Joker Moon - George R R Martin (ed)

 Joker Moon is the third of the Wild Cards Mosaic I have read.   It is, I believe, the most recent of the ones I have read.   I still like Mississippi Roll the best, and this the least.   Mississippi Roll works well because the action is concentrated aboard the steam ship.  Three Kings has a strong storyline which, fortuitously, closely mirrored reality.  Joker Moon is unfortunately all over the place, from India in the Fifties to, obviously, the Moon.   And the central character, Theodorus, is your typical Elon Musk over-indulged brat.  Okay, you're going to feel sorry for anyone who turns into a snail-centaur.  But he's still a brat.

That said, there are plenty of more appealing characters.  I liked the all the astro- and cosmonauts.  I liked Tiago, who attracts trash like a semi-human recycling centre.   Even Aarti the Moon Maid, a female Indian mirror of Theodorus has more going for her than, well, than Theodorus.

The main attraction of the Wild Cards series is to enjoy the collaboration of multiple genre writers (11 of them in this case), each developing their theme and characters.  There was no poor or inferior writing in Joker Moon.   Some was exceptional.  I particularly enjoyed the sections done by Michael Cassutt and Leo Kendren.

The Moon and the Bonfires - Cesare Pavese

 The Moon and the Bonfires was Pavese's last novel.  It was published in 1950; he committed suicide in August that year.   He was forty-one.   Some say he was the most influential Italian novelist of his time, which makes it odd that this translation by Tim Parks didn't join the Penguin Classics until 2021.  I bought The Penguin Classics Book this time last year and Pavese isn't even mentioned in the index.

Anyway, this slim volume - a very short novel, I would suggest, rather than a novella - is about 'Eel', a bastard boy given as cheap labour to a fatrmer up in the Piedmont hills.  He works the farm, is given basic skills and an element of freedom.  He observes the farmer's three daughters, he makes friends with other farm workers and with Nuto, a part-time amateur band leader and son of the local carpenter.

After his spell of military service Eel travels to America where he makes enough money to return to his roots after the war, twenty years since leaving.   While it is probably not technically his home, the village outside Canelli is the only home he has ever known, the place he has dreamed about during his time in America.

But he returns to find that everything in the village has changed.  The farms have all changed ownership and almost all the people he knew as a boy have either left or died.   Only Nuto remains, married with children, but still the same philosophical mentor for Eel.   Twenty years ago Nuto taught Eel about life and the possibilities of change.  Twenty years on, Nuto, who hasn't changed at all, guides forty year-old Eel around their old haunts and explains, piecemeal, what happened in his absence.   Mainly what happened was the war.  Was Nuto a partisan?  It is never fully explained.  He certainly had links with the partisans hiding in the hills.  Eel himself becomes a mentor to a lame farm boy called Cinto.  It all ends with two bonfires, one in 1949, one towards the end of the war when the partisans were avenging old scores.

The style is discursive, skipping from Eel's memories to Nuto's updates.  For all his links to this rich soil Eel remains the outsider, the observer - except perhaps when it comes to Cinto.  His recollections of the women on the farm where he was raised remain detached, oddly impersonal; such women were never for him.  He has known women but it is doubtful he has ever known love.  Pavese wrote the book in less than three months yet it is incredibly deep and immersive.   I loved it.   I'm pleased to see that Penguin have also published Tim Park's translation of Pavese's semi-autobiographical novella The House on the Hill.  I'll  be having that.

Crowley's Apprentice - Gerald Suster

 Israel Regardie (1907-85) was secretary, pupil and sometimes friend of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666.   Gerald Suster (1951-2001) was pupil, friend and ultimately memoirist of Israel Regardie.  Regardie broke with Crowley before World War II and after the war qualified as a doctor of psychology and licenced chiropractor, settling in the USA.  Suster visited him there as a very young man and stayed with him in California and Arizona on many occasions.

This memoir therefore, is one notorious occultist (Suster got money out of News International when they defamed him in one of their scandal rags) writing about another.  Regardie had become notorious during the height of Crowley's time as self-described Wickedest Man in the World, and had been banned from entering England even though, like Suster, he was born in London.

In occult circles Regardie was praised and despised in equal measure because he was the one who wrote it all down and made the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn available and comprehensible to outsiders.  It was his writing, of course, that initially attracted Suster.

Crowley's Apprentice is interesting in many ways.  For the generalist it offers valuable insights into the rebirth of magic around 1900 and leads to other sources.

Royal Highness - Thomas Mann

 Royal Highness was written in 1909.  The royal in question is Prince Klaus Heinrich, second son of the Grand Duke of an unnamed grand duchy somewhere in central Germany.   Klaus Heinrich is born with the exact same disability (an underdeveloped left hand) as Wilhelm II, Kaiser Bill, who had been emperor of Germany for twenty years when Mann wrote this romantic comedy.

Klaus Heinrich is very much not Kaiser Bill.  Klaus Heinrich is one of the good guys, trained from birth to reflect well on his autocratic and aloof father and sickly older brother.  So Klaus Heinrich learns to hide his hand and become loved by the people.  He does a good job.  He is only twenty or so when his father dies and his brother Albrecht is recalled from the healthier south to succeed.  By this time the grand duchy is heavily in debt and the rural population is quietly starving.

Duke Albrecht is too highly bred to do anything about such things.  His sister Ditlinde has already married an aristocratic princeling with a talent for modern business, so it falls to Klaus Heinrich to try and fumble his amiable way to a solution.

An American millionaire of German ancestry visits the city to partake of its spa waters.  He likes the place and buys one of the many redundant royal palaces.  He has an only daughter, Imma, who is of mixed heritage (as was Mann through his mother), who is intellectual, sarcastic, and beautiful.  She will inherit all her father's riches.  Klaus Heinrich is genuinely in love with her and all too willing to do his obvious regal duty.  But before he can win Imma's heart, he desperately needs to do something about measuring up to her mind.

Royal Highness is what I didn't entirely expect from Thomas Mann - a joy.  The themes of liberating modernity clashing with stifling tradition are common to the works of his I have previously read (Death in Venice and The Holy Sinner, both reviewed on this blog) but here everything is enlightened by eccentric and oddly charming characters.  The court master of ceremonies with his brown toupee, Klaus Heinrich's tutor and friend Raoul Uberbein who commits suicide the day Klaus Heinrich becomes engaged, and Imma's batty companion Countess Lowenjoul who thinks prostitutes are conspiring against her.

The Great God Pan - Arthur Machen

 Arthur Machen was a Victorian bookman who is remembered today for his weird fiction, most of which (four stories) is collected in this Dover Thrift edition.  Machen was a member of the Golden Dawn so one might expect high magic to figure in his stories.  In fact his theme is primitive paganism and elemental beings.  The theme is in the title of 'The Great God Pan' but the structure of the piece is unexpected.  A doctor literally opens the mind of the young girl he adopted, sending her mindless but also unleashing a devilish offshoot on a death-dealing spree around London.  'The White People', nearly as famous in its own right as 'Pan' , is a bizarre account of what might be fairies or, more likely, those who live underground like the Tuatha.  'The Shining Pyramid' is definitely about the underground people and 'The Inmost Light' has underpinnings of alchemy whilst echoing the beginning of 'Pan' in the forbidden use of someone's essential being.

The stories are weird, not overtly horrific.  Machen deals in suggestion, unease, and comes at his horrors obliquely which only makes them more disturbing.  I am very impressed/

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles - Giorgio Bassani

 Our unnamed narrator is a nineteen/twenty year-old student who lives in Ferrara and commutes to Bologna with a group of fellow students.  The gold-rimmed spectacles belong to Dr Athos Fadigati, a popular ENT specialist with a clinic in Ferrara.  He too is taking a course at Bologna, mainly for something to do on his day off, and gradually becomes involved with the much-younger students, many of whom have passed through his clinic.

The 'star' of the group is the promising young boxer Eraldo Deliliers, who seems to hold Dr Fadigati in the utmost contempt.  But, come the holidays, where the middle-class Farrarese decamp en masse to Riccione on the Adriatic coast, Fadigati and Deliliers turn up together, openly a couple.   Everyone is outraged, but too polite to say anything.  Meanwhile, this is 1937 and our narrator and his family have other problems to contend with.  Fascist Italy is debating whether to implement a Nazi-style race law, and our lead family is Jewish, albeit Papa has been a Fascist from the early days and nobody seems to be actually practicing their faith.  Our narrator, by the way, is an atheist.

It's only a hundred-page novella, on the face of it a take on Death in Venice, but in fact The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is so much more.  Bassani wrote autobiographical fiction, all of which combines into what became known as The Novel of Ferrara.  The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is the second book; the first is a collection of five shorter stories.  Thus he spends as long creating the detail of the town as he does the creation of his characters.  They are one - and yet our hero and Dr Fadigati are outsiders, by race in one case, by sexuality in the other.  Our hero and Fadigati are true friends, supportive of one another.  In an ideal world they belong together.  A lesser novelist might have tried to arrange it thus.  Not Bassani.  He tells it how it was.

A twentieth century classic.  Magnificent.

The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck

 The Good Earth (1931) was not only a bestseller, it won the Pulitzer Prize.  Not bad for what was only her second novel.  Since then it became a classic, then sank into obscurity.  There is no reason for this; it remains a unique and hugely impressive work.

Buck knew China; she was brought up there by her missionary parents and spoke Chinese.  If her story of the peasant farmer Wang Lung seems slightly medieval it is because China was a medieval society before the Boxer rebellion.  His wife O-lan is a slave.  All women who are not either aristocrats or prostitutes are slaves.  The caste system is set in stone.  Yet Wang Lung rises through it, from rickshaw puller to owner of the big house in town.

He is not a hero without faults.  He does his duty by his wife and five children.  He honours senior relatives, even though his uncle is a bandit chief.  But he buys the prostitute Lotus for a second wife and ends up in his late sixties seducing her teenage slave Pear Blossom.  He is lustful for Lotus, protective of Pear Blossom, but the only one of his children he truly cares for is his eldest daughter, brain damaged as a result of malnutrition during a hard famine in the year of her birth,

The thing that drives and sustains Wang Lung is his land - the titular Good Earth.  He is born poor but is luckier than most because his father actually owns the land he works.  In due time he buys other parcels until he owns so much land he can rent it out to others.  He becomes rich but can never find peace until he retires to his old home on his original plot.  The sons he does not understand plan to sell it all when he dies.

Buck pulls off an astonishing technique.  I can think of only one equivalent, E L Doctorow's Ragtime, in which there is not a word of dialogue and yet you do not notice as you read.  Buck's characters are mostly nameless - we don't know the personal names of any of Wang Lung's children, for example.  But this only reinforces her theme: that people are just cogs in the vast social machine of China.  The only individuals, the only characters named, are the ones that manage to break out of their societal chains.

Palomino Blonde - Ted Allbeury

 This is billed, ludicrously, as Tad Anders Book 2 when in fact Tad Anders is barely a bit-part player.  The hero here is Ed Farrow, who lives on a boat moored on the Thames in the heart of London.  The focus, however, is James Hallet, a young science prodigy who has made his fortune from a single patent but who has now, accidentally, stumbled on a super-weapon, codenamed Omega Minus, which every superpower, East and West, is itching to get its hands on.  The trouble is, the technology only costs a few pounds; the secret is intellectual, locked inside Hallet's head or possibly in his computer.  This being 1975, the computer is not exactly portable.

Agents from the KGB and CIA head for London.  Hallet meets a beautiful Danish girl, the titular blonde, for whom he would happily give up everything he has - wife, family, fortune, even Omega Minus, which becomes the stake when the KGB under  rising star Sergei Venturi kidnap Kristina Olsen, take her to the Polish Embassy (then, of course, part of the Soviet bloc) and torture her.  It becomes Colonel Farrow's task to prevent Hallet giving up Omega Minus and rescue the girl who, of course, has been planted on Hallet by the CIA.  This Farrow does in a remarkably brutal but utterly convincing way.

Allbeury, we must remember, was a real long-serving spy.  Thus his descriptions of how the secret service agencies work comes across as 100% credible.  He is clearly on top of the technology involved and in Ed Farrow he has a character as compelling as James Bond or 'Harry Palmer'.   Personally I was taken with the politicians in Palomino Blonde: proper, hard=as-nails professionals who mean exactly what they say and who have the authority to deliver.  Whatever happened to them?

Prince of Darkness - Ray Russell

 Prince of Darkness  is a collection of Russell's magazine stories from about 1955 to 1970.  Several appeared in Playboy, of which he was for a long time fiction editor.   'The Prince of Darkness' is actually 'The Cage', the title under which it was originally published in 1958 and as which it reappears in 1980's Haunted Castles.

The best story here is 'Domino' (1967), which is almost long enough to be a novella.  It is certainly long enough to allow Russell's 'contemporary' style (very different to his 'gothic' style) to work effectively.  It's the story of Jack Straw, a jaded journalist who is lavishly commissioned to cover the funeral of a South American dictator who has died of meningitis.  Straw is the ideal man for the job because he wrote a book about President Mendoza's previous career as a controversial film director who married his muse, a former nude dancer.  Because of the book, Straw has contacts at the highest level of government in the unnamed Latin nation.  It's a story in which nothing and no one is as they seem.  An expert long short story well worth the lesser work that precedes it here.

Shifty's Boys - Chris Offutt

 There's a genre emerging of American bluegrass communities colliding head-on with large-scale contemporary corruption.  I have previously blogged about Ace Atkins' work in this field.  Now we have Chris Offutt's series featuring Army CID officer Mick Hardin, of which Shifty's Boys is Book 2.

Hardin is back in his old Kentucky home recovering from IED injuries and lodging with his sister Linda, the county sheriff, currently up for re-election.  Somebody murders and dumps Barney Kissick, no great loss, the local drug-dealer so low on the scale of social responsibility that he's known far and wide as Fuckin' Barney.  Mick, though, knew Barney in childhood, so feels obliged to offer his condolences to the family matriarch, the titular Shifty.  She asks him to find out who killed her son.  Then she loses a second son, a harmless idiot who never hurt anyone.  And someone torches the cabin Mick inherited from his Pawpaw, incinerating the geek who fixing up the Hardin family truck.  That's simply going too far.  Mick teams up with Shifty's eldest boy, Ray, a Special Ops Marine, and takes on the people with secrets to hide.

It might be predictable but it's great fun and very well written.  Offutt is notably good and adding extra dimensions to his characters.  There's an especially effective scene when Mick delivers the long-delayed divorce papers to his ex.  And Ray is humanised from being just another killing machine by the fact that he is gay, a secret he thought he'd hidden from his mother Shifty, but...

Haunted Castles - Ray Russell

 Round this time last year I reviewed Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan on my blog.  On the basis of that I bought Haunted Castles and now I've finally got round to reading it.   What a book!  A masterpiece of Gothic Horror that has somehow fallen from sight.  Thankfully it's now a Penguin Classic endorsed by the great Guillermo del Toro.

Essentially the collected Gothic stories of Russell (who also wrote sci fi and twist-in-tail stories), Haunted Castles comprises three long tales obviously meant to go together from the outset ('Sardonicus', 'Sagittarius', and 'Sanguinarius') and four shorter works in similar style: 'Comet Wine', 'The Runaway Lovers', 'The Vendetta' and 'The Cage' (also known as 'The Prince of Darkness', the opening story in Russell's collection of the same name, which I'm currently working my way through.)

If I have to name a favourite, it's 'Sagittarius'.  I liked 'Sardonicus' a lot, 'Sanguinarius' a little less, mainly because it's Eliabeth Bathory and I think my own novella about her will be scarier; basically, we take totally different approaches to her character.   'Sagittarius', though, is pure Grand Guignol and couldn't be more to my taste.  One of the characters even performs at the theatre of the same name.  Pure bliss.

Overall, I really enjoyed the way several stories are linked by Harley Street physician Sir Robert Congrave and his travelling pal Lord Henry Stanton.  Stanton's letters to Congrave give Russell another story-telling device which adds texture to his narratives.  It helps that the two friends are so completely different in character.

In summary, Ray Russell is a great of horror fiction, up there with Lovecraft and M R James.  I deliberately exclude living masters because they came after.  Stephen King, of course, is a generation later than Russell but broke through at a similar time.   I wonder if King, surely the greatest horror writer of all time, was aware of Russell when he started out? 

The Chelsea Murders - Lionel Davidson

 I remember this book when it came out in 1978.   It was seen as something of a comeback for Davidson, who then went on to triumph with Kolymsky Heights (reviewed below).   I remember reading it at the time and wondering what all the fuss was about.  Now I've read it again.  And I still wonder.

It is a very silly book.   It contains none of things I like about Davidson (the breathtaking depth of his research, the ability to evoke absolutely convincing extreme locations, the profoundly conflicted characters).  It is a murder book.  The murders are excessively gruesome (I wonder if this is what stirred the critics at the time - was Davidson the first to go so far?), the setting very pretension and the characters by and large off-putting.  The only exception is the mildly eccentric Mary Mooney, a reporter on the local newspaper and stringer for the nationals.  The murderer is not hard to work out although Davidson does a pretty effective job at laying false trails.  The dialogue, of which there is far more than usual in Davidson, is really, really bad.  Some of the faults are of its time and thankfully we have moved on.

If it was the best thriller of the year it was a very poor year.  I see from the back cover that H R F Keating described it as a black comedy.  Dark it certainly is.  Comedy?  Well, perhaps that is what Davidson was trying.  Sadly, he failed.  Badly.

The Summing Up - W Somerset Maugham

 The Summing Up is not an autobiography, albeit it is the only source of autobiographical facts you are get from Somerset Maugham, and the main source of everybody else's biography of Maugham.  Written in 1938, when he was in his early sixties, it is a book of thoughts and reflections on a life which he assumed was coming to an end when in fact he had another thirty years to go.   As such it is unusual and fascinating.   I was fascinated by his thoughts on the theatre (it is often forgotten nowadays that Maugham was the most successful dramatist of his time) and his time as a British Intelligence agent in WW1 (see my review of Ashenden below).  But actually the most absorbing part for me turned out to be the finally 20% on Maugham's philosophy, agnosticism and mysticism.  These are not matters which usually concern me but Maugham managed to hook me in.   He sets out all his workings and makes a very persuasive case.

An excellent book, highly recommended.

The Lair of the White Worm - Bram Stoker

 It's not really a secret that Bram Stoker never equalled anything like the success of Dracula, even though Dracula wasn't that big success in his lifetime.  However, Lair of the White Worm is very disappointing.  You feel the inky thumbprint of Dracula all over it: ridiculously trite love affairs; the Byronic or Irving-esque anti-hero; the arrow-straight man of action from overseas.  The main interest is Lady Arabella March of Diana's Grove, who has set her cap, for financial reasons, at the newly returned Edgar Caswell of Castra Regis, who is, perhaps wisely, more interested in the gigantic kite he flies to scare off birds.

The setting is also of interest: the Vale of Cheshire, which has a deep a history as Dracula's Transylvania.  It is contemporary Cheshire and thus railways play a major role.  It was a rare highlight when the gigantic serpent chased the train most of the way to Liverpool.  Mainly, though, it is very silly and not at all frightening.  The monster is absurd, its linkage with Arabella not thought through, and there are far too many deferred conversations, conveniently putting off gobbets of key information.

It's interesting, particularly for devotees of the genre, but not much more.  It would have fared much better as a novella than as a novel.

Mercury Rising - Robert Edric

 Edric is one of the best, least famous contemporary British novelists.  He is well published - Doubleday and Penguin - and well reviewed, but not adequately promoted.  I found his London Satyr by chance (reviewed on this blog) and have been on the lookout for more ever since.

Mercury Falling from 2018 is another minutely characterised story - the story of Jimmy Devlin (29), dishonourably discharged from the army at the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, who has spent the last nine years on the tramp around his birthplace in the Fens.  Fenland always floods but the floods of 1953-4 have been the worst in memory.  Homes inundated, farms too wet to work.

We start with Jimmy being evicted from one such farm which he rented with the vague idea of becoming self-supporting.  He finds work as a casual labourer on a government drainage scheme, lodgings with Ray Duggan, a farmer with a sideline in scrap, not necessarily legally acquired.  He gradually involves Jimmy in his illicit business, which involves working with the Maguire family, gypsies who spend the winter repairing fairground equipment, building holiday camps, and (inevitably) stealing stuff.

Jimmy's life settles for a while.  He re-establishes contact with his sister, and tries to avoid her husband.  But his transgressions start to catch up with him.  He tries to settle scores, finds there are too many.  The police become involved.  Jimmy is a gunman on the run...

It is masterfully done - one not especially likeable man's inexorable fate rolls out against a sodden, almost alien background.  All utterly believable.  Edric asks the question, how hard was it for the unskilled conscripts kicked out of the army en masse in 1945?  Conscripts with skills, like my father, for instance, were kept on, promoted, their skills enhanced, so they were demobbed into a more settled economy with prospects.  But for the Jimmy Devlins?

If you haven't already come across Robert Edric, I recommend you seek him out.

Somerset and All the Maughams - Robin Maugham

 An interesting and unusual concept - half an account of the Maugham brothers' ancestors, half Robin's memories of his famous uncle with a particular focus on the dislike between Willie and Robin's father, Frederic Maugham, who before this I had not realised was Lord Chancellor of the UK.

Robin brings it all off entertainingly.  Like Willie, he was gay and enjoyed literary success.  Unlike Willie he was unashamedly gay and brave (he was severely wounded in action in WW2).  Not knowing anything of Frederic Maugham before this, I was unaware that any Maugham had become a peer of the realm.  Robin was thus the second and last Viscount Maugham.

The men in the book are all eccentric.  It is the women who shine, in particular Somerset Maugham's wife Syrie Wellcome, nee Barnardo (yes, the daughter of Thomas Barnardo).  Sadly their daughter Liza makes no appearance, even though (perhaps because) Robin claims her as a close friend.

A great pleasure to read.  Essential for anyone interested in the private Somerset Maugham.

Plainsong - Kent Haruf

 Kent Haruf, whom I admit I'd never heard of, wrote a handful of novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.  Plainsong (1999) was his 'middle' novel, and apparently most successful, winning a bunch of literary prizes.

What Haruf pulls off here is an ordinary domestic drama, handled so tenderfully, so delicately, that it becomes something much more.  Yet we lack more or less all detail.  We get only superficial descriptions of the main characters.  The landscape is evoked but never nailed down.  Everything is entrusted to atmosphere and dialogue.  The characters reveal themselves in the way they talk, albeit most of the time they are exchanging superficial politeness.  And yet the story throbs with life.  The characters draw us in.

There are basically two stories at play.  They only come together in the last chapter.  Teacher Tom Guthrie's wife has suffered some sort of breakdown.  She spends all her time in bed until she ups and moves to her sister's apartment in Denver.  It quickly becomes apparent she is never coming back to Holt.  So Tom is left with two young boys to bring up.  Meanwhile sixteen year old Victoria Roubideaux falls pregnant.  The boy wants nothing to do with her.  Her mother throws her out of the house.  Her only recourse is schoolteacher Maggie Jones, who takes her in but can't keep her because of her senile father.  So she places Victoria with two elderly bachelor brothers, Harold and Raymond McPheron, at their farm outside of town.  The relationship that builds between the young girl and the two old men is probably the most beautiful thing in the book.  The iron-hard oldsters also provide an element of gentle comedy.

Tom is subject to a complaint from the aggressive parents of a loutish student.  The student himself takes out his resentment on Tom's sons, ten year old Ike and eight year old Bobby.  This moment of malice somehow equates to the farm-life in which animals are sometimes brutally born yet gently eased into death.  The detail of a calf being successfully yanked out of its mother by the McPherons and Ike's horse being put to sleep by the local vet stand out powerfully from the soft pastoral background.

Plainsong is an extraordinary book, highly recommended.  For once, the 'big name' introduction - by Peter Carey - adds to our understanding and appreciation of what follows.

Adventures in the Skin Trade - Dylan Thomas

 Thomas intended Adventures in the Skin Trade as the successor to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.  The latter was a fictional rendering of his childhood in Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, the former as a version of his first attempt to break free by going to London in 1933.  In real life the key element of his first London life was participation in the Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936.  The fictional version never gets that far.  The discontinued fragment that came out in 1955 - this Aldine paperback - is limited to three chapters covering the day of departure, arrival, and immediate descent into dissolution.

Dylan's fictional alter ego is Sam Bennett, intended to be a passive character whom things happen to.  Thus he stays in the station cafeteria until someone offers to take him home.  The someone is Donald Allingham, a dealer in secondhand furniture, who takes Sam to his three rooms in Praed Street, every room of which is crammed with furniture, thus making rooms within rooms.  There is no water or cooking facility so Allingham takes Sam to Mrs Dacey's informal cafe, where Sam ends up naked in the bath without the company of Mrs Dacey's amorous daughter Polly.  Then it's everybody off to the progressively seedier nightspots - "the Gayspot first, then the Cheerio, then the Neptune."

It is surreal in its way, and colossal fun, but how I wish Thomas had been able to take us to exhibition and finding the spanner to get Dali free of his diving helmet.  Nevertheless, Adventures in the Skin Trade is an essential for anyone interested in the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive.

English Journey - J B Priestley

 

In 1933 Priestley toured England from Southampton to Newcastle and then back to London down the East Coast.  His account of the country, four years into the Depression, was published the following year.

There are signs of the industrial collapse everywhere he goes but most calamitously, of course, in the North, which had been industrialised more intensively than anywhere else.  A Northerner himself, Priestley naturally takes this personally, and his descriptions of deserted shipyards and abandoned factories is at times harrowing.  What prevents the book becoming an ordeal is the way Priestley seeks out the positive - the charitable settlements in towns large and small which give the unemployed a way of occupying their time and expressing themselves, often through choirs and theatrical productions.  Priestley, again, was a great man of the theatre.

The English Journey should be a set book for Sixth Formers but never will be because Priestley makes no bones about who is responsible for the collapse.  The same people who, even as I write, are gleefully trashing the British economy, slashing social support to fund tax cuts for the extremely rich, few of whom live in England any more.

Ashenden - W Somerset Maugham

Ashenden is said to be the fictive version of Maugham's experience as a semi-professional intelligence agent in World War I.  As a famous author, middleaged, and long-term expat, Maugham's presence in Switzerland, France and Italy was unquestioned.  As he famously sociable and civilised, he could easily mix with people of all sorts.  So, therefore, does Ashenden.

The fascinating thing for me was that some of the spies Ashenden tangles with in these stories are easily identified.  Guilia Lazzari, for example, is surely Mata Hari.  Others, I would love to be able to identify. Was Maugham really in Russia during the Kerensky government?  If so, who was Mr Harrington and who was Alexandra Alexandrovna?

Published in 1928, Ashenden is Maugham at the height of his powers.  The writing, characterisation and narrative structure are all superb.  To anyone who hasn't tried Maugham before, could there be a better introduction?  I think not. 

The Axe Woman - Hakan Nesser

 I have reviewed five of Nesser's Van Veeteren novels on this blog (another five to go).  The Axe Woman is one of his other string, the Barbarotti series.  I initially wondered if this was going to be set in an imaginary Italy, as Van Veeteren is set in a fictional Holland, but no, it's set in Sweden - Gunnar Barbarotti is a middleaged Swedish cop with an absent Italian father.  Obviously it's a fictional Swedish town, though.

Anyway, Barbarotti wakes up one morning to find his wife dead beside him, from a brain aneurysm.  They knew about the problem and learned to live with it, but nothing prepares Barbarotti for the overwhelming, shattering grief.  After a few weeks' compassionate leave, he is due to return to work.  His boss, Asunander, wonders if he's fit to take on major casework.  Probably not, so he gives Barbarotti a cold case to pursue.  A missing man called Arnold Morinder.  Actually it's not that much of a mystery.  Morinder was living with a woman called Ellen Bjarnebo when he disappeared - and Ellen is the Axe Woman of Little Burma who did ten years for murdering her abusive husband and chopping the body into little pieces.  Asunander would just like the case cleared up before he retires - or so he says.

Of course nothing is what it seems to be - and the case proves suitably therapeutic.  It's extremely well-written, the characters highly satisfactory and the plotting expertly handled.  It sends with Barbarotti deciding to go off in search of his father, which is a novel I would look forward to reading - if only The Axe Woman wasn't described as the fifth and final Inspector Barbarotti mystery.

Procession - to Prison - Donald Henderson

 Donald Henderson was an interesting fellow.  Born in London in 1945 he was successively a stockbroker, actor, BBC staffer and pioneer of British noir crime.  He died of lung cancer, far too soon, in 1947.

I say noir because that is precisely what the poorly titled Procession - to Prison (1937) is.  I have read and reviewed a couple of novels written twenty years later by my fellow Nelsonian Maurice Proctor, credited by many as the initiator of the genre, and they are nowhere near as black as this.

To start with, it's not a whodunnit.  We know from the outset who is on his way to be hanged.  The question for about two-thirds of the book is, who did he kill?  Even when we know that Henderson pulls the rug out from under us when body parts are found and the garden dug up.  It's very clever, very tightly focused.

Alfred Willibur is a middleaged shopkeeper whose wife Mill has turned bitter with disappointment and whose daughter Megsy is about to marry car mechanic Eric Lord and flee the nest.  Everything comes to the boil when the Williburs' landlord sells the premises to an ambitious local farmer who turns it into a dairy outlet and installs a young woman to help Alfred in the shop.

Mill will have nothing to do with the new business.  She takes in a lodger, an eccentric old biddy, and lets bitterness eat at her health.  Ultimately Eric and Megsy take Mill away for a seaside break at Margate.  Alfred stays behind with the shop help and the demanding old woman upstairs.  As the week goes on, he finds himself with decisions to make.

Henderson has a choppy style and some irritating habits (three dots to start a sentence? what's that about?).  But the novel has really interesting psychological depth.  Essentially it's a study about ordinary people trying to find fulfillment in life.  What is especially diverting is the way characters deal with the trauma of the murder act.  Procession - to Prison is by no means Henderson's best known novel - that's probably Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper, and the one I really want is the BBC-based A Voice Like Velvet - but it has been a fascinating introduction to his work.

Dylan Thomas - Paul Ferris

 Originally published in 1977 and revised several times since, Ferris's biography has become definitive.  He has seen the original documents and was able to talk to many of the key players, most notably Dylan's wife Caitlin, of whom he also wrote a biography.  More than a decade on from the biography of Caitlin, this 2006 edition is likely to be Ferris's final word on the subject.

He quashes many myths whilst accepting that Dylan himself was a master myth-maker.  Dylan, he says, didn't die of eighteen straight whiskeys but of a morphine overdose administered by a fashionable New York quack.  Dylan, he recognises, was a terrible scrounger, but at least he gave attention to some of the rather hopeless people he scrounged off.  Ferris excels in the New York trips, which seem to be his main interest from the off.  He is especially thorough in establishing who was a reliable witness and who wasn't - and he gives his reasons.  The childhood is also very well done, albeit the only potentially reliable witnesses to what went on inside 5 Cymdonkin Drive - Thomas's father and sister - left no testimony, dying before Dylan did.

What I missed, and what Ferris was presumably denied, was any clues into Dylan's relationship with his three children.  They seem to have chosen to say nothing, which is of course their absolute right.

The commentary on the poetry and prose are well considered and the amount quoted is well judged.  Personal letters are quoted rather more than I felt necessary, because they tend to be much the same; however, these are always subjective judgments.

I haven't yet read the 'official' biography of Thomas by Constantine FitzGibbon.  Other than that, I have read most of the key texts and can therefore state with confidence that Ferris is by far the best.

The Dark Remains - William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

 On the face of it, The Dark Remains is an unexpected treat, an unfinished novel by the pioneer of Tartan Noir completed by the master of the form.  In reality it falls below the average of either.  The story itself has potential: the murder of a front man for one of the local gangs threatens to spark a turf war in 1972, when Glasgow was still dying on its hind quarters.

It is perfectly readable, obviously, but there is a conspicuous lack of darkness, the mordant black humour for which both McIlvanney and Rankin were known in their heyday, even credible violence.  The names of the characters - Carter, Thompson - seem like placeholders for something better.  I didn't figure out who the murderer was, but then I rarely do.  I was neither surprised nor especially interested when it was revealed.  There is an tagged-on episode in which the stirrer-up of the turf war gets his comeuppance.  I had forgotten who he was, which in a large print novel of less than 300 pages read over two consecutive days is not good.

It's trivial footnote to a significant career.  There was a reason McIlvanney left it unfinished.  Rankin can still deliver a good novel but it's all about retirement these days, the older man looking back.  Canongate would have done better to get Stuart Macbride or one of the younger lions to work on Dark Remains (which is also a poor title, having nothing to do with the plot).

Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor

 I enjoyed Shadowplay, O'Connor's novel about Bram Stoker and Henry Irving, but Ghost Lights is even better.  It"s an evocation of the affair between the dying genius of the Irish National Theatre, J M Synge, and his street urchin muse Molly Allgood, who starred, under her stage name Maire O'Neill, as Pegeen in his subversive masterwork Playboy of the Western World.

Forty-five years on from Synge's death and Molly is living alone in London, only her cat and the drink for company.  Today, however, in late October 1952, she has a gig - an old admirer has booked her for a BBC radio play, and Molly has the entire day to ensure she gets there on time.  As she walks through autumnal London she polishes her memories of better times, as a teenage actress in Dublin, of Synge and his eccentric courtship.

It is all beautifully done.  The tragedy that strikes at the end is so masterfully handled that I was almost overwhelmed.  Dublin, London and New York are all vibrantly conjured.  I recognised the foyer of Old Broadcasting House; the same for Molly as it was for me a quarter-century later.  It is only more recently that I have come to realise how important the Abbey Players and the Playboy were to the emergence of a radical arts theatre around the world.  I think I read the Playboy for the first time around the time Joseph O'Connor was writing Ghost Light.  What took me so long, I wonder?  Don't know that I would have appreciated it properly had I been any younger.  By God, I get it now - and I loved Ghost Light for reminding me.

The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney - Trevor H Hall

 Critical parapsychology is what we might call a niche genre.  But it's one in which the late Trevor H Hall was second to none.  He also wrote about stage magicians and tricksters, so for him the two blended inexorably.  What we have here is an oddity even for him.  Edmund Gurney was a man who had everything.  He was rich, good-looking, an obvious genius.  Yet he died along in a commercial hotel in Brighton in June 1888, when he was just forty-one.

The trickery is not disputed.  Gurney was secretary of the Society for Psychical Research and did the bulk of the research and writing himself.  His particular interests were telepathy and mesmerism.  He became involved with two young Brighton men, George Smith and Douglas Blackburn who had been doing a mind-reading act at the Aquarium.  They became the objects of his research, his obsession.  The experiments purported to be scientific but were a long way from it.  The young men had never pretended their act was anything other than muscle-reading yet Gurney, the genius, let himself be convinced.

Hall argues that the trickery was about to be revealed and that Gurney, who suffered from extreme depression which he tried to fend off by overwork, simply could not take another disappointment.  He argues his case well and thoroughly but one could just as easily argue that he was killed by someone higher or lower than him in the SPR hierarchy.  His friend Frederick Myers, for example, or his brother Arthur Myers, who was one of the first on the scene.  Or Frank Podmore, Gurney's assistant at the SPR, who was said to have interests of a different kind in the Brighton Boys.  Or indeed the remaining Brighton Boy, Smith, who had become Gurney's private secretary.  The other stage faker, Blackburn, had emigrated to South Africa by this point, where he became a celebrated novelist.

Fascinating...

A Case of Spirits - Peter Lovesey

 I remember when Sergeant Cribb first graced our TV screens in the mid 1970s.  We'd been introduced to Victorian detectives by The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes but this was something different - a newly written Victorian detective in a wholly credible Victorian world but written by a young man fully conscious of contemporary sensibilities.  And written, moreover, with wit.

Lovesey's specialism was the Victorian fad - competitive walking or 'wobbling', waxworks and the chamber of horrors, fear of dynamiters, and in this instance Parapsychology.  He offers a fictional body, the Life After Death Society (LADS) but the members are highly reminiscent of the real-life Society for Psychical Research.  The mediums are all frauds and at heart everyone knows it.  But then one is murdered in the house of a prominent medical man in the presence of both Cribb and Inspector Jowett.

It's all great fun.  The Cribb books are all classics and should be much higher profile than they are.  After he ceased writing them Lovesey wrote two other novels which I enjoyed, The False Inspector Dew and Keystone, but I'm afraid I never took to his other long-running series featuring Peter Diamond.  I might however try his Prince of Wales series and the novels he wrote as Peter Lear sound interesting.

Thieves Fall Out - Gore Vidal as Cameron Kay

 After the controversy stirred up by The City and the Pillar (reviewed below) Gore Vidal tried his hand at pseudonymous genre fiction - the Edgar Box novels (murder mysteries including Death Likes It Hot, also reviewed below) and the single, hard-boiled noir crime thriller Thieves Fall Out (1953), written as Cameron Kay.

What we have is a blend of American action man abroad and The Maltese Falcon.  The latter is especially noticeable.  The Claude Rains character is Inspector Mohammed Ali of the Cairo police, the Peter Lorre character is Le Mouche, pianist at Le Couteau Rouge, who has fingers in every pie, and the equivalent of Sydney Greenstreet (which Greenstreet could never play) is a wall-eyed collector-cum-smuggler called Said.  I suppose the Ingrid Bergman character is the mysterious German Anna Mueller.  The Maltese Falcon is definitely the necklace of Queen Tiy which Peter Wells, our hero, is hired to smuggle out of Egypt.

Just as The Maltese Falcon gains extra frisson from the background of the war and potential invasion, Vidal exploits the tensions in Egypt under the appalling King Farouk and sets his climax against the Black Saturday uprising of January 1952.

Is Peter Wells Humphrey Bogart?  No, he's more John Garfield - a working class bruiser, former oil wildcatter and wartime soldier.  He is relatively dumb, easily seduced, and happy to operate on the fringes of legality.  He is good fun.

Vidal in the Box books was bright and amusing.  On the evidence of Thieves Fall Out he could have given Mickey Spillane and Donald Westlake a run for their money in noirish thrillers. It goes without saying that he is a marvellous writer, probably the best American novelist of his era, his only real rival being Norman Mailer.  An excellent read, another great from the Hard Case Crime series.

The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann

 It's a long way from Death in Venice to The Holy Sinner, nearly forty years in fact, so you'd expect them to be different.  They are very different.  There are similarities, of course, and contrasts.  Instead of suppressed homosexual paedophilia, here we have fraternal incest in no way suppressed.  Instead of extreme contemporary realism, here we have a magical medieval world in which the bells of Rome ring out without human agency and a penitent endures seventeen years chained to a rock in the middle of a lake by turning himself into a hairy hedgehog.  Magical realism twenty years before its time, perhaps.

Mann took his story from the 12th century Minnesinger Hartmann von Aue.  The twins Wiligis and Sibylla, only children of Duke Grimald of Flanders, are brought up together to the extent that they share sleeping quarters.  After inheriting the dukedom, Wiligis crosses the bedroom and has sex with his sister.  She becomes pregnant.  Wiligis, not essentially a bad man and still very young, immediately heads off on crusade, leaving Sibylla to govern in his place.  She secludes herself in the fortress of the wise knight Eisengrein.  She gives birth to a beautiful healthy son but can take no joy in it because news arrives of Wiligis's death.  Sibylla is beyond distraught and submits to Eisengrein's advice.  Leave the child's fate to God.  The baby is sealed in a barrel and cast into the North Sea along with a tablet explaining that he is a child of sin but his parents are noble; if he is found, raise him accordingly; there is money in the barrel with which to do so.

Poor fishermen find the barrel and take it back to their base on the island of St Dunstan.  Abbot Gregory opens the barrel and finds the child.  He entrusts him to one of the fishermen whose wife has just given birth.  He gives the child his own name.  Ultimately the child is raised as a novice monk - until he discovers the secret of his birth.  At seventeen he sets off as a knight errant with the aim of finding his parents.  Instead he marries Sibylla, becomes Duke of Flanders de jure uxoris and father's two daughters by her.

Then he finds out the truth a second time.  He immediately renounces his dukedom and becomes a beggar, ending up on the rock.  The Lamb of God (literally) tells wise men in Rome that their next pope is tethered to a rock in a lake in the north - it is their God-given mission to go and find him.  Thus Gregory the child of sin becomes a very good pope.  He is reunited with Sibylla whom he prudently decides to refer to as his sister.

It is actually very entertaining.  Mann writes in a cod medieval style using the authorial voice of the Irish monk Cormac, who is visiting the monastery of St Gall (where so many ancient manuscripts were later found), who provides us with much commentary.  I raced through The Holy Sinner, which is absolutely my cup of tea.  I'm no Mann scholar - indeed, I had never heard of The Holy Sinner - and the only novel by him I had previously read was the aforementioned Death in Venice (reviewed on this blog).  That didn't inspire me to discover more.  The Holy Sinner definitely has.

Every Dead Thing - John Connolly

 Every Dead Thing  (1999) is the first Charlie Parker thriller and Connolly's first book.  Parker is a former NYPD detective who let the job get to him.  He took to drink and neglected his wife and daughter.  Then, one night, he staggered home to find his wife and daughter monstrously butchered.

Two years on, having left the force, Parker is completely sober and 100% forcused on capturing the killer.  He contacts his old partner and gets an informal gig hunting for a missing woman.  This leads him to a philanthropist widow, a local mobster, and the person responsible for a chain of serial murders - but not his serial murders.  So Parker moves on to New Orleans and hooks up with FBI contacts and local NOPD in another chain of murders.

The problem, ostensibly, is that Every Dead Thing is actually two novels, one set and solved in New York, the other likewise in New Orleans.  Even more problematic, they are in many ways the same novel done twice - mob links, serial killers, Parker allowed more access to police and FBI than would ever be allowed.  It is also very long.  And yet, for all that, it works.  It works very well indeed.  The overarching story of Parker's quest links the two main storylines sufficiently to keep us going.  The characters, especially Parker, are deeply drawn and engaging.  The narrative tone - first person Parker - is pitch perfect.  He is never a man in control, always a man in recovery.  Side characters, the New York killer couple Angel and Louis, the voodoo momma in deepest Louisiana, even the mobsters and their lead assassins, draw us in.  I didn't work out who the killer was in either North or South, and especially not both, which is always a good thing.

There are now twenty Parker novels.  I enjoyed Connolly's non-Parker novel He (see review below) so much that I decided to try Parker and now I'm hooked.

A Bid for Fortune - Guy Boothby

 A Bid for Fortune (1895) is the debut of the Victorian super-villain Dr Nikola, a man with worldwide interests, limitless resources and a spooky cat called Apollyon.

"Ask the Japanese, ask the Malays, the Hindoos, the Burmese, the coal porter in Port Said, the Buddhist priests of Ceylon; ask the King of Corea, the men up in Tibet, the Spanish priests in Manila or the Sultans of Borneo, the Ministers of Siam, or the French in Saigon.  They'll all know Dr Nikola and his cat, and take my word for it, they fear him."

The premise is silly - a holy relic of the Himalayan Masters promising access to the Mysteries of the Ancients.  it is of its time, the fin de siecle with its occult interests.  In physical appearance Nikola is the personification of the aesthetic decadent.  Boothby was an Australian living in London who produced more than 50 novels and yet was only 38 when he died.  Dr Nikola is perhaps his most enduring character, an obvious forerunner of Ian Fleming's Dr No.  Boothby was prolific but skillful.  His narrative never falters but the plot twists are all properly planned and his characters fully rounded.  He had travelled the world and it shows.  The locations here, of which there are many, smack of authenticity and personal knowledge.

There are four further Nikola novels and I hope to read them all. 

Silverview - John le Carre

John le Carre's final novel, which his son Nick Cornwell tells us in an afterword sat in a drawer for some time, is in some ways in line with his other late novels - for example, A Legacy of Spies - in that it involves old hands revisiting a past they have tried hard to escape.  In other ways it harks back to his very first novels such as , say, A Murder of Quality; the scale is confined, largely to a small, unspecified seaside town in East Anglia.  To this backwater Julian Lawndsley has fled from his successful City career to open a bookshop.  Here he meets (or is approached by) the amiable, slightly eccentric Edward Avon, long since retired from some sort of development role in Eastern Europe.  Edward's wife Deborah is dying.  She is, apparently, a famous Arabist who worked for some sort of think tank.  It's all very vague.  Oddly, Edward claims to have known Julian's father at public school.  Julian's father was a churchman who renounced God and went on a well-reported dive into debauchery, disgrace, and ultimately penury.  Edward claims to have got in touch with his old friend, offering assistance.  Julian still has his father's collection of letters.  There isn't one from Edward Avon, although there is one which might offer a clue.

Meanwhile Stewart Proctor, Head of Domestic Security, receives an important letter at a safe house in London.  Letters are very old school and thus are the preferred means of communication among old hands.  Edward, for example, persuades Julian to deliver one by hand to a very beautiful old lady whom he meets at the Everyman Cinema in Belsize Park.  He buys the stationery which allows her to write a sealed reply.  On his return to his bookshop he finds a written invitation to supper from Deborah Avon.

I have to say, the whole thing is wonderfully well done.  I have enjoyed several of le Carre's later novels but Silverview may well be the best of them.  I especially liked the last line, from the Avons' daughter Lily to Julian: "And that's the last secret I'll keep from you."  How classy is that?

The Revelators - Ace Atkins

 The Revelators is the continuation of The Shameless, which I read and reviewed here a month or so ago.  Quinn Colson is still recovering from being shot down at the end of The Shameless.  He has been 'temporarily' replaced as Sheriff of Tibbehah County while investigations continue into who ordered the hit.  Meanwhile J K Vardaman has been elected governor despite or maybe on account of his close association with the Watchmen militia.  The Watchmen are rearming and looking for contacts; fortunately Donnie Varner, schoolfriend of Quinn Colson and Boom Kimbaugh, and teenage crush of Quinn's sister Caddy, is fresh out of jail and looking for work.  Fannie Hathcock is expanding her sex and smuggling empire, seeking to expand her standing with the Syndicate, and itching for revenge of the frame hammer type on those who ordered the hit on her lover.  In the deep background federal agencies are quietly trying to get on top of the various criminal and seditious enterprises that currently control the town of Jericho and surrounding Tibbehah County.

It's another utterly engrossing narrative with dozens of beautifully drawn three-dimensional characters, all of them with good and bad sides.  The inciting incident is when Vardaman has the immigrant workforce at the local chicken factory rounded up.  The adults are incarcerated, the kids left to fend for themselves.  Naturally the kids are taken in at Caddy Colson's Christian refuge.  The chicken factory is restaffed with inmates from the local for-profit prison.  Not all the local Good Old Boys approve.  Not all the local wheelers and dealers are in on the action.  

I relished every minute of The Revelators.  I cannot fathom why this series isn't higher profile.

He - John Connolly

 'He' is never once named in the novel but there is never a moment's doubt who he is: Stan Laurel.  He is he because he was really Arthur Stanley Jefferson, son of a theatrical promoter in Northern England.  He is the idiot partner of Norville 'Babe' Hardy but he is really the brains and driving force in the partnership.  Babe married three times, Stan married anywhere between five and nine times, although he woman who he spent much of his early life with and who came up with the new name was never his wife.  In reality, the great love of his life was Babe.  Babe, in return, loved many people, though he probably loved Stan most of all.

Loads of Connolly's story is familiar or even well known - but then so are Laurel and Hardy's movies; it doesn't stop us loving them.  There are also things I didn't know (and it so happens I know quite a lot about the silent cinema).  I didn't know about Babe's brother.  I didn't know much about James Finlayson.  And I never had such insight into the mysterious death of Thelma Todd.

That said, the bit I enjoyed best was the filming of 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine' number from Way Out West.  A beautiful scene, beautifully done by Connolly.

An accidental find and a real treat.

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

 Some say Earthly Powers (1980) was Burgess's masterpiece, though I prefer the Enderby series and the Malay Trilogy.  A Clockwork Orange is always the book he will be best known for, though I disliked it on my most recent reading.  However, Earthly Powers was written to land Burgess the Big Book Prize, which as I recall it didn't.

It is a massive undertaking, by far Burgess's longest book.  Its size means that Burgess has to tune down experimentation and tackle the more usual novelistic tropes of character development and long story arcs.  He does this, it has to be said, remarkably well.  It was a typical Burgess clever stroke to base his protagonist, Kenneth M Toomey, on William Somerset Maugham, another very famous, extremely successful novelist and playwright whose success prevented his artistry being recognised in his lifetime.  I told a good friend I had been reading and enjoying Maugham; he suggested I should read Earthly Powers.

Toomey isn't Maugham; he is homosexual like Maugham, ex-pat, successful in books and plays and films, but he isn't just Maugham under a different name.  He is a Maugham-like character who finds himself subsumed into family and religion and, through them, dragged into significant events of the first eighty years of the twentieth century (in a way that Maugham, to the best of my recollection, wasn't).

His sister Hortense marries a young Italian composer whose brother is a priest.  Toomey has by this time rejected the Catholic church of his upbringing, which condemns him as a homosexual.  Domenico Campanati goes to Hollywood to write the score of dozens of motion pictures; Carlo Campanati becomes bishop of Milan and, ultimately, Pope Gregory XVII.  None of this is spoiler: we know Carlo is pope because the novel starts with Toomey, after Gregory's death, being approached at his house in Malta to write an account of an apparent miracle he saw Carlo Campanati perform in a US hospital.  The twist that comes from that event would absolutely be a spoiler - but I had no idea it was coming, and it really dropped my jaw.  The twist, on its own, would be worth reading Earthly Powers for.  But there is so much else.  The characters are magnificent; the literary wordplay that Burgess just cannot resist; and the sheer scope of the story.

Earthly Powers didn't win the Booker, William Goldings' Rites of Passage did.  I have now enjoyed them both.  I suspect Golding is slightly superior in purely literary terms, which explains why a Maugham-based novel came second.  As novels, though, they are equally magnificent.

Three Kings - George R R Martin

 A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel, apparently, Three Kings is the second British-based instalment in Martin's vast alternative universe series.  Essentially Queen Elizabeth II died in childbirth, her sister Margaret succeeded and ruled until 2020.  She died leaving two sons, Henry and Richard, the first a reactionary brute, the second a bisexual charmer.  Then rumours begin to circulate - that Elizabeth's newborn son survived but was hidden away on Prince Philip's orders because there was something wrong - in fact, like so many others around the world, he was born a Joker, mutated by the alien virus of 1946.

It is for Alan Turing - yes, the Alan Turing - to investigate, even though he is over 100 years old and made of metal.  He is assisted by his protege, the Joker super-spy Noel Matthews and the Joker king of London, the Green Man Roger Barnes.  They are all frustrated by the Celtic goddess of death Badb, dislodged from Belfast after the Good Friday Agreement and on the look out for a hero's death-blood to rejuvenate her.

It's a good enough pretext with lots of fun ideas.  Unfortunately the cast is miles too big to keep track of.  Most of the characters are well drawn (unfortunately, Noel isn't, and he gets much of the action).  The royals are not very convincing either, mainly because American lead writers always assume we Brits are as keen on our royals as they are.  I very much doubt the state would fall if the succession was altered, subverted or just plain failed.

Good enough, but not great.  I enjoyed Mississippi Roll much more.  Nevertheless I remain fascinated by the overarching concept.

Tumbledown - Charles Wood

 Tumbledown is the other controversial Falklands Play.  Ian Curteis wrote the actual Falklands Play, a hymn of praise to the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, which was commissioned by the BBC soon after the war ended but shelved indefinitely when it turned out that the British public were not quite so gung-ho about the imperialistic adventure and had rather fallen out of love with Margaret Thatcher.  In the end it wasn't produced until 2000 by which time tempers had cooled but Curteis's technique had dated badly.  It was recently reshown on BBC 4 for the fortieth anniversary of the war.  It was very old-fashioned but I was impressed by the character of Curteis's Maggie (for clarity, let it be known, my hatred for Mrs T, whose reign of terror I endured in full, is second to none, my contempt for electioneering military escapades likewise).  Some of the other acting, however (who was that as Michael Foot?) was atrocious.

I digress...  Tumbledown is the other controversial TV play about the Falklands War, produced by the BBC in May 1988, despite the screeches of protest from the Daily Mail and others.  I can't remember why the Mail considered the true story of 21 year-old Robert Lawrence, who was horribly wounded just before the end of hostilities, was somehow controversial.  Lawrence was a hero, he responded heroically to his injury, and who was hidden from the cameras at the state memorial service in case he upset the viewers.  Who, war-supporter or not, wouldn't empathise with young Robert and his family, who behaved with magnificent dignity.

Wood was famously a dramatist of war.  His stage plays, Dingo, H and so on, are military-based.  He wrote both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Dick Lester's How I Won the War.  He was an admirer of the front line soldier, an enemy of war - exactly the stance required for this story.  He does it beautifully.  There are many profoundly moving moments - so much so that I couldn't bear to watch it again when it too was shown for the anniversary.  So I read it for the fourth or fifth time again.  Superb.

Snow - John Banville

 As Benjamin Black, John Banville wrote the Quirke mystery novels and one of the Raymond Chandler continuation novels (most, if not all, reviewed elsewhere on this blog).  Under his real name Banville writes award-winning novels in the modern Irish tradition.  Here, at last, he combines his two output streams - a police procedural set in County Wexford in the Nineteen Fifties.

Quirke, now the state pathologist, is out of the country on his honeymoon no less - a beautiful touch which tells us immediately the territory we are in and who will probably not be joining us there.  Instead we have a new character, Detective Inspector St John Strafford, a mid-thirties teetotal singleton from the Protestant Ascendancy, which makes him something of an exception in the Dublin Guards.

On Christmas Eve he is called to attend the death of a priest at Ballyglass House,  This is in itself unusual: what is a Catholic priest doing at a Protestant house?  It gets worse.  Father Tom Lawless hasn't just fallen down the stairs.  He has walked down the stairs, leaking blood from a stab wound to the shoulder, across the hall into the library where he has finally collapsed and, for good measure, someone has gelded him.  This sort of thing doesn't happen to priests.  Priests don't get murdered in Ireland.  Priests definitely don't get their genitals hacked off.  Where are they, by the way?

The Osborne family are all decidedly odd.  Colonel Osborne likes to play the squire but his second wife is more than a little mad and his children, Letty and Dominic, are somewhat on the wild side.  There are also assorted staff and the villagers who congregate at the local pub.

Banville is so good at this sort of thing because he rises above genre.  Irish history permeates every character, informs every crime and demands a cover-up at the highest level.  One of the best scenes in the book is Strafford's interview with the Archbishop.  The writing, throughout, is that of a master novelist at the very top of the game.  There is another Strafford novel, April in Spain.  I look forward to reading it.