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.

The Night of Wenceslas - Lionel Davidson

 I have reviewed three other Davidson novels on this blog: The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights in 2019 and The Chelsea Murders in 2022.   I was bowled over by the first two but found the latter to be as bad as I thought it was when I read it as a young man.   I can therefore place Davidson's first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, in context.   It is as good in its way as Kolymsky Heights, not quite as good as The Sun Chemist, and leaves me wondering how anyone who could start with a novel as complex and thrilling as this could end up wasting time and paper and ink on something as trite as The Chelsea Murders twenty-five years later.

Wenceslas is in the tradition of John Buchan.   A young man gets accidentally involved in an international conspiracy, ostensibly about unbreakable glass, in fact about Cold War espionage.   The Cold War element is probably what made it so successful in 1960 (it won two awards).   Davidson was ahead of Le Carre and the Bond films and Len Deighton.   He takes us behind the Iron Curtain, to a communist country that no longer exists (Czechoslavakia), to a Prague as yet unblighted by drunken tourists on stag nights, an imperial gem under a fairly light-touch autocracy in which everyone is expected to keep a wary eye on one another.

We are about half way through, and our hero Nicolas Whistler is on his second trip when we begin to suspect there is something deeper going on here.   Nicolas has taken up with a local girl - Davidson, with a touch of genius, makes her a hefty Slavic girl, by no means without charm - and has cultivated a working relationship with the floor attendant in his luxury hotel.   He finds ways of using them to make his escape from the secret police to the British Embassy.   He has to do so during the National Celebration.   Fantastic stuff, and as in Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Davidson seems to know his stuff.   He lived in Israel for a time, which explains Sun Chemist but Soviet Russia and 1960 Prague?   Indeed, he seems to know these places better than he knew London in the 1980s.   That said, his portrayal here of bedsit London recovering from the Blitz, with lock-up garaages and men of dubious natonality in obscure offices strikes all the right notes.

The Night of Wenceslas has not only restored my faith in Lionel Davidson, I've already bought another.

The Silence - Don DeLillo

 I've reviewed two DeLillo novels previously on this blog, Running Dog in 2015 and Libra in May this year.   The Silence is nothing like either of them and yet it is quintessentially DeLillo.

DeLillo specifically calls it a novel but it is really a novella, only 116 pages in huge and beautiful American typewriter font.   There are only five characters: Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, who we find onboard their flight from Paris to New Jersey; and an older couple in their New York apartment, Max Stenner and Diane Lucas, and their guest Martin, who is a physics teacher and Diane's former student.   Martin has an obsession with Einstein's 1912 manuscript of The Special Theory of Relativity, which he can and does quote from.

It is Super Bowl Sunday 2022 (but DeLillo wrote the book in 2020) and the game is about to start.   Jim and Tessa are due to join the party later.   But something happens.   The TV blacks out.  The same system failure hits the plane.   Fortunately the pilot is able to glide in.   Motor vehicles still work but all digital systems are down.

There is no resolution - and, of course, in real life we would be able to do nothing in this situation, no matter if our domestic group included a retired physics professor and a savant on the theory of Relativity.  The lack of resolution is another trait suggesting this is really a novella or longish short story.   Whatever it is, it's damn fine writing.

The Underground Man - Ross Macdonald

 This is one of the later Lew Archer novels.   Archer is middleaged, methodical.   He is, basically, Paul Newman in his prime.   Newman played him in Harper and The Drowning Pool but Peter Graves took the role in the TV adaptation of The Underground Man.

The story is essentially one of a disfunctional family in and around old money.   The old rich are aloof and stuck in their ways, the infiltrators are either nouveau riche or grifters.   Macdonald comes up with a brilliant metaphor.   The Broadhurst family owned the entire canyon until Mrs Broadhurst entered into a dubious deal with property developer Brian Kilpatrick.   Now the hills and forest above the new housing are ablaze.

Mrs Broadhurst married a fly-by-night pilot after the war.   He soon left her for a local teacher.   Mrs B's son Stanley is obsessed with finding his father - but now Stanley has disappeared.   He was last seen in his sports car with a very young woman who the day before was so stoned she jumped off a yacht into the sea and Stanley's young son Ronny, whom Archer had come across in his yard that very morning.   It's all very incestuous (without actually being incestuous) - a restricted number of closely interrelated relationships most of which involve abandonment.

Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar, 1915-83) was a master craftsman and was in his prime with the Lew Archer series.   The story moves along at a brisk place, the writing chiselled to a fine edge without ever going to extremes.   There is psychological depth, suspense, and whilst Archer himself never seems to be in danger, the necessary jeopardy comes from the fire, which is especially effective given what happened lately to Southern California.

Another (#21) in Penguin's magnificent Crime & Espionage series of Modern Classics.