Possession - Peter James

I had heard of Peter James, obviously.  He is one of the established stars of British crime fiction.  Had I read any?  I'm not sure.  I certainly watched the TV adaptation of his Roy Grace series but didn't much like it.  I am usually a fan of John Simms but in this case he didn't quite hit the mark as I recall.  I remember that his Achilles Heel, his fatal flaw so far as the police force was concerned, was faith in psychics.

Anyway I bought Possession on the off-chance, wondering if perhaps it had been wrongly listed under Horror and Supernatural.  But no, it's a standalone supernatural thriller from 1988, quite early in James's writing career - and, as the title suggests, it's all about possession.

Cambridge student Fabian Hightower has died in a car crash in Europe.  His mother Alex is devastated.  He was her only child.  She is a literary agent in London, her estranged husband David is establishing a vineyard in the countryside.  One of Alex's friends suggest she might want to consult a psychic and eventually Alex finds the dapper Morgan Ford.  He suggests holding a series of 'circles' in Fabian's room, to help his spirit move on.

No surprises that from that point on, things go to hell in the proverbial handcart.

The thing is, James makes a tremendous success of the story.  He clearly has unconventional views about the psychic world.  His medium, Ford, is convincing, the apparitions and apports all too real.  Yet he also knows and presents the arguments against.  David Hightower is a flat-out skeptic, whereas Philip Main, Alex's client, a writer of popular science books, helped his father as a fraudulent psychic but can't entirely dismiss the idea of some sort of basis for an afterlife.  Main and Ford agree on one thing which is key to the plot: These things can sometimes be genetic.

There are secrets and twists good enough for any crime thriller and the denouement is a finale with supernatural bells on.  Even so, James leaves some of the key issues open to interpretation.  No wonder he is such a success.  This is absolutely how these things should be done.  Possession is on a par with Stephen King.

The City and the Pillar - Gore Vidal

 The City and the Pillar is both a roman a clef and perhaps the first American homosexual novel, certainly the first one to break through from underground genre to mainstream.  Considering it came out in 1948, when the author was only 22, I find Vidal surprisingly frank and yet mature enough to know that his readers know perfectly well what he is talking about.

It is not in any sense a novel for gay readers only.  Jim Willard is another ordinary middle class youth in Virginia, living with his parents and siblings, who happens to be good at tennis and not much else.  His best friend is Bob Ford (great choice of name, by the way), who dreams of running off to sea.  Immediately before Bob makes his escape, the boys spend a night out in the woods where one thing leads to another.  Bob becomes Jim's epitome of manhood and love - but Bob is away at sea.  Ultimately Jim follows, without much direction but always in search of Bob.  He joins the merchant marine too but after an embarrassing foursome in Alaska he jumps ship and ends up teaching tennis in Hollywood and living with the clandestinely gay movie star Ronald Shaw.  Then he travels with the failed novelist and scriptwriter Paul Sullivan, who introduces Jim to a older woman, Maria Verlaine, the sort of woman he can love but not physically, which is what she wants and needs from him.

Then comes the war.  Jim enlists but never makes it overseas.  He falls ill and is discharged with rheumatoid arthritis, the result of an infection that nearly killed him.  He naturally re-evaluates his life.  He gets in touch with all the people he has let down and spends the rest of the book catching up and resolving issues as far as he can.  Finally he makes it home to Virginia, and faces up to the last remaining issue,,,

I've previously read only Vidal's vast historical series Narrative of Empire, written at the other end of his distinguished career.  The City and the Pillar is slight by comparison, yet it is deeply felt and extraordinarily vivid.  It captures the fragmentation of lives torn between public and private.  It celebrates the lonely ones who search for their dream, be it Shaw's desire to be a proper stage actor, Sullivan's ache for success as well as reputation, or Maria and Jim's simple search for the one who will love them back.  It is enlivened by comic moments - the gay set clinging to one another because nobody else wants them, camping it up and gossiping cattily.

It's a tremendous achievement by a great writer.

Under Occupation - Alan Furst

 

Alan Furst is, with Joseph Kanon, at the forefront of American wartime fiction.  Like Kanon, Furst is wholly European in outlook.  His sympathies are with the occupied, those who, against all the odds, fight back.

Under Occupation is one of his slighter works, only 200 pages.  Furst writes with such authority that I assumed he was writing about real people - until I tried to look them up on Wikipedia.  His hero is Parisian author of crime and spy fiction Paul Ricard - a moderately-known figure on the fringes of society.  A secret blueprint is thrust on him in the street and he feels obliged to try and deliver it to the resistance.  Progressively, Ricard is drawn in, paired up with the Polish lesbian Kasia, and run by Turkish aristocrat Leila, Ricard ends up running a safe house near the Gare de Lyon.

I won't reveal what happens next.  What I will say is this: every page reeks authenticity.  I never for a second lost interest or lost belief.  I was fascinated, enthralled and, at the end, thrilled.  I have no grounds to say, this is Paris as it was under the Nazis.  But I can say this is Paris as it should have been in 1942-3.

The Four Gospels - translated by E V Rieu

 

I am an atheist.  I don't believe in any religion.  That doesn't stop me being interested in all religions.  I am keen to know what the founders actually said and did; who they were and how they impacted on their world.  This is a Penguin Classic edition from 1952, translated by E V Rieu who also translated Homer for the series.  Rieu was a believer, yet he translates the Gospels like any other ancient text.  He also provides an essential introduction, summarising scholarly opinion of his time.  He presents the four accounts in the order it is believed they were written, starting with Mark.  This is a brilliant move.  Matthew is the most popular because it comes first in the Authorised Version.  Because it contains everything most people know - the divine conception, the boyhood etc - most readers feel no need to go further.  But Matthew is only a compiler, working from a multitude of texts.  Mark, as well as being one of the key texts for Matthew, may actually have been there, in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus was betrayed by Judas.  He may have been the boy whose lioncloth was stripped away by the arresting party leaving him naked.  In any event he is held to have been Peter's assistant when he travelled to Rome.  When Peter was martyred Mark went to Egypt where he too was martyred.  His account is Peter's account, and Peter was definitely an eye witness.  Luke was Paul's assistant, probably also the author of the Acts of the Apostles.  Luke witnessed many of the Acts but his Gospel is Paul's take on the life and teaching of Jesus, and neither Luke nor Paul was a witness.  Indeed, Paul was in many ways the antagonist of the original disciples.  John is the only Gospel author who saw with his own eyes, who was there throughout Jesus's ministry, who was almost certainly the beloved disciple who even attended the crucifixion.  His account is very different from Matthew's -= yet it comes across as very real.  He speaks of miracles.  He claims to have seen Jesus many times after his death.  John and Mark are very credible.

The fascinating thing about reading the Gospels in plain English is twofold: what is there, in terms of the miracles, the infuriatingly metaphorical parables (which John in particular finds intolerable), and, across all four, the assertion that those who see Jesus in resurrected form do not recognise him yet somehow know it is him; and, secondly, what isn't there.  Mark, for example, ends with the women finding the tomb empty and this, compelling cliffhanger of a sentence: "They said not a word to anyone, because they feared..."

I never had any doubt that Jesus was a real historical figure.  I lost faith around the age of 18 and was a complete atheist by 30.  Reading the Four Gospels hasn't changed that.  I don't believe that Jesus was any more the Son of God than I am.  That is not how I read these accounts of what he actually said.  One key omission from these accounts, even Matthew, is any mention by Jesus of life after death.  He does speak of resurrection after an incoming Day of Judgement.  He is also very clear that those he is speaking to, including John, will see the End of Days in their lifetime.

In summary, then, my faith is not restored.  But I am enthralled.

Vine Street - Dominic Nolan

 An absolute stunner!  One of The Times' Crime Books of the Year and no wonder.  I was unfamiliar with Dominic Nolan but now I am mad keen to read his two earlier books Past Life and After Dark.

Vine Street has everything we could want in contemporary British noir - metropolitan vice, gangsters, dodgy coppers, serial sex murders - and a truly jaw-dropping plot twist about three-quarters of the way through.  Vine Street spans seventy years, from 1935 to 2005, mostly concentrating on the Fascist ascendancy before WWII and the war itself.  The lead characters are Leon Geats, a copper born to police the mean streets of Soho, his assistant Constable Billie Massie (female) and Mark Cassar, formerly of Vice, now risen to the Flying Squad and dreaming of greater things.  The three of them come together over the death of a whore which leads to a crew of French gangsters.  The trail runs cold but the bodies keep coming, into the Blitz and even after the war.  It is in the mid-Sixties that they finally uncover a suspect and even then there are secrets to be kept.

Six hundred plus pages of tense narrative, beautiful prose, staggering plot.  A work of pure genre genius.

Blackwood - Michael Farris Smith

 

Michael Farris Smith has just released Nick, a prequel to The Great Gatsby.  This, however, is original fiction in his personal strand of Southern Noir or Southern Gothic.  His setting is not Rust Belt America but something far older, which has been declining for a much longer time.

It starts in 1956, when young Colburn is coming up twelve and finds something really nasty in the woodshed.  Twenty years later Colburn is back in the unnamed town looking for answers.  It is  1976 and wherever it is has become so godforsaken that artists can have shopfronts for free - which is what Colburn does.  He makes sculptures out of scrap.  Also foraging for scrap is a drifter family, so debased that they don't even have names.  Celia has a bar from which she befriends the young buy of the family.  She also starts an affair with Colburn.

In Colburn's absence the valley has been taken over by the invasive kudzu vine.  It has swallowed up the house where Colburn used to live, swamped everything, hidden secrets.

People start disappearing without trace.  First the woman who might have been the feral boy's mother.  Then twin brothers.  Then Celia.  The town sheriff has never had so much work to do.  He makes no headway at all.  But when Celia goes, Colburn kicks in.  He finds out...

It's a great read.  I especially enjoyed the vagueness of it all.  I'm not even sure what state it's supposed to be.  I wondered why it should be mainly set in 1976 - I mean, it's not as if these forgotten corners of America have recovered in the years since.  But all is explained in the last couple of short chapters.  For once, continuing the story after the denouement really pays off.  I am very keen to read more of Michael Farris Smith.

To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway

 

This is a strange concoction - a couple of short stories bodged together into a novel with heavy padding for at least a third of it.  And yet it works - works as well as the two major novels I have previously reviewed on this blog, and a sight better than The Old Man and the Sea which I have repeatedly tried and failed to read.

The short stories tell of Harry Morgan, a 'Conch' or societal dropout in Key West, a former rum runner turned arms and people smuggler.  The padding, in an utterly different tone, revolves around the bringing home of Harry's body after his last attempt to raise some cash and the effect this has on the drunken wastrels and society homosexuals who are drawn to spend time in the lawless fleshpots of the Florida Keys.  It is a testament to Hemingway's inimitable style that you keep on reading, no matter how reprehensible Harry's actions, no matter how sordidly the rich folk behave.  Between this and the previous blog post on T C Boyle I started on a well-known modernist classic written perhaps six or seven years before To Have and Have Not, and it was so childish, so full of itself, that I gave up and reached for Hemingway.  That is how good he was and remains.