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Monday 18 March 2024

Nova Scotia - John Byrne


 Nova Scotia (2008) is the fourth part of Byrne's Slab Boys tetralogy.   It brings things into the era of devolved Scotland and cell phones.  It is not as powerful as the first and second plays of the trilogy (the second is not very good at all - see my review below from late last year).   Sex and death are not such motivators for those in late middle age.   And Byrne makes far too much of the new mobile technology.   We must be thankful he didn't carry the story on into smartphone territory.

Phil McCann is still the dropout painter of 1958 who has failed to ever drop in.   His young partner Didi, though, is hugely successful, her installations have her up for the Turner Prize and a possible Thames & Hudson book.   Didi supports Phil in a Highland Castle.   The action takes place in the garden area where Phil has built himself a studio which every else assumes is where they store their bins.

Didi has given permission for an arts feature to be made in the grounds.   What no one has yet realised is that the subject is Phil's old mate from the Slab Boys, George 'Spanky' Farrell, now a living legend in LA, and now back with the sex-bomb of the old print shop, Lucille, who was also briefly married to Phil.   Lucille and Phil's son Miles is directing the feature.   Miles has also been doing some research into the complex family tree, using a technology that is highly relevant to the plot, DNA.

There are some fine moments in the play, notably regarding the DNA, which those familiar with Byrne's story will be able to guess.   Phil, of course, is a version of Byrne, though nowhere near so famous or successful.   Is Didi Tilda Swanson?   Only in terms of age difference.   Is Spanky Gerry Rafferty?   Possibly.   These are the games Byrne encourages us to play.   Nova Scotia is, generally, a fun game, a fitting swansong for Byrne's theatrical career.   The book, like its predecessor, also gives us his drawings, which are as brilliant as ever.   

Sunday 17 March 2024

Reconstruction - Mick Herron


 Reconstruction (2008) is Mick Herron before Slough House.   Immediately before - so close on Jackson Lamb;s heels we can almost smell his fags.   But tt's not Slough House and it's not about Slow Horses.   Instead it's about how a Secret Service forensic accountant Ben Whistler ends up negotiating a hostage situation in Oxford in, of all places, a pre-school nursery.

The Dogs are here, and have clearly messed up.   The Dogs are unleashed because one of Ben's colleagues, Miro Weiss, has gone missing.   Along with quarter of a billion pounds syphoned off from the money that was supposed to be reconstructing Iraq.   Or, more exactly, from the funds that had already been syphoned off by the crooks who were contracted and sub-contracted to do something about the mess Bush and Blair had created in Iraq.   Miro has vanished without trace, which was not surprising, given that he had largely lived without trace.   Ben Whistler worked in the same office but barely knew him.   Then, out of the blue, Miro's boyfiend, Jaime Segura, rings the SIS asking for Ben Whistler.

The Dogs are unleashed: Bad Sam Chapman and Neil Ashton.   It's supposed to be a simple containment exerice.  The Queens of the Database know exactly where in London Jaime is.   All Bad Sam and his oppo have to do is ... not let Jaime see them coming.   But Jaime does see them coming.   He gives them the slip and hops on a bus that happens to be heading for Oxford.   Bad Sam and Ashton, naturally a little put out, track him to a layby just outside the city of sleeping spires.   Jaime runs.   Ashton decamps from the car and gives chase.   Ashton has a gun, which is news to his partner Sam.   It's a commuter road, rush hour.   Ashton slips, falls into the road and under a car.   The gun goes flying.   Jaime grabs it and flees.   The next thing we know he's wandering round South Oxford asking, not for Ben Whistler but The Lady.

Before you know it he's in the reception class annexe with a pair of toddler twins, two ladies, the guilty father of the twins and an unofficial SIS firearm.   Outside, the media is massing.   Since Bad Sam has gone off piste on business of his own, there's only one answer.   Send in Ben Whistler.

It takes a chapter to get used to how different Reconstruction is from the better known Herron of today.   In many ways it is better than the very latest Herron output because in Reconstruction he is still experimenting, still perfecting his authorial voice.   I ended up thoroughly loving it.   It bursts with twists and subplots and the characters are wonderfully diverse.   I am enthused.

Tuesday 12 March 2024

The Doors of Eden - Adrian Tchaikovsky


 This was my first Tchaikovsky.   To be fair, I'd only recently come across him.   A 99p Kindle deal opened the door and I had already secured my next Tchaikovsky before finishing this one.

Two lesbian crytozoographers are seeking monsters on Bodmin Moor when something happens.   Mal disappears completely, Lee is left alone in London.   Four years later Mal gets back in touch - a different Mal, tougher, fitter, and with what looks like a Neanderthal in tow.   Meanwhile transsexual maths genius Kay Amal Khan is attacked by rightwing loons.   This draws the attention of MI5's Julian Sabreur and his partner Alison Matcham, whose boss Leslie Hind is fixated on a techno-billionaire called Rove, who is somehow involved.

Thus we are drawn into a multiverse which is literally coming apart at the seams.   We discover other Earths which have diverged from ours and are populated by very different evolutionary outcomes.   Tchaikovsky's first stroke of genius is to seduce us with scholarly interludes in which these branches of the Darwinian tree are outlined by Professor Ruth Emerson of the Uinversity of California.   These, she reminds us, are not our Earth - and Professor Emerson is not entirely what she seems.   The second stroke of genius are multiple-choice solutions for the threatened universes, all of them set out in alternate Chapter 17s.

The sheer inventiveness drew me in.   Then there is the scientific/technological depth on one hand, the wit with which leading characters like Lee and Khan are handled.   I normally baulk at books this long but I enjoyed every minute of The Doors of Eden.   Highly recommended. 

Sunday 10 March 2024

The Sacred Wood - T S Eliot


 Eliot's first book of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood, came out in 1920, and consists largely of work that had been published in journals and papers slightly earlier.    Yet there is no mention, not the slightest hint, of the war that set Europe on fire or the covid apocalypse that was currently decimating the survivors.   Instead the man who was yet to write The Waste Land gives us criticism in the style and shadow of the Victorians.   Who now cares about Swinburne or Hopkins?   Yet these are the 'moderns' he writes about whilst admitting that even in 1920 they were somewhat forgotten.   Most of the other critics he discusses are lost to us today.

And yet The Sacred Wood is well worth reading.   It may even be essential to understanding the man who broke the mould and thus dominated English poetry for more than half a century.   His references might be obscure but his reasoning is valid.   He especially stresses the critical dissociation which, certainly to me, still throws a veil over the Four Quartets.   

Eliot and I will have to disagree over William Blake.   We are, however, in accord over the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.   Indeed, I was surprised to find that Eliot shares my belief that Shakespeare was a team-leader rather than a singular genius.   We are in absolute accord over the genius of Dante.  We couldn't be further apart on his youthful ideas about poetic drama.   In that respect I have the advantage of hindsight, but that doesn't explain how I seem to know a great deal more about poetic drama in English in the first quartet of the Twentieth Century than he, as a London-based member of the literati seems to have done.  Where is his mention of Masefield or Yeats?   I shall have to investigate further.



Monday 4 March 2024

Nemesis - Rory Clements


 I enjoyed the first Professor Tom Wilde novel, Corpus, so much (see my review below),  I was always going to pick up future novels in the series.   They didn't actually have the second instalment (Nucleus) so I settled for the third, Nemesis.

It's August 1939, the world is heading for war.   Wilde and Lydia are in France on what should have been their honeymoon.   Wilde is approached with a message from Marcus Marfield, one of his former students.   Marfield is in a French internment camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Marfield was a chorister at Cambridge, with the look and voice of an angel.   Wilde always found him a bit distant, but the least he can do is visit.   He finds Marfield half-starved and wounded - shot, not in Spain but here in the French camp.   Of course he gets him out, gets his wound attended to, and takes him home to Cambridge.

That is when things start to go astray.   Not everything about Marfield is as it seems.   His fahter, for example, commits suicide on the day his son returns to Britain.   Then the psychologist who is persuaded by Lydia to examine Marfield for what we now call PTSD, does the same.   Gradually, Wilde gets drawn into the mystery.

Meanwhile a U-Boat sinks the liner Athenia, which is packed with American citizens returning from Europe, among them Jim Vanderberg's wife and two young sons.   Jim is Wilde's college friend and now with the US Embassy in London.   The rumour circulates that it was really the Brits that attacked the ship in an attempt to prevent Roosevelt joining France and the UK against Germany.

The war is only days old.   A lot of British fascists have yet to choose their side.   A lot of Communists are appalled by Stalin's pact with Hitler.

It's a great premise for a thriller and Clements handles it very well.   Unfortunately it's not quite as good as Corpus.   In places there's something hurried about it.   Nothing a decent edit couldn't fix, but do editors bother these days?   In both books there are little side scenes that are there for plot reasons and don't directly involve the main characters.   In Nemesis there are just one or two too many, the surplus ones explaining plot points we probably don't need to know.   Personally, I tend to take the view that if you're going to do that sort of thing, you're better off doing lots of it.

That said, Nemesis is still a cracking read.   If Corpus was A*, Nemesis is easily B+.   I'm definitely looking out for more.

Thursday 29 February 2024

The House of Fame - Oliver Harris


 I first stumbled across Oliver Harris by chance - I picked up, and was enthralled by, his spy novel, A Shadow Intelligence, last September (see my review below).   I said then I would be interested in his earlier Nick Belsey novels - and here we are with the third of them (out of four to date).   It was written in 2014 and seems oddly dated.   Not in style, content or pace, but nevertheless dated.   I suspect it is the sort of police corruption involved, the old-style heavy-handed fit-ups and sharing out the booty afterwards.   To my mind that's the Met circa 1980, the era of The Sweeney.   Nowadays the Met is corrupt by bending over backwards to the government of the day, beating up the weakest member of any protesting group, and - because the leadership is political and therefore weak - recruiting psychopaths and deviants and giving them guns.

Belsey's antagonist and former mentor, Geoff Bullseye McGovern, is the psychopath.   He recruited Nick to the dark side back in the day.   Nick is now suspended, under heavy investigarion, and squatting in a disused copshop in Hampstead (very contemporary).   An oldish lady bangs on the door, so confused she still thinks that's how to contact the forces of law and order.   Her thirty-something son has gone missing.   Nick has nothing better to do, so offers to help.   The son seems to be obsessed with media star Amber Knight, whose upcoming wedding is the talk of the tabloids.   Missing Mark Doughty seems to be a little too interested.

So Nick wanders the short distance from Mark's mum's council flat to Amber's mansion in Primrose Hill - and blunders into a crazed celebritiy cult in which dissenters are murdered.   Bullseye McGovern is the SIO.   Nick finds himself the chief suspect.


What really caught my eye was the way that Nick never tries to disguise who he really is.  He uses his real name, sometimes tells people that he's a cop facing serious jail time, other times let them go with their first assumptions.   He does much of his investiagting on his phone.   It's fascinating how skillfully Harris steers us through the madness.   And the ending is not only unexpected, it's sheer bloody brilliance.

So that's two series by Oliver Harris I am now obliged to pursue, the spy novels featuring Elliot Kane, and the other novels in the Belsey series.   It sounds like hard work but, hey, somebody's got to do it.

Saturday 24 February 2024

A Fatal Game - Nicholas Searle


 Nicholas Searle is the award-winning author of The Good Liar (2015).   He previously worked in British Intelligence.

A Fatal Game (2019) is about Jihadi terrorism in a large, unnamed British city.   It begins with what seems to be a suicide bombing at the railway station.   The scandal with such events is always, Where were the security services?   In this case they were watching the bomber every step of the way - he was, they thought, one of their assets.   They had checked his rucksack before he set out for what they thought was a trial run; it was full of nothing but books.   He doubtless changed it during a visit to the gents in the park.   Or was it changed without his knowledge?   Did he set it off or was it triggered remotely?   These are some of the questions to be probed in the inevitable public inquiry.   The handler, Jake Winter, is a key witness and our protagonist.

At the same time as he gives evidence from behind the ubiquitous screen, Jake is continuing his day job.   This includes handling Rashid, a former Jihadi who has now been recruited for another planned bombing, this time at the football stadium where City are to face European opposition.   A trial run will take place on the Sunday before the midweek match, when City will play Liverpool.

Jake, a New Zealander with a Maori father, is of course a loner.   He shops in the convenience store owned by the father of one of the station victims.   His superiors in London understandably want him removed from the upcoming op.   How will it look if his trusted CHIS turns out to be unreliable, if the reheardal turns out to be, again, the real thing?   But Jake's local manager trusts him.

We follow the build-up to match-day.   Searle gives us multiple viewpoints, down to the individual would-be terrorists and one of the armed police whose task it will be to tail Rashid to the stadium and, if need be, hard-stop him.   This fractured tachnique pays off in the set-piece finale.

Searle has a winning style.   His characters are all conflicted, all well defined.   There is never a problem knowing whose point of view we are experiencing.   His prose is very effective: technical where need be, literary enough to keep the brain engaged while never slowing down the plot.   In many ways his great achievement as a contemporary author is to keep the book down to a traditional 250 pages.   The temptation, in the era of word-processing software, is to sprawl, which Searle never does.

The very end of the book - the climax of the finale - is thought provoking.   Is it enough?   I suppose some people will think it insufficiently conclusive.   Is conclusive better?   I thought about it long and hard.   My conclusion?   This is Searle's decision.   He chose to leave it there.   The alternative would be to tie up all loose ends.   And that would definitely have been too much.   It is, after all, the point of the structure Searle has given us: the repercussions of these events never fully end.

Monday 19 February 2024

Dylan the Bard - Andrew Sinclair


 Sinclair's thesis is that Dylan Thomas, despite speaking no Welsh, is in the bardic tradition, both a court and public bard.   This works well: Thomas's succeeds best when he personally recites his work, be it the poems or the drama (and Sinclair is especially good on the other Thomas radio play, Return Journey, in which Thomas is the Narrator in search of his younger self).

Sinclair works with the accepted three-part life of Thomas - childhood in Swansea, young adulthood in London, maturity in Laugharne.   As those of us familiar with Sinclair, he is in his element discussing the dissolute life of Fitzrovia, where Thomas lodged with the painters Alfred Janes and Marvyn Levy.  One of Sinclair's other books is War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties (1989).   He also wrote an earlier study of Dylan Thomas, subtitled Poet of His People (1975).  He says this, in 1999, is a rewrite of the earlier work.   To what extent it is a rewrite, to what extent new material, I do not know.   Caitlin Thomas liked his 1975 portrayal of Dylan.   She died in 1994 and Sinclair certainly seeks to assess her role in the story here.

It's a fascinating book, full of insights, and useful to both the general reader and the scholar.   The writing itself is exemplary, every sentence has rhythm and poise.   I loved Sinclair's debut novel, The Breaking of Bumbo [reviewed on this blog, October 2023) and eagerly laid hands on his Gog, which I absolutely hated, so much so that I threw it in the bin.   Perhaps I will stick henceforth to his non-fiction.

The book also contains Sinclair's 1971 account of the making of the film, Under Milk Wood, which he adapted and directed.   No other biographer of Dylan Thomas can offer that.

The Long Drop - Denise Mina


 The Long Drop is Mina's take on Peter Manuel, hanged in 1958 and probably Scorland's worst serial killer.   He was convicted of two family murders (that is to say, twice, for little or no reason, wiping out every member of two unconnected households) and a couple of sex-murders of vulnerable young women.

Initially, the husband-father of the first household, a fairly prominent Glasgow businessman, was suspected and imprisoned.   He got out and, bizarrely, conducted his own investigations, finding Manuel who had written three letters to the businessman's solicitor saying he knew who had done it.   The solicitor always suspected Manuel had done it - how else could he know the details of the house, down to the brand of sherry in the drinks cabinet?   The businessman, William Watt, insists on meeting Manuel.   They go on a truly surreal alcoholic bender, from the posh business bars to the threshold of the Cot, a dive so seedy, naked women serve the drinks.   Throughout they are being sought by representatives of Glasgow's underworld.   The gangsters are seeking both Peter Manuel and William Watt.   Why both?

Interspersed with this, Mina recreates the trial of Manuel.   TRhe Scottish court process is slightly different from the English.   I recently watched a documentary of an actual Scottish murder trial, so some of the anomalies had been cleared up for me (for example, advocate-depute).   But what I saw was a 2023 trial, so it didn't have the final, stunning twist, the judge donning a black tricorne hat and uttering the final, bone-chilling formula.   English and Welsh judges ended with "So help you God."   The Scottish ending knocks that, literally, into a cocked hat.

Dina's storytelling is, of course, superb.   I have never read a bad book by her, something I cannot say for any of her peers in Scottish crime writing.   She has chosen to write in present tense, which I always think works perfectly for true crime.   Where she excels is in taking us into the mind of the two principal men.   Watt is respectable but a wrong 'un.   Manuel could not be further from a right 'un.   He is so monstrous, there simply has to be a mental defect.   Mina portrays him as psychotic.   He can be charming, he always talks more than he should, but he does not get the reactions of other people.   He loves his mum.   He does what he is told.

A brilliant read, masterfully done.

Thursday 15 February 2024

Dylan Thomas - C B Cox (ed)


 This is a collection of critical essays put together, roughly a decade after Dylan's death, by the senior lecturer in English at one of my old alma maters (even before my time).   It makes for an essential primer for the great swathe of critical literature that sprang up after the fatal collapse in New York in November 1953.   Indeed, several of the contributors comment on that event which, of course, they all remembered.

There are no dud essays here.   Robert M Adams is the least interesting contributor for me, because he compares Dylan with an earlier poet (Richard Crashaw) whom I confess I have never heard of.  He died in 1649, apprently.   The most interesting is the final entrant, the American critic Karl Shapiro, who is irreverent and challenging and, to my mind, comes closest to the mind of the man himself.   I shall definitely look out for the work from which his chapter is extracted, In Defense of Ignorance.   Even the title appeals.

From the first four essays - and Cox's introduction = I was quickly able to establish the tripartite map which overlays all criticism of Thomas's work: the early, semi-surrealist poems, mostly about childhood and sex; the second period of seemingly intentional obscurity; and the late, mature period of clarity, the era of Fern Hill, Do not go gently and, obviously, Under Milk Wood.

Still relevant after more than half a century, I commend Cox's book to all new entrants into the work and myth of the most unique British poet of the 20th century.