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.