them to his superviser, Professor Emerson.

That night, returning home via the canal towpath, Mitchell is approached by two other men.   They too ask if he is Mr Mitchell.   They don't want assistance.   They want to kill him and chuck him in the canal.  Fortunately he survives, which is more than his mentor Emerson managed earlier in the day.   He was bludgeoned to death in his own home, which was then set on fire, destroying all the research for his next groundbreaking book.

Before he knows it, Mitchell is in Flanders Field, disguised as Paul Lefevre of the Tank Corps, seconded to assist coach tours of veterans revisiting their traumatic youth and paying respects to fallen comrades.   But one war cemetery, by Bouillet Wood where hundreds of troops were simply annihilated, is difficult to access.   This is because the French secret service have acquired the manor house there for secret summit meetings, one of which is scheduled imminently.

That, as we might expect in a first rate espionage thriller, is not strictly true, and it is Mitchell's task to find the truth.   He is backed up by Audley, who has been drawn in by his French counterpart and old friend 'Ted' Ollivier, and Nikki MacMahon, who really isn't a representative of the French Ministry of Tourism.

Other Paths To Glory is every bit as good as The Labyrinth Makers (for me, it was slightly better but only because it is about precisely the aspects and events of WW1 that most interest me).   Like the very best thriller writers - like Len Deighton, for instance - you feel confident that Price has done his research and knows his subject backwards.   There's an excellent quote on the back of this edition, from the Sunday Times: 'Price unbeatably blends scholarship with worldliness, flattering us to bits."   Yep.

In Flanders Field - Leon Wolff

 Wolff (1914-91) was an American author who only wrote four books, of which In Flanders Field (1958) was by far the most important internationally.   It set in stone the image of Earl Haig's incompetence during the Allied campaign of 1917 - "The greatest and most futile slaughter in modern times", like it says on the cover blurb.

Wolff is no academic.   His account is down-to-earth, detailed and brutally factual.   The notes and sources are here, as they should be, but relegated to the end so as not to interfere with the journalistic narrative.   The literature review, with which most of us begin, is in the last chapter, which is about what happened to the main characters next.   Usually I would shy away from that sort of epilogue but Wolff makes it eminently worthwhile as a means of highlighting Haig's fate.   He got his earldom and a grant; otherwise he was ostracised from the corridors of power.

To show how powerful and important this book is, not just to academics and students but to anyone who cares about the issues of war, this is how Wolff handles the conclusion of hostilities:

It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452.   Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million.   The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude.