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.