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.