One Moonlit Night - Caradog Prichard

 One Moonlit Night is possibly the only Welsh literary work that has come close to Under Milk Wood, both in terms of prestige and literary attainment.   Given that Under Milk Wood was a radio feature, One Moonlit Night stands alone as the Great Welsh Novel of the Twentieth Century.   It was written in Welsh and though Prichard was a Fleet Street journalist who lived in London, he did not do the translation (this one, for Canongate, is by Philip Mitchell).

It came out in 1961, when Prichard was 57.   It is the story of a boyhood in the North Wales during and just after the First World War.   The boy, our narrator, is never named but we are clearly meant to assume it is the author.   This lulls us into a false sense of security for the shattering ending, which clearly does not relate to Prichard.   The writing is modernist, more so, in my opinion, than Thomas's dramatic feature.   For example, where Thomas resorts to the Voice of the Guide Book, Prichard's Voice seems to be that of a prehistoric goddess associated with the Black Lake.

On one level we have the everyday chitchat of ordinary people going about their business.   But that is regularly skewered with madness, suicide and death.   One Moonlit Night is light and very dark at the same time, which gives it a unique charm.   Yet Under Milk Wood is infinitely better known and loved.   Partly this is because Under Milk Wood came first, largely because Thomas was famously dead when it premiered (otherwise he would have exploited producer Douglas Cleverdon's gullibility for years to come).   Mainly, though, it's because Thomas wrote in English and Prichard didn't.   There have been radio productions of his sole novel in English and Welsh (Un Nos Ola Leuad), including one this year, but they have never really caught the public imagination.   It's a shame.   I was fascinated, enthralled, and highly impressed.

Albanian Assignment - David Smiley

 Smiley, whom some suggest may have provided le Carre with the name, was a career cavalry officer who spent most of World War II with the Special Operations Executive.   He was a regular resident of the house in Cairo known as Tara.   Thus he knew Paddy Leigh Fermor and thus, inevitably, this book includes an introduction by Paddy.   Other than partying, Smiley and Paddy did not serve together.   Paddy was a Cretan specialist, Smiley served with Billy McLean, in Albania, twice.

The Albanian situation in the second half of the war was even more complicated than the Cretan.   The Italians had annexed the country and only really when Italy surrendered did the Nazis get involved.   At this stage the Albanian resistance, which had always been divided between supporters of King Zog and Communists, turned active against once another.   Smiley and McLean's first mission had been to unite them and get them fighting the enemy, their second was to try and salvage what they could.   Their situation was further complicated, according to Smiley, by Communist moles within SOE Command at Cairo and later Bari.   Smiley and McLean, in the field, were allied with the Zogists but Command ignored their reports and supported the Communists of Enver Hoxha.   Hoxha, meanwhile, contributed to the deaths of serving British SOE officers - again, according to Smiley.

Smiley, like all right-wingers, claims to be uninterested in politics.   He is not involved with negotiations (left to McLean and Julian Amery, who arrived slightly later, both of whom, of course, later became Conservative MPs).  Smiley prefers blowing things up.   He is generous to those who served with him, whatever their nationalities or beliefs.   He really likes Albania.   The fairly slender text is packed with fascinating military details.   It should be noted that Smiley only wrote after he retired from a lifetime military career.   Along the way he had worked with MI6 and served all over Europe and the Middle East.   Before the war he had served in Abyssinia and Palestine.   His tone sometimes jangles the modern liberal ear, but he certainly knew what he was talking about.   As for his personal conduct, he held the Military Cross and bar.   In other words, he won it twice.  That's quite an achievement.

Landor's Tower - Iain Sinclair

 Sinclair's fictions are like his non-fiction: complex, deeply layered, psychogeographic, and filled to overflowing with arcane knowledge.   The latter is what we come for, the rest then seasons the mix.   As elsewhere, we begin with the book-runners, nomadic eccentrics scouring the country for bibliophilic rarities.   On their fringe is Norton, who is a writer on the side.   Some plucky soul has commissioned him to write a novel about the Victorian weirdo-aesthete Walter Savage Landor and his doomed attempt to recreate manorial life in a Welsh valley.

Sinclair is famously the psychogeographer of London.  He was born and raised, however, in Wales.   For Norton, who is really Sinclair thinly disguised, returning to Wales means returning to childhood and a long Welsh prehistory.   Time is irrelevant.   The narrative hops back and forth, action mutates into memory and vice versa.   Again, this is what brings Sinclair fans to the party.   Many of the characters he encounters are or were real.   Celebrity drug-dealer Howard Marks, for example, and a whole troop of American beat poets, many of whom I will now be checking out.   Norton falls for a woman in Hay on Wye who might be real or might be several different women.   Norton spends time in a psychiatric hospital with a bookish doctor who happens be called Vaughan.   One of Norton's manias is for the Georgian Vaughan twins, one a poet, the other an alchemist.   There is also the matter of the club foot which the owner bequeathed to Norton's father, a doctor in General Practice.

It sounds complicated and absurd because it is.   Sinclair is like Umberto Eco, only more so.   Polymath, poet, prose-wrangler and, first and foremost, a psychogeographer.   I find him and his work endlessly fascinating.

The Slab Boys Trilogy - John Byrne

 The great John Byrne, who sadly left us earlier this month, was hailed as one of Scotland's greatest contemporary artists.   But he originally made his name as a playwright, with The Slab Boys (1978), which deals with his life before getting into art school.   Byrne's fictional persona is Phil McCann, who is 19 years old in 1957 and working in the colour preparation department ('Slab Room') of Stobo & Co, Carpet Manufacturers.   His oppo is George 'Spanky' Farrell and their mutual victim Hector Mackenzie.   All are smitten with the comely Lucille, who shows no interest whatsoever in any of them.

It is a play of coming-of-age at a time when tides were turning.   It is a vivid evocation of the industrial life where young lads had very little to do and therefore indulged in high jinks.   It was notably successful around the UK in the late seventies and two follow-ups ensued, Cuttin' a Rug (1979), which takes place the same evening, at Stobo & Co's Christmas bop, and Still Life (1982) set ten years on, in 1967, and then five years later in 1982.

Cuttin a Rug, I have to say, didn't do it for me.   It was originally a radio play, The Staffie, then it became a stage play (Threads), then The Loveliest Night of the Year and finally this.   On radio I can see it working well.   On stage and on the page it reminds me too strongly of Willy Russell's Stags and Hens, one of very few creative works which I actually despise.   The problem is, it is all action 'off'.   The dance is going on in the ballroom and from time to time we are meant to hear what is going on.   The action we see, however, is in the gents and ladies' cloakrooms (Act One) and then the terrace where revellers go to do whatever.   It is, frankly, overwrought.   Ironically, given it is supposed to be the coming of age of the Slab Boys, the standout characters are tea-lady Sadie and the frustrated spinster Miss Walkinshaw.

Still Life, on the other hand, is much more successful.   Phil is now a working artist, albeit unsuccessful.   Spanky is still at the carpet factory but is trying to make it as a musician.   Spanky has married the divine Elaine and they have a baby daughter.   The setting is the Paisley cemetary.   The funeral that brings them together is for poor Hector, done to death with a brick by a man he was having sex with in a cubicle at the swimming baths.

Hector had episodes of mental illness and was sectioned for a time.   Phil's mother had lifelong mental issues (as did Byrne's mother, and with reason - Byrne believed he was the product of incesr between his mother and her father), which gives Phil a reason for attending.   Spanky has simply seen it in the paper.  The narrative thread of Slab Boys was, will Phil get accepted at the art school?   The thread of Still Life Act One is, will Spanky's upcoming appearance on Juke Box Jury lead to better things?

It does, and in Act Two we are still in the cemetery but Spanky is just off a plane from the States where he is a major rock star.   Phil is still a jobbing painter but now he is married to Lucille and has adopted her daughter with Spanky.   He is back in the cemetery to see the memorial stone for his mother.   The play works well.   The jokes are dark but the main characters have all mellowed and the ending is upbeat. 

It should be noted, there is a fourth instalment, making it a tetralogy - Nova Scotia (2008), which I have got hold of but haven't yet read.   Menawhile, surely someone is planning to revive The Slab Boys?  A great play should never die.

Are Snakes Necessary? - Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman

 Another cracker from Hard Case Crime.   I wondered, as I read, how much was De Palma (director of Scarface, Carrie, etc) and how much was co-writer Lehman?   I got to the end and all was clear.   The storyline was definitely De Palma, complete with Hitchcockian twist, and the writing was probably mostly Lehman.   This was far from a bad thing.   One is a visual artist, the other word-based.   They come together beautifully.

It's a story hung around a brief affair twenty years ago, between stewardess Jenny Cours and politician Lee Rogers.   A casual encounter today leads nowhere in itself but has massive consequences down the line.   Jenny's daughter Fanny, a student videographer, gets herself attached to Rogers' re-election campaign.   This causes headaches for Rogers' fixer Barton Brock.   But first Brock has to strongarm a quick separation for a Las Vegas millionaire, Bruce Diamond, and his drop-dead gorgeous latest wife, Elizabeth.   Elizabeth has had an affair with photo-journalist Nick Sculley - they sat next to one another on the plane - but leaves him high and dry in Vegas and starts a new life as an online agony aunt who she sits next to on the bus.   Nick, heartbroken, accepts a gig as onset photographer for a remake of Vertigo being shot in Paris (I did say it was Hitchcockian, right?), where Fanny Cours also shows up, having been booted from the Rogers campaign.

Actually, it's more complicated than that.   Gloriously so.

Even the structure is cinematic.   Short chapters, one or two pages mostly, jump cutting between storylines, all written present tense.   Another, very unusual twist: Are Snakes Necessary was originally published in France, in French, in 2018.   There is apparently a second novel stuck in works. 

Maigret Sets a Trap - Georges Simenon

 Maigret Sets a Trap dates from 1955, the year I was born.   It is vintage Maigret, written when Simenon was at the height of his power.   Women are being attacked in Montmarte, their clothing slashed, their throats cut.   The police haven't a clue to work with - until Maigret gets chatting with a psychiatrist, Professor Tissot, at dinner one evening.

Simenon's great contribution to crime literature was the pschological angle.   Here, Professor Tissot develops an early version of a criminal profile, diagnosing the kind of man who would be most likely to commit such a series.   He also hazards an equally ahead-of-its-time geographical profile.   The killer must know Montmarte like the back of his hand.   If not living locally, he must certainly have spent considerable time there.

Maigret is thus able to track down his suspect.   He does this via a single jacket button, snatched from the attacker's suit.   But while Maigret is questioning the suspect at the Quai des Orfevres another woman is killed up in Montmarte.   Maigret remains convinced that he has the serial killer in custody.   So the latest killing must be a copycat.

Having set a trap to catch the suspect, Maigret (or Simenon, typically playing with our expectations) sets another to catch the copycat.

I'd forgotten how great Maigret can be.   It must be twenty years since I read one.   I'm glad I read this.

Superstition & Science - Derek Wilson

 Wilson provides a terrific introduction to the development of Western Thinking between the Reformation and the Age of Englightenment - roughly 1500 to 1800.   He covers all the well-known thinkers and adds as many that I, for one, was either unfamiliar with or had not explored.  Wilson provides well-considered summaries to their individual contributions and relationship with one another, without ever losing narrative drive essential to the book's success.

Personally, I suspect the discovery I will taken away is the Wesley brothers, John and Charles.   I was brought up as a Methodist, albeit an Independent Methodist, and have long been an atheist.   I remember the Wesleys, Charles especially, from the hymnbook at Sunday morning service.   I stopped attending a month after my twelfth birthday and never considered them again.   Now Wilson has given me fascinating insights to their ideas and their lives.   For instance, I knew nothing whatsoever about their missionary work in the US.   I can't help but wonder, why Georgia.   And I know full well I will have to find out.

Original Sin - Peter Gill

 Having rediscovered the work of Peter Gill, who was big when I was a drama student first time round, with The York Realist, reviewed below, I was keen to read more.   I picked up Original Sin, first produced at the Sheffield Crucible in May 2002.   This is, in fact, the edition published to accompany the premiere.

Original Sin is Gill's take on Frank Wedekind's Pandora plays, Pandora's Box and Earth Spirit, which I had tried to find when I was originally a drama student and couldn't find.  I still haven't read them but they are now on my must-read lisr.

Pandora, of course, is famously Louise Brooks in the Pabst movie.   Gill shifts the timeframe back to the era of Oscar Wilde.   Gill's object of desire is Angel, who has risen from the gutter to be the adored idol of society.   He has been raised by newspaper magnate Lionel Southerdown and is now being painted by society artist Eugene Black.  From there, everything falls down.   Black kills himself for love of Angel and Southerdown manipulates Angel into shooting and killing him.

Angel flees to France with his adopted brother, Henry Southerdown, now his lover.   Henry is ruined in a Stock Exchange scandal and Angel ends up touting for trade in a Whitechapel slum, where he shares the ultimate, gruesome fate of Wedekind's Pandora.

Gill's play is epic in length, scope and achievement.   Everyone around Angel is motivated by sex and money, yet Gill is such an expert in characterisation that Angel is absolutely no angel.   I kind of always knew his ultimate fate (I might not have read Wedekind's original but I have read a good deal about it) but was intrigued to discover how it came about.   That's the whole point.

I was impressed by The York Realisr.   I was extremely impressed with Original Sin.

The General - Alan Sillitoe

 Sillitoe's second novel couldn't be more different from his first, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.  One thing they do have in common, I suppose, is the compressed timeframe.   Aside from the unnecessary thirteenth chapter, The General (1960) takes place over three or four days.

A war is raging in an unspecified part of Europe.   A symphony orchestra has been sent by train to entertain frontline troops, only to be ambushed and taken prisoner by the enemy.   The enemy do have a name, the Gorsheks, and they seem to me to represent the Russians - the initial capture is by Cossack-style cavalry who are gunned down for taking prisoners by a middle-ranking officer.   The officer takes the orchestra to the General, who delays their mass execution.   Standing Orders dictate No Prisoners.   The General enquires about making an exception.   The reply is machine-like and unequivocal: execute them immediately.   But still the General delays.   He gets the orchestra to play for his officers.   He searches for a way out of his dilemma.

The General is a parable, rather than a character study.   It is about the incongruity of war and art, the battle between logic and sentiment.   It is well done and quite entertaining.   Apparently Sillitoe wrote many more novels over his lifetime, none of which I have ever heard of (save, of course, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner which is a novella and also something of a parable).   I'm guessing he continued in the mode of The General, not Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

The Last Office - Geoffrey Moorhouse

 Moorhouse's specialism is the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace and its context, the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Thomas Cromwell on behalf of Henry VIII.   In this study Moorhouse focuses on Durham Abbey, which was unique in many ways.   It was part of the fortress of the Prince Bishop who was technically also the abbot of the abbey; in practice, the Prior was the head of the religious.   The Bishop, meanwhile, was the King's deputy in civil and legal matters in the whole of the North Country and held court in the castle adjoining the abbey.   When Henry VIII made himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, his bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, found himself in a dilemma.   Fortunately for all concerned, Tunstall was a lifelong equivocator and Durham Abbey was neither in the forefront of dissolutions nor, in the end, resistant to its fate.

Moorhouse is a great source on the Dissolution and in particular its forerunner, the Visitations of 1535 and the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the monetary appraisal that sealed the fate of all religious houses.   No value, of course, was put on their service to local communities, which became ever greater the further they were from London.   They provided hospitals and hospices, alms and alms houses, shelter for the homeless, the orphaned, and the mentally ill.   They drove and underpinned local economies, providing work for local labourers and artisans.   All that was wiped away in less than a decade.   That, not love of supersition and mystic ritual, was what the Pilgrims rose up for.

Moorhouse feels obliged to continue his narrative post-Dissolution.   Given that Durham's transition was peaceful and measured, I personally lost interest.   Notwithstanding that, I find Moorhouse indispensable to my research into the English Reformation. 

The Colorado Kid - Stephen King

 In 2004 the creators of the yet-to-appear Hard Case Crime imprint wrote to the greatest living US writer to see if he would be interested in maybe a couple of quotes for their noir reprints.   The reply came from King's agent.   Would they like to publish his short mystery novella The Colorado Kid?   Oh yes they would, and publishing a major writer - as major as it is possible to get - gave Hard Case instant credibility.   King continues to publish with them.  Joyland is reviewed on this blog and Later sits on my to-be-read pile.

Mine is the 2019 reprint, which includes Charles Ardai's introduction, which is great, and illustrations which are variable.   The story itself ... I called it a novella above, because of its length, but in tone it is a long short story.   It is essentially an account of a 25-year-old mystery (thus set in 1980) told by two old geezers who run a smalltown newspaper in Maine to their twenty-year-opd summer intern.  Back in 1980 two teenage runners found the body of a forty-year-old man lying on the beach.   Naturally this drew the attention of the then middleaged newsmen.   The police weren't interested as there was no obvious foul play involved - the man died because some steak got stuck in his gullet.  But other elements of the case intrigued the journos.   Why did the man carry no wallet, no ID?

Eventually another intern, who was working with the police back in 1980, comes up with a clue to the man's identity, which only reveals more odd facts.

Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann

 This is the book from which Martin Scorsese made his latest movie.   It's easy to see what attracted Scorsese.   Grann has unearthed a long-forgotten story about the abuse of a Native American tribe, the Osage. who purely by chance became incredibly rich when oil was discovered beneath the worthless land to which they had been displaced.   Briefly, those who could claim tribal rights became briefly some of the richest people on earth, with vast homes, fleets of cars and household servants, some of them white.   That was never going to be tolerated in early 2oth century America.   First came the bandits to steal Osage property, then financial advisers to shepherd the poor lambs into handing over their wealth, then came the men of business, notably William Hale, a middle-aged former champion cattle roper and failed business man who rapidly became the Friend of the Osage people and King of the Osage Hills.

Then the Osage started dying, by the bucketload.   Grann focuses on Mollie Burkhart, whose sister Anna is abducted and murdered in May 1921.   One of the Mollie's sisters has already died young.   Her mother soon succumbs, then her first husband, then Mollie herself starts to decline.   Mollie, of course, has become the heiress of her sisters and mother.   If Burkhart sounds an odd name for an Native American woman, she got it from her second husband, Ernest Burkhart.   Ernest is only important because he was the nephew of none other than William Hale.

Then the Mollie's final sister dies with her husband when their home is blown up.   Even the lacklustre law enforcement of the US West at that time cannot ignore this.   Even J Edgar Hoover, young leader of what was yet to become the FBI, becomes interested.   He sends agents to Osage County, Oklahoma, led by a tenacious Texan called Tom White.  White comes from a law enforcement dynasty.   He is a former Texas Ranger.   We find ourselves in a world of paradox where cowboys are protecting Native Americans from former cowboys.

White's pursuit of the truth is protracted.   It takes him several years.   But he gets there - and the scandal he uncovers almost defies belief.   Grann handles it all extremely well.   His measured journalistic prose carries us through revelations that otherwise might seem preposterous.   He also lets us empathise with both both the hopeless and the heartless.   It is a major work of revisionary US history.

Werewolves in their Youth - Michael Chabon

 A collection of nine decent-length short stories by Michael Chabon, Werewolves in their Youth distills the charactersistics that make Chabon one of the best US writers of recent times - wit, elegance, the eye for the telling detail, the nuances of speech, etc.  Oddly, the title story was my least favourite; no particular reason, just that Stephen King does these things better.   On the other hand I loved 'The Harris Fetko Story', a skewed take on the Great American sports hero, and 'In the Black Mill', a Lovecraftain pastiche which Chabon cleverly links to perhaps his bestknown novel Wonder Boys.   I single out these two and have given my reservations about 'Werewolves', but I enjoyed all the stories here and recommend the collection wholeheartedly.

SOE: Special Operations Executive, 1940-46 - M R D Foot

You have to remember that this work was originally published in 1984 and updated in 1990.   The SOE story was still subject to the Official Secrets Acr and many people still did not know that such an organisation had ever existed.

What Foot provides, therefore, is a comprehensive overview of the background of SOE and a much more general summary of their activity.   Given that they operated in every theatre of war, there were limits to what Foot could say in 1984, given that the Cold War was still raging and many of the countries who had hosted SOE operatives were behind the Iron Curtain.   I guess that the 1990 update was because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino effect on Balkan and Baltic nations.

This book is therefore a solid account for the generalist.   If you want specialist detail, you will need to go elsewhere.

The York Realist - Peter Gill

 Another playscript, this time by writer-director Peter Gill, perhaps best known for staging the plays of D H Lawrence in the Seventies.   The play, originally mounted in 2001 and revived inb 2018, is about a farm worker, George, who is put forward for and gets a part in an amateur production of the York Mystery plays.   He falls for the assistant director, John, who wants George to try turning professional, but George won't leave his mother and family and the farm.   So they continue a secret relationship for several years until John returns to attend Mother's funeral.

It is all expertly done.   The supporting characters are vividly drawn, as is the harsh reality of life on the lowest rung of the agricultural ladder.   The trap George finds himself in is evoked particularly in the character of his brother-in-law Arthur, who has escaped it.   The relationship between George and John is delicately done, but what makes the play stand out is Gill's technique for handling time and memory.   The audience - or in my case the reader - has to pay that bit of extra attention which inevitably makes engagement to a deeper level.

Gill uses the same technique in the two linked plays, The Look Across the Eyes and Lovely Evening, which accompany The York Realist in this 2018 edition.   These are set in Cardiff, where Gill was brought up, in the late Forties and early Fifties (Gill was born in 1939).   They focus on the household of May and Harry, before and after May's death.   In the first play their oldest son Laurence, who is also our narrator, is sixteen.   Laurence the narrator, though, is in his thirties; in both plays, therefore, he is looking back.   In The Look Across the Eyes, May's single brother Jimmy - a docker like Harry - is invited to move in.   He is still there, a permanent fixture with the widower Harry and the adult Laurence.   In Lovely Evening Laurence has taken on May;s household duties, looking after the two ageing brothers-in-law who go about their mysterious and separate evening activities.

So that's three slice-of-life working class dramas in a style I find increasingly appealing.   Gill is a very fine playwright and I'm keen to get hold of more of his published scripts.

The Breaking of Bumbo - Andrew Sinclair

 Andrew Sinclair may well be my new literary obsession.   In The Breaking of Bumbo (1959) a coming-of-age story meets the roman a clef.   Young Bumbo Bailey passes from Eton to National Service in the Guards.   He is a hopeless soldier, a good officer and an amiable chap.   Posted to Wellington Barracks in the Mall, Bumbo does Public Duties at the Tower and Palace and on Horseguards Parade, and in his spare time becomes embroiled in London Society both High and extremely Low.   It all takes place against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis about which Bumbo has scuples, which lead to his breaking.

It is all done with tremendous brio.   Sinclair has an experimental style which still reads fresh and lively more than sixty years on.   The training sector is laugh out loud hilarious.   The mood then becomes gradually darker.   Despite the light surface there are considerable depths here and I was surprised at how long it took me to read such a short novel.   Yet I absolutely adored it.   I'm off now to track down more of Sinclair's work.

The Governor's Lady - David Mercer

 

A Methuen Playscript from my youth is always a fun find.   This is extra special in that it's a one-acter from 1965, originally staged by the RSC at the Aldwych as part of a programme called Expeditions Two.

I never considered David Mercer to be either experimental or absurdist, but The Governor's Lady is both.  Lady Harriet Boscoe is the widow of Sir Gilbert, governor of an unnamed African territory on the verge of seeking independence.   Unexpectedly, Gilbert returns.   His manners have deteriorated somewhat.   He now feasts on bananas, smashes crockery for fun, and demands sex.   He has, indeed, reverted to being a gorilla.

It is a one-acter, lasting perhaps half an hour.   But it is in seven scenes with quite complex changes in between.   Yet Mercer, an emerging playwright at the time, handles the stagecraft with astonishing flair.   That is all very well, but what stood out for me was the way he can evoke emotion in such a crowded format, whilst juggling issues of colonial racism which (we should remember) were still controversial in 1965.

In it's small way, The Governor's Lady is a mini masterpiece that would still be worth putting on today - though I doubt we could find two such perfect characters for the leads as Patience Collier and Timothy West.

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man - Thomas Mann

 A disappointment, I'm sorry to say, this final, unfinished work, published in 1954, a few months before Mann's death.   The idea is fair enough - the impoverished son of a failed champagne-maker hauls himself from the lowest level of employment (unpaid lift-boy in a Paris hotel) by virtue of his good looks, educated manners, and total lack of principles.   It purports to be a comic novel and there are parts that reminded me of Royal Highness (reviewed on this blog).   There are genuinely comic moments - the examination for military service which Felix must at all costs fail - but the writing has the common failing of new and relatively new comic writers.   It is hugely, disastrously overwritten, as if Mann is hoping that endless wordplay equates somehow to humour.   On the plus side there is an excellent sex scene in Paris (something else Mann was still experimenting with as he closed in on turning eighty) and the final twist in what we must remember was only meant to be part one of the Krull confessions, is a good one.

Occult London - Merlin Coverley

 A well-written and entertaining survey of some of London's premier occult landmarks.   I was however surprised by the sites left out - Cock Lane, for example, scene of the first sensational poltergeist infestation (though not the first incidence, which is about 100 yards down the road from me in South Leicestershire).   That said, Merlin Coverley's other work helps set his field of interest.   He is a psychogeographer in the footsteps of Iain Sinclair.   His sources are Peter Ackroyd, William Blake and Geoffrey of Monmouth.   He is interested in the mythic London lying behind and beneath the facade we see today.

Though Mortlake is a bit off-piste for Coverley, he covers Dr John Dee briefly and accurately.   Again, there is much more to be said about Dee but Coverley only claims to be an introduction.   In that sense, his guide to other, more comprehensive studies is invaluable.   I have been researching these subjects for more than fifty years and there were sources here that were completely new to me.

Like Covereley's companion volume Psychogeography, Occult London is a small, short book, but it is well worth a slow and careful read.   Lack of space has required Covereley to weigh every word, carefully consider what to include and what to refer the reader on to elsewhere.   Like his concept of London, the result is multi-layered and endlessly fascinating.

The Fleshpots of Sansato - William F Temple

 Great title - but a novelette only likely to interest the literary acheaologists amongst us.  Temple was a pioneer of British sci fi from the war period until the Seventies.   He mixed with the best but never really rose above the level of supporting player.   His best-known novel was Four-Sided Triangle, which I reveiwed earlier on this blog.

To me, Temple is interesting purely because he is a bystander, observer of what the better-known were up to.   Fleshpots is basically a take on Psychedelic sci fi of, most notably, Michael Moorcock.   Temple has ingenuity but a distinctly prosaic imagination, so the result is basically pulp detective noir in space.   Ray Garner of the Sidereal Intelligence Service is ordered to the distant planet of Montefore to find SIS source Dr Lowry who has disappeared into the titular fleshpots.

A classic example of period sci fi - the galaxy has intergalactic travel but still uses telephone landlines.   Interestingly, Temple's take on the travel element is that it has been made available to earthlings by the otensibly friendly Dorians of a far distant planet.   Temple is a bureaucracy man and, typically, the Dorians retain a measure of control: earth travellers can only go one way on the instant relocator; the other half of a round trip has to be by conventional spaceship.   Dr Lowry, a prominent scientist, was sent into space to try and figure out how the quick version works.

Despite mixing with aliens (and doing more exotic things to alien females in Sansato) human intelligence agents still favour racial stereotypes.   Thus Garner's contact on Montefore is the very Italian Arnoldo (Arnie) Monicelli, who drinks Italian wine and favours long lunches.   Garner is American and therefore a whisky man.

So Garner plunges into the fleshpots and meets the Satos, the Montefore version of geishas.   Their sexual specialities are various: one is invisible, another is literally electric, a third a humanoid cat complete with claws.   The one who leads Garner to the truth is Vygynia, an autistic waif whom both Lowry and Monicelli have taken under their wing, the Italian in a paternalistic, protective way, the not-so-good doctor probably not.

It's all good fun with plenty of betrayals and red herrings.   I've no idea why this NEL edition is 'specially abridged' but having done my research on Four-Sided Triangle I'm betting there is another, very different version out there somewhere.

A Shadow Intelligence - Oliver Harris

 I picked up A Shadow Intelligence by chance.   It seemed like the sort of thing I'd be interested in.   I certainly was.   I was fascinated.   Oliver Harris is more than a continuation of English spy fiction; he is the next generation.   The cyber warfare being waged in A Shadow Intelligence is so deep and complex that much of the time I didn't have a clue what was happening - yet Harris's writing skill and the compelling voice of his protagonist Elliot Kane, kept me hooked for all 438 pages of the ebook.

Kane is MI6 but has wandered somewhat off from the mainstream.   He has spent his career under cover in exotic countries far afield.   He is back in England when he learns that his colleague and lover Joanna Lake has disappeared in Kazakhstan.   Immediately before vanishing she sent Kane a video in which he was in a hotel room with a dubious man.   The thing is, it wasn't him, he doesn't recognise the room or know the man.   He notices the date on a newspaper in the clip is a couple of weeks hence.

Naturally Kane gives his official spook surveillance the slip and heads off to Kazakhstan, the ninth largest country by area with one of the smallest populations per hectare.   A massive oil field has been discovered.   International corporations are flooding in - on the heels of their various official and non-official (or 'shadow') intelligence agencies.   Kane signs up with one of these and contacts the others.   He also brings his own resources to bear.   It all comes together in a spectacular climax.

Harris has clearly done his homework.   Whether what he describes is feasible or not doesn't matter a hoot.   It soon will be and Harris has plugged in to the contemporary AI paranoia.   He writes exceptionally well.   His pacing is both relentless and extraordinary.   A Shadow Intelligence is the first of his spy novels.   I shall certainly look out for the next, Ascension (2021).   I am also keen to try Harris's Nick Belsey crime novels.

Saturday - Ian McEwan

 I read Atonement when the book and movie were big news and thought very little of it.   It struck me as trivial, a little bit seedy, and overly judgmental.   It put me off reading any more McEwen until I came across Saturday, which is a wholly different kettle of fish.

Saturday is very simply a day in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, who lives in some style in a London square close by the Post Office Tower.   His day begins with sleeplessness.   He looks out of the bedroom window and sees a plane, its engine on fire, heading towards Heathrow.   This is February 2003, eighteen months after the attack on New York's Twin Towers and on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.   Indeed, an anti-war demonstration is due to take place not far from Henry's square later in the day.   So when Henry sees the burning plane his thoughts inevitably turn to Terror.   Should he phone the emergency services?   Surely they already know....?   Henry goes downstairs to watch the news on TV.   Ultimately the plane lands, no one dies, it's something and nothing and Henry considers himself justified.

He goes off to his Saturday morning squash game and gets involved in a road rage incident which does have considerable consequences later in the day.

What makes this a brilliant book is the depth which Atonement so patently lacked.   Here we become immersed in the Perowne family who, as it happens, will be gathered together on this special Saturday.   They are elite (the house is inherited from Mrs Perowne's late mother, who also owned the French chateau in which the widower, the famous poet John Grammaticus usually resides) but they are also made interesting.   Where McEwen ventures into the extraordinary is in his descriptions of Henry's work - McEwen gives detailed acknowledgement of the help he received from actual neurosurgeons.  Without this level of detail I wonder if the final story twist would be believeable.   I suspect we have to be convinced that only Henry can do what he is called upon to do.   In my case I was already stunned and sold because Henry met his wife Rosalind when she went blind as I did and had an earlier version of the same neurosurgery I had twelve years ago.   With the same positive result, I'm pleased to say.

Mephisto - Klaus Mann

 Superb - unbelievably good, without doubt the best book I have read all year.   Mephisto is a psychological study of how so many of us come to terms with the evil around us.   Mann doubles down on the theme of self-delusion because his protagonist is an actor.  Very cleverly, the actor makes his name with his portrayal of Mephistophiles, the Devil's agent in Goethe's Faust (which cunningly also references the author's father's take on the classic theme) but has to face ultimate failure with his inability to cope with the complexity of Hamlet.

What really drives the narrative, though, is the fact that the real Mephisto was Mann's former brother-in-law, the second rate actor and Nazi favourite Gustaf Grundgens.   Albeit published in exile in Amsterdam in 1936 and banned in Germany until the 1980s, there can have been little doubt at the time who the original was.   'Hendrik Hofgen' isn't much of a disguise, especially given the pretentious alteration of the first name - the 'd' added to Henrik, the 'f' for the common 'v' of Gustav.   Mann is much kinder with the fictional version of his adored sister Erika.   Both of Erika's marriages were farcical - she was lesbian, and after Grundgens she married the extremely gay W H Auden.   Klaus Mann, of course, was gay, and when Erika and Gustaf got engaged, he went through a similar farce with Erika's lover Pamela Wedekind.   This was the avant garde life in Weimar Germany.   Similarly, in the novel, this is the sort of life Hendrik Hofgen enjoys in the Twenties - a Communist who wants to start a revolutionary theatre whilst tap-dancing for his whip-weilding black paramour.

A clever touch is that the key Nazis are not given names.   Hofgen's protector (Goering) is simply the Prime Minister or the fat giant, Goebels the limping dwarf, Hotler the Fuhrer or the Dictator.   The physical description of the latter, in his one and only encounter with Hofgen, would be sufficient to get Mephisto banned in most rightwing countries in 1936.   Did Mann perhaps feel that these monsters would have been forgotten by, say, the end of the century, or did he realise that they were monsters for all time?

A Twentieth Century classic which should be much better known than it is.   Even from major online booksellers I had to have two goes at getting a decent copy.   Finally a word for the translator, Robin Smyth.   That word, again, is superb.   I cannot recall reading a translation, particularly from the German, when nothing ever seems to have been lost.

Caliban's War - James S A Corey

 Caliban's War is the second instalment in The Expanse series - space opera, certainly, but with ambitions.   What space opera often lacks is characterisation and overarching premise.  'James S A Corey' (collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) tackle the problem head-on.   The premise was where it all began as proposed game-play and thus the characters and storylines have all derived from the premise.  The fact that authorship is a collaboration and, moreover, they each write third-person-limited chapters from the viewpoint of certain characters, guarantees differentiation.

Thus our focus characters start with Captain Jim Holden, Earth-born but now working for the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA).   In the first book, which I haven't read but will soon, he is the survivor hero who stops the bio-engineered protomolecule escaping from the lab on Eros. 

Praxidike Meng is a botanist on Ganymede.  As an ecological disaster unfolds his daughter Mei is kidnapped.   His quest to find her is the driver of this novel.   The ecological disaster however is this novel's take on the overarching premise.   Holden soon realises that the protomolecule he is supposed to have destroyed is what caused the collapse of the station on Ganymede.   Mars Marine Roberta Draper already knows this - she watched her corps get literally torn apart by a indestructible mutated monster that ultimately destroyed itself.  

The Eros station crashed onto the surface of Venus.   Now Venus itself is morphing.   This brings in the UN, in particular our final focus character Chrisjen Avasasrala, potty-mouthed Indian granny and high-ranking bureaucrat.

Caliban's War is almost 600 pages long - space opera needs to be epic - but it races along.  There is humour, camaraderie, action, high politics, big business - even elements of romance.   There is real peril. Most important of all, though, there is the underpinning high concept: humankind, even more diverse than in our times, the solar system divided between three fragile alliances (Earth, Mars, the Outer Planets) needing to come together to defeat the existential threat to the existence of all or any.   It works really well.

Abducting a General - Patrick Leigh Fermor

 Basically, Abducting a General is the other half, or alternate view, of the General Kreipe abduction on Crete in the first half of 1944.   Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss were the British officers in charge and it the initial proposal was Paddy's, developing a much vaguer idea mooted to him by Xan Fielding.   Paddy was a major, senior to and older than Captain Billy Moss but it was Moss who had the big success with his account, Ill Met by Moonlight (reviewed earlier on this blog).  Fermor was himself a literary man but held off writing his account until thirty years or so after Billy's death.   It was partly published in a WW2 magazine and went largely unnoticed.  This version, published by John Murray in 2014, after Paddy too had died, is a reconstruction from the papers he left behind, with helpful introductory notes and extremely useful reports from the field retrieved from the War Office.

The facts don't alter - after all, Paddy was involved with Moss's books and indeed most other accounts.   He translated The Cretan Runner into English and was a source for Antony Beevor's scholarly account which in turn has deep reciprocal links with the works of Beevor's wife, Artemis Cooper, whose biography of Fermor and study of wartime Cairo are both reviewed on this blog.   What makes Paddy's account different is persepective.   He lived a very long life and had time for the deepest reflection.   For much of the time he and Moss were on Crete in 1944 they operated separately, Moss escorting the abducted General while Fermor hurried everywhere across the island meeting contacts and other agents, all of whom he knew, whereas Moss knew none.

In terms of describing the action, Moss is probably the better read.   In terms of understanding the machinations of the Special Operations Executive and the sheer courage of the Cretan resistance, I prefer this.

The Scarlet Papers - Matthew Richardson

 Apparently a debut spying novel, The Scarlet Papers is very impressive indeed.   Matthew Richardson has tackled all the major tropes of the British genre and acquitted himself splendidly.   Moles within the SIS, seedy postwar compromises, double agents, triples, illegals, even the real-life embodiment of super-evil, Mad Vlad.

Max Archer, failed MI6 applicant turned failed academic, is summoned to meet the legendary Scarlet King, first and only female C, active in the field from 1946 all the way to 1992.   Now in her 90s, it seems she wants to publish her tell-all autobiography but needs Max, author of two failed books on Philby and other traitors, to fact-check it.

Obviously, a recipe for disaster.   The powers-that-be can't have that sort of thing coming out.  Some of Scarlet's secrets are big enough to bring down governments, let alone their creepy secret agencies.   The chase is on and it's Max who finds himself on the front-line, with only a dual national private intelligence operative to help him.

Again, Richardson handles this remarkable well.  The theme is preposterous, but then so are all actual spying scandals.   Richardson has not only done his homework, fleshing out the narrative with historical parallels, but he brings it right up to date with the botched Skripol poisoning - one off-the-books op for Scarlet, post-retirement, is accompanying the swapped Skripol to the UK.

The best thing, though, is that the action is suitably thrilling.   I enjoyed The Scarlet Papers hugely and will be searching the shelves for more by Mr Richardson.

The Platform Edge - Mike Ashley (ed)

 From the British Library series 'Tales of the Weird, comes this collection of neglected ghost stories set on the rail system.   Mike Ashley always tries to avoid the well-known regulars, thus there is no 'The Signalman' by Dickens.

There is, however, 'A Short Trip Home' by, of all people, F Scott Fitzgerald, which turns out to be startlingly effective.   Of the Victorian entries I liked 'Railhead' by Perceval Landon, of whom I had never heard but who turns out to have been a friend of Kipling (he lived in a cottage at Batemans) and the author of 'Thurnley Abbey', a ghost story which M R James considered 'almost too horrid.'  I must look it out.

Of the more modern ones, I am always intrigued byR Chetwynd-Hayes, represented here by 'The Underground'.   Of those inbetween, I really liked 'A Subway Named Mobius' which, according to editor Mike Ashley, is the only short story by American astronomer A J Deutsch.

A good collection, then, casting light on several intriguing writers.

The Ariadne Objective - Wes Davis

 This is the story of the SOE in Crete.  It syntheses the personal accounts of Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss (see various posts on this blog over the last couple of months) with the 'universal' approach of pure military historians like Antony Beevor.   It works well and is probably the best introduction to the subject.  What Davis brings to the party is deeper research than Fermor or Moss could ever have achieved.  Davis, for example, gives us the names of the crew of the bomber that dropped Fermor but was unable to drop Moss onto the Cretan massif in February 1944.   Where Davis differs from other accounts - for example, the type of bomber it was that carried Fermor and Moss - I tend to side with Davis.  In this instance, for example, why would a British crew fly an American bomber?

Davis is particularly could on John Pendlebury, the eccentric British academic who carried out the groundwork for Fermor and Moss (and Xan Fielding, come to that) and who died the ultimate hero's death during the Fall of Crete in 1941.  Pendlebury gets a chapter to himself - richly deserved.   Davis slightly plays down the abduction of General Kreipe in April '44, which reflects its importance with historical retrospect but does not reflect the fervour it raised at the time.

Obviously I am now quite familiar with the central story but Davis adds a lot of fresh detail and has a 100% engaging style.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Ariadne Objective.  I recommend it to generalist and specialist alike.

Nothing More Than Murder - Jim Thompson

 Nothing More Than Murder (1949) is a pulp psychological thriller knocked out by Thompson at the height of US film noir.   It is begging to be adapted by Chandler and directed by Fritz Lang with either Robert Ryan or Sterling Hayden in the lead.   It even has a movie house setting.

Joe Wilmot, a former juvenile delinquent, has built up a thriving picture house in the town of Stoneville.   Ok, he got the premises by marrying the heiress of local bigwigs but he built it up, saw off the competition and negotiated his way through the bewildering and wildly corrupt picture distribution business.   Joe's wife, Elizabeth, has a habit of bringing home strays, the latest of whom is a pubescent Plain Jane called Carol Farmer.   Inevitably Joe and Carole have a fling.   Inevitably Elizabeth finds out.   She wants out - more importantly she wants half the value of the business.

A murder plot is concocted whereby they will lure a housekeeper to Stoneville.   Carol kill her and they will burn the woman's body in a fire in the garage where Joe stores and rewinds and checks his films.   Joe will then claim on Elizabeth's life insurance and mail her the lot.

It sounds like the perfect murder.   Of course there's no such thing.   Suspicion falls on Joe, Carol gets clingy, Joe tries to scam his way out of the jam, only to fall victim to the several scams of others.   Thompson could concoct this sort of story in his sleep.   He keeps it short and punchy and the reader is happy to tag along for the ride.   It's not Thompson at his very best - King Blood is my favourite - but it's still miles better than most of his rivals.

Gold, Frankincense and Dust - Valerio Varesi

Parma is shrouded in autumnal mist.   Commissario Franco Soneri is called to a body found on the verge of the autosrada, where there has been a multi-vehicle pile-up.   A lorry-load of bulls have broken loose and there is a Roma camp close by.   The body has been badly and deliberately burnt.

The victim turns out to be a beautiful young Romanian girl with links to the Roma people.  She operated under various names and had a string of well-off older lovers who have different perspectives on her character.   Whilst they certainly give her presents, she is not a prostitute.   Her day job seems to have been cleaning for a specialist firm of goldsmiths.   She was, however, having an intense affair with the husband of the proprietor and was three months pregnant by him.

Soneri investigates at a leisurely pace.  We are gently introduced to the unique working of the Italian crime and judicial system.   The book was written in 2007 and it is therefore just about credible that a middle-aged commissario like Soneri should still be immune to technological advances.   Soneri does things old-style.   He believes that coincidences happens, that people are fallible, and all will become clear in the end.   His private life is going through a troubled time, so he increases his visits to local bars and trattoria.  He meets a down-at-heel marchese whose aristocratic demeanour gets him carte blanche for his eccentricities.   He too is one of nature's philosophers and his interactions with Soneri are highlights of the story.

I was reminded of Camilleri's Mantalbano novels.  The focus on food, regionality, character - alongside a wry commentary of the current state of affairs.   Reading it was pure pleasure.   I'm no expert on translations from the Italian but I will certainly keep an eye out for translator Joseph Farrell's versions of Dario Fo's plays.  In fact I think I might Google them now...

Patrick Leigh Fermor, An Adventure - Artemis Cooper

 This is a superb account of a long life, well lived.  Fermor was a son of the Raj, brought up by effectively a single mother, who failed at school and, aged 18, set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, an adventure which changed his life.

Fermor was great at languages and making friends.   These skills brought him out of Rumania in 1939 and into the Intelligence Corps.   From there it was the Special Operations Executive and undercover work on what the Nazis called Fortress Crete.   Medals and public recognition came with the abduction of General Heinrich Kreipe in 1944 (see my review of Ill Met by Moonlight, below).

After the war Fermor settled in Greece and became a famous travel writer.  Ultimately this led to a knighthood.  He died, aged 96, in 2011.

I have already commented on Cooper's literary DNA and skills (see my review of her Cairo, below).  By the time she wrote this, in 2012, her skills had developed even further.   Once you know about her, it's good fun to see how she underplays her famial links with Fermor in the final third of the book.   Her husband visits him in Greece, but she doesn't mention herself being there.   Her father and grandmother were close friends with Fermor and she herself has a Greek forename.   Coincidence?

But that's just an extra for those in the know.   Anyone would derive tremendous pleasure from this book.   It is a rare gift to be able to write about war, travel and the making of books with equal care and aplomb.

Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata

 Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, so you have to wonder why he is so little known in the West.  It can't be because he is too Oriental, because Mishima can be equally esoteric.  It might be a translation problem (Edward G Seidensticker, who translated this, was undoubtedly a great scholar but that doesn't necessarily make him a great translator), or it might just be that 120-page novellas are not popular here.

I should perhaps point out that 120 pages took me five sessions to read.   I so enjoyed the poetic quality of Kawabata's sparse writing that I wanted to enjoy every paragraph.  It is a leisurely story, and rightly so, as the protagonist Shimamura is a lazy man taking a lazy holiday in the mountains.

He comes to this particular hot springs resort because Komako is there.  Shimamura and Komako have met before and have had an affair, but now Komako has signed a four-year geisha contract to fund care for a young man who she looks after but who is engaged to another woman, Yoko.  Shimamura has encountered Yoko and the sick young man on the train journey north.   His interest has been piqued in more ways than one.

Shimamura is an urbane city man.   He has inherited enough money not to have to work.   He considers himself something of an intellectual and aesthete.  He has cultivated an interest in Japanese dance and collects Chijimi linen cloth.   Komako is not rich.   To get money she has adopted the archaic profession of a geisha.   She fits in a renewed affair with Shimamura between parties at which she drinks too much and filches cigarettes (she doesn't smoke).  In a sense she is flirting with modernity (the novel was written in 1934), but the two lifestyles are always going to clash.   In any event, the casual love affair is never going anywhere.   Shimamura already has a wife and children, who he seemingly doesn't care much about.  Indeed, he doesn't seem to care much about anything.

The allusive, meandering style is deliberately misleading.  The novel in which very little happens is always leading to a tragic climax.  Old and new Japan come together.  An old traditional barn in the mountain resort is acting as a cinema.  The film jams in the projector, sets on fire and burns the place down.  A shocking death finally jars Shimamura into life and Kawabata ends with the most beautiful paragraph of all.

The Society of Time - John Brunner

This fantastic British Library collection, edited and introduced by Mike Ashley, contains the original three long short stories/novellas, plus two additional time-based stories, 'Father of Lies' and 'The Analysts'.

In John Brunner, I have now found a sci fi writers whose interests sit closely with mine and who can actually write in a highly-acceptable literary style.  The problem with many sci fi authors is that they prioritise ideas over craft-skill.  I can understand this to an extent; describing the challenging in a basic, functional manner might seem an obvious turn to take, however going too far can easily put off the more discerning reader, and has done in my case many times.   You really need to give your writing a bit of character - and fortunately Brunner has it in bucketloads.

For the Scoiety of Time trilogy Brunner envisages a world in which the Spanish Armada succeeded.  England is now - in the twentieth century - a well-integrated part of the Spanish Empire, which divides the world more or less equally with the Confederation, dominated by China and Russia.   Thanks to the victory of the Spanish Hapsburgs in 1588 there has been no Austro-Hungarian Empire, thence no World Wars.   On the negative side, because of the dominance of the Catholic Church there has been very little progress - no industrial revolution, no cars or planes.   People still ride about and defend themselves with swords. 

Science has, however, made one stupendous advance: it has become possible to travel back in time.  The potential benefits and dangers of this are so extreme that the Empire and the Confederacy have come together to lay down rules, adminustered by twin societies in the two jurisdictions.  Time travellers have to be licensed by their society, their expeditions severely restricted.   In all three stories, therefore, the rules are broken and the very existence of the 'contemporary' world is threatened.

In all three cases Brunner's hero is Don Miguel de Navarro, a young licentiate of the Imperial Society.   In 'Spoil of Yesterday' occupt licentiates have been selling time trips to rich diletantes.  Someone has brought back an Aztec mask as a souvenir, not realising how an out-of-time artefact can turn the world on its head.  'The Word Not Written' is set in London on New Year's Eve.  Society members will gather at their HQ for midnight mass but first there is a spectacular party thrown at the Prince Imperial's Palace at Greenwich (the Prince is Head of the Society).  Don Miguel is not one of nature's party-goers but he forces himself to attend and is paired off with the Scandanavian ambassador's daughter.  Scandanavia is naturally a progressive country and Lady Kristina is a liberated ypung woman.  She wants to see how orifinary people celebrate, so Miguel escorts her into central London (Londres, in Brunner's Spanish empire).  There they realise something has gone out-of-time when an Amazonian female warrior first excites the mob, then fights them off.   Meanwhile their is an insurrection.  The Empire is about to be overthrown - until Father Ramon, the Jesuit master-theoretician of the Society, steps back in time and fixes the anomaly.  The third and final story 'The Fullness of Time' is set in America where, in a fun development, the Empire has chosen the Mohawks to bring together the traditional tribes.  The anomaly in this case is a modern drill bit in a mine supposedly sealed in ancient times.  Father Ramon suspects Confederate involvement.

The additional stories are both associated in theme and time of writing (the early Sixties).  In 'Father of Lies' a small corner of rural England appears to have been sealed off from modernity, to the extent that dragons and ogres live there.  'The Analysts' has the advantage of a compelling character, Joel Sackstone, who has turned his unique gift of visualisation into a profession.  He looks at architect's models and visualises them in reality: how people will move about there; the limitations of the plan and the solutions.  He is called in by his main employer who has been asked to design a very odd building for a mysteruous research organisation.  Joel visualises it in practice and realises that all the odd angles and levels are leading visitors in a direction that doesn't really exist.  He tries it out in his main room at home - and walks clean through the solid wall.

As I mentioned, Brunner was writing this stuff in the early Sixties.  He was slightly ahead of his time, albeit he reflects and develops trends that were incipient at the time - women's liberation, mixed marriages, racial prejudice, even plundered treasures.  He wrote lots before his death in 1999, but to my horror yesterday, none of my usual obscure book dealers in London had a single one!   I shall have to delve deeper and venture further afield, because I absolutely want to read more. 

The First Day on the Somme - Martin Middlebrook

 The classic account of perhaps the greatest organised bloodbath in history.   I remember when it came out in 1970, it completely upended all the sentimentalised tosh we had been taught to believe about our heroic grandfathers.   There was heroism, that's for sure - and it was all for nothing.   Something like half a million men died on July 1 1916, for absolutely nothing.

The great breakthrough had been planned for several months but it had to be brought forward in order to releive the French at Verdun.   To be clear, the French withstood hell at Verdun.   We should also remember, which Middlebrook reminds us from time to time, that this was a Franco-German war, a re-run of 1871, and we were only there on a gentleman's agreement, helping out.

The scale of the battle, even on that first day (which was meant to be the only day) was too immense for the modern reader to assimilate.   This is where Middlebrook's stroke of genius, since adopted by many, comes into play.   He has chosen ten men, from all over the UK and of all ranks, whose fortunes he follows.   They range from the outliers - the 68 year old who volunteered along with three sons - to the everyday run-of-the-mill man who wanted something more exciting than drudgery in the aforementioned mill.   They allow us to relate.   The machine of the new style of war is humanised.

Middlebrook also draws on first-person testimony.   Again, he covers the range.   There are the published war diaries of Earl Haig and his commander on the day, General Rawlinson; and there are dozens of privates and lance-corporals whom Middlebrook interviewed during his research.  The interviewees all, of course, survived.

Middebrook is the only war historian I recall reading who explains how armies are built.   He takes the time to point out that the German army on the Somme were all conscripts - Germany and France both had forms of national service which meant that every man under sixty had been trained in weaponry, discipline and basic military tactics.   Britain had a small regular army, recently backed up by Territorials primarily meant for home defence.   Everyone else was a volunteer (conscription did not even begin in mainland UK until 1916 and none of the first conscripts were anywhere near battle-ready in July).   Most of those volunteers, and the vast majority of the Brits on the field on July 1 were New Army, men who had responded to Kitchener's famous (or infamous) "Your Country Needs YOU!" appeal.   Kitchener was their hero; he had died at sea less than a month before the Somme, and now he was mythical, a hero.   For every member of the New Army, this was to be their first action.

Middlebrook takes us carefully through the day, with pauses for review at midday and dusk, the same times the generals at HQ could have used to capitalise on the few successes there had been and do something about the appalling disaster unfolding elsewhere.   He then takes us, commendably briefly, through what happened next.   For the ten men whom he chose as guides, he tells us what became of them. 

The book is, as I say, a classic.   It is sobering, instructive, horrendous in what is described but always compassionate.   The errors of leadership were largely unavoidable.   Some misjudgments, however, were built into the plan from the first.  The real catastrophe, it seems to me, was the failure of the man who was told to arrange eighteen trains to ferry the worst casualties from the field to hospital, who on day only managed three.  How many deaths did he have on his bill?  

The sort of slop I was fed as a child is now forcefed to contemporary children about World War II.   The truth will come out and I'm sure there are historians out there waiting to bring it to light.

Cairo in the War - Artemis Cooper

 Artemis Cooper might be defined as heritage writer.  The books she writes are connected with her heritage as the granddaughter of Duff Cooper, politician, diplomat and military historian, and the aristocrat actress Lady Diana; daughter of aristocrat and writer John Julius Norwich, and wife to military historian Antony Beevor.   Her themes are perfectly encapsulated here, the scandalous story of the cultural broth that made Cairo infamous during World War II.

Cairo was then a British protectorate - not quite part of the Empire but effectively ruled from London.  The British expats, and the first wave of military commanders stationed there, were either Raj, posh or risque, sometimes all three.   This is not really the story of the ordinary infantryman, a long way from home in an alien climate, though they are mentioned.

We have the highly dubious royal family, led by the notorious King Farouk, initially in his youthful pomp, latterly at the start of his long debauched decline.  In public the royals are devout Muslims, behind closed doors they are boozing and copulating with the everyone else.

The war becomes a reality with Rommel's advance through the desert.  Cairo survives.  Then the war-story turns to the Special Operations Executive, with Cairo the base for operations supporting resistance movements in Greece, Crete and the Balkans.

It is incredibly well done.  The characters are expertly summarised and Cooper somehow makes it easy for her reader to keep track of the various cliques and conspiracies.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.