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.