The Island Pharisees - John Galsworthy

 Galsworthy is best known for his Forsyte Saga.   It is often forgotten that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was also a very successful, sometimes controversial dramatist.   The Island Pharisees is a novel from 1904, two years before The Man of Property began the saga.   It is a gentle satire of middle class Edwardian English pride and hypocrisy.   Dick Shelton, a half-hearted, well-off trainee barrister, has become engaged to the beautiful daughter of wealthy landowner Algernon Dennant.   Her mother comes from the aristocracy and Antonia is regarded as a fine catch.

Antonia's parents insist on a period of separation, to make sure the young people really love each other.   During this time Dick knocks about town country, visiting old friends and society contacts.   His journey is dogged by a young French bohemian he meets in Chapter One.   Ferrand is something of an anarchist, on the tramp around Europe.   Dick casually gives him a few pounds to help out.   They keep meeting through the novel.   They correspond and Dick writes to Antonia about his odd acquaintance.   Ultimately, of course, they come together at Holm Oaks near Oxford, the family seat of the Dennants.   Ferrand does his level best to behave but ultimately he has to go.   Antonia recognises that something has changed in Dick since he fell under the influence of Ferrand.   He seems to question the norms of society...

It is beautifully done, Galsworthy showing the better qualities of his characters as well as the worst.   The broadest satire is reserved for the most pompous and opinionated - a bunch of Oxford dons at Shelton's old college.   I was particularly struck by the way the Dennant family are more tolerant of Ferrand, who is of course not one of them, than their neighbouring landowner who is shacked up with a married woman.   Many excellent writers do not win the Nobel Prize.   What makes an excellent writer into a great one, worthy of the Prize, is humanity, which Galsworthy dispenses here in spades. 

Marthe - J K Huysmans

 Marthe is the debut novel of Huysmans, the ultimate novelist of French decadence at the end of the nineteenth century, so bad, so obscene that no British publisher dared issue a translation.   Actually, one publisher, Kegan Paul, did dare, but only the late 'Catholic' novels and only when he was at death's door and it didn't matter any more.

Pompous bluestockings are always on the lookout for something to ban.   The fact is Huysmans was a realist.   He was enthused by Zola's pseudo-scientific theories of experimental realism but he, in practice, led the way with Marthe.   Zola blatantly copies Marthe in Nana but does not dare to go as far as Huysmans.   Zola's heroine starts off in the theatre and rises from there.   Marthe is first seen in the theatre but that is the highpoint of her career.   She is and remains a whore.   Her young lover finds normalcy after leaving her.   Her elderly actor lover ends up on the mortuary table after she dumps him.   Inbetween Marthe is the kept mistress of a married man she cares so little about that his name is never mentioned.

Huysmans had to self-publish Marthe in Belgium.   Imports were banned in France, any copies seized and destroyed as obscene.   The truth is, the characters are immoral but there is no obscenity.   We are given reality, sordid, sad, but ultra real, even down to the details.  The actor beats Marthe, showing off to his drunken mates.   The married man who keeps her wears pink silk tights.

It sounds grubby and depressing.   It might be a shortcoming on my part, but I found it fascinating, thrilling and restorative.   I enjoyed it more than the better known Down There (reviewed here in 2021) because the core subject (unsuitable passion, the degradation of poverty, and indeed debased theatricals) are themes I have encountered and witnessed.   I bought the book for a research project, started reading as a chore, only to be swept away by Huysman's brilliant technique.   I have become a Zola fan over recent years but Huysmans intrigues me more.

Downriver - Iain Sinclair

 I emerge from another protracted read.   Downriver is in some ways future fiction.   Sinclair envisages London dominated by the Widow (obviously Margaret Thatcher), whose rule is absolute and who "accepts the advice" of those who suggest she builds an enormous memorial to her late husband in Docklands.   Sinclair and his mates decide to investigate.   Meanwhile, some of them are pitching a project to the BBC's late night arts programme (under the absolute rule of Yentob) about David Rodinsky, a real-life Whitechapel mystery who was thought at the time to have disappeared, leaving behind a room above the synagogue devoted to his studies in various languages and the Kabbalah.   Sinclair himself had written a book about him with Rachel Lichtenstein, who first uncovered the story.   It later transpired (and is reported in Downriver) that Rodinsky had actually been sectioned in a mental hospital where he died.

The story, such as it ever is with Sinclair, is told in twelve instalments, as Sinclair gets further and further away from his usual East End stamping ground.   The style varies between instalments.   Sinclair is at the centre of each until we come to the last, which he asks his friend the sculptor Joblard to write because he, Sinclair, has somehow lost his voice.   It is still Joblard and Sinclair, however, as they both come to end of the line, the Isle of Sheppey, where the Thames joins the North Sea.

It is all thoroughly enjoyable but I didn't find it as intriguing as Landor's Tower or White Chappell, partly because the Thatcher trope has dated so badly since the novel came out in 1991.   Also, I am really not interested in the wastelands of Essex which I have seen for myself, thanks (I largely share Sinclair's view of it).   Because the two main premises don't grab my interest I found the book too long, though Sinclair is never boring.   As I say, I enjoyed the Rodinsky section and the Joblard switch at the end.

I Was Jack Mortimer - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 I cannot fathom why the prolific Lernet-Holenia hasn't been translated into English more often.   It seems to me only Baron Blagge (reviewed below), Count Luna and this are available.   He wrote a novel about the Count St Germain - that's obviously of wide interest, so what are we waiting for?

Anyway, I Was Jack Mortimer is very different to Blagge and Luna.   It is a contemporary (1933) satirical take on US gangster thrillers.   In that sense it shares the fantastical tone of Blagge.   Lernet-Holenia gives us a dark farce in which old school mores clash with modern mobsterism.

Cab driver Ferdinand Sponer picks up a fare at the station in Vienna.   The passenger asks to be taken to the Bristol Hotel.   Sponer heads across town.    He hears what he assumes is a truck backfiring.   It occurs to Sponer to ask which Bristol Hotel the man wants, the New Bristol or---   The man doesn't answer.   Because he's been shot dead by someone who must have hopped onto the cab's running board, done the dirty deed, and hopped off again - something only really possible with interwar cars.

Sponer does the decent thing.   He tries to interet the police in the murder, but can't manage to grab their attention.   He therefore decides to dispose of the body and get on with life.   He drives aimlessly around the city, even finds time to pop into a coin-op bar (what happened to those?) and chat up a couple of girls.   Before dropping his passenger into the Danube he has the sense to go through the dead man's papers.   Turns out he's Jack Mortimer, a banker from Chicago.   We subsequently learn more: Mortimer's bank specialises in laundering Mob money; he is or rather was a notorious lady's man.

It occurs to Sponer that he should go on the run, start a more interesting life somewhere else.   Meanwhile, why not make the most of the opportunity to enjoy the high life of Vienna?   He assumes Mortimer's identity and takes Mortimer's room at the right Bristol Hotel.   Also in town are Mortimer's latest conquest and her affronted husband...   The night doesn't turn out anything like Sponer anticipated.

It's all great fun.   The style is certainly modern for the time.   I like the way Sponer's imaginary police interrogations are handled.   I'm not 100% convinced by the translation but I don't speak or read German, so can't really criticise.   The proof reading was astonishingly bad - bloopers on the first page!!?  Get a bloody grip, Pushkin Press!

Of Human Bondage - W Somerset Maugham

 It's been three weeks since my last post, three weeks very well spent as I've been reading Maugham's first indisputable masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, published in 1915 but written on the eve of World War I.   It's a coming of age story written by a man of forty.   It ends with Philip's marriage as he is coming up to thirty; Maugham turned forty in January 1914 and was not yet married, though he was in a relationship with the woman he would marry (Syrie, daughter of Dr Barnardo, no less, and until 1916 still married to the US pharmaceutical millionaire Henry Wellcome); in September 1915 Syrie gave birth to Maugham's daughter, Liza.

Philip Carey is Maugham in all but name.   Orphaned at an early age, he is brought up in Kent by his eldery uncle and aunt.   He is educated at the thinly disguised Canterbury School, and later in Heidelberg.   After a dismal apprenticeship in accountancy he trains as a doctor in London.   There is a period as a would-be artist in Paris which Maugham did not do.   Maugham, however, was born in Paris and spent his first ten years there.   

Maugham, today, is claimed as a forerunner of gay emancipation.   In 1915 England that was totally illegal.   Maugham deals with the tendency in Philip masterfully.   Philip has a crush on boys at school and is reluctant to get involved with women as a young man.   He feels, as Maugham clearly did, that he ought to marry.   The first woman he falls for is a waitress in a teashop called Mildred.   She is pretty but dull.   She only tolerates Philip because he is a gentleman and is willing to spend money on her.   She treats him appallingly and runs off with another man.   She turns up pregnant and abandoned.   Philip takes her in on a platonic basis and bonds with the child, a baby girl.   Then he discovers that Mildred is getting an income as a prostitute.   Later, as a trainee medic at a hospital in one of the poorer parts of Victorian London, Philip diagnoses a terrible disease in Mildred.   He abandons her, loses money on a share deal because of a slump caused by the Boer War, and is reduced to working as a shopwalker until his uncle dies and his small inheritance enables him to complete his medical studies.

So far as we know, none of this happened to Maugham.   The emotional backbone of the novel is entirely him coming into his own as a master of his craft.   The other difference with Philip is that he has a club foot.   Maugham was bullied because he had a bad stammer.   Some critics say that Philip's foot is a metaphor for Maugham's sexuality.   I say that's wishful thinking.   Maugham gives his hero a visible physical defect because reiterating a stammer bad enough to be a serious problem would be tedious to do in a modern novel with lots of dialogue and because most people, then and now, do not appreciate how restrictive a speech problem can be.

Of Human Bondage is a long novel with 600 pages and a hundred-and-something chapters.   It was a transitional work for Maugham and is a transitional novel from Victorian literature to a Modern Englsh form.   It really is a masterpiece, well worth a couple of weeks of anyone's time.

Little Siberia - Antti Tuomainen

 I picked up Palm Beach Finland earlier this year and quite enjoyed it.   So I picked up Little Siberia and found it slightly less enjoyable.   Tuomainen sees himself as a Finnish Hiaissen but he simply hasn't thought it through with this one.

The start is promising.   A meteorite falls to earth on the Finnish border with Russia, smashing through the car roof of an alcoholic ex-rally driver who was aiming to smash into the cliff-face and kill himself.   It turns out to be a meteorite of special interest, its composition unusual.   They say it's worth a million euros.   It will have to be taken to Helsinki, then on to London for further study.   In the meantime it is lodged in the War Museum in Hurmevaara and guarded for the next four days by volunteers from the villagers.

The first night the young pastor is on guard duty when unknown criminal try to steal the meteorite.   Unfortunately they raid the wrong cabinet in the darkness and steal the wrong item, with fatal consequences.

So far, so good, we think.   Cracking premise, nice set-up.   Our protagonist, Joel, is no ordinary pastor.   He is a veteran of the Afghan war in which he was seriously injured.   He has a beautiful, clever wife who he adores.   She tells him she is pregnant.   He should be thrilled - but the pipe bomb he stepped on in Afghanistan left him permanently infertile.   Somehow he hasn't told Krista about his problem - and that's where ther shortcomings of Little Siberia begin.

Joel presents as an honest man.   He doesn't pretend that he believes absolutely in God.   He just wants to use compasssion and his listening skills to help the villagers.  So why would he not tell the wife he adores?   The resolution of this plotline is cursory in the extreme and I didn't believe it for a moment.

Likewise, the cosmic pebble which drops in the stagnant pond that is Hurmevaara is rather mechancially worked out.   A bunch of suspects is put in front of us and eliminated in turn.   A couple of interfering Russian gangsters offer promise but end up going nowhere much.

Little Siberia is pacey but perfunctory.   Worse, it is not as funny as it thinks it us.   I won't be picking up the next Tuomainen I come across.

Three Fires - Denise Mina

 In many ways Three Fires (2023) is the companion piece to Mina's brilliant Rizzio (2021).   Both, obviously, are novellas published by Polygon.   Both take historical incidents and view them through a contemporary lens.   Three Fires is less immediately engaging.   Its hero, the 15th century Florentine mystic dictator Girolamo Savonarola is clearly less appealing than the (probably) innocent French secretary.   Political murder, in the latter case, is more exciting than a renegade preacher ultimately brought down by hubris.  That said, both are compelling reads - Mina couldn't write boring sentence if she tried.   And she manages to drag out every shred of humanity in Savonarola.   He starts off indifferent to God, then personal setbacks lead him to find God.   He genuinely believes God speaks to him, then he begins to doubt, and the doubts quickly lead to his gruesome death.

The novella is the perfect form for Mina's purpose.   Many have tried and failed to spin the Rizzio story into full-length novels.   Such attempts fail because poor old Rizzio was collateral damage in a political powerplay which happened behind closed doors in Tudor times but today are everyday public fare.   In that sense Savonarola plays better because he is definitely responsible for his own rise and fall.   The canvas is bigger, the protagonist centrestage.  

I for one am really enjoying Mina's mid-career experiments.

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

 Achebe and Wole Soyinka were near contemporaries who brought African literature to world notice in 1958, Soyinka with his first stage play, Achebe with this novel.   Soyinka went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and rightly so.    Achebe didn't publish enough - just five novels in almost fifty years.

It's interesting that both men were Nigerian and both finished their education in England.   Solyinka, however, was upper middle class with a Yoruba background whereas Achebe was Igbo and rural.   Things Fall Apart was his first and most important novel.    Broadly speaking it is certainly a novel.   It has a central character, the famous wrestler Okonkwo, and is in three parts: Okonkwo's life as a distinguished resident of his village; exile from his fatherland to his motherland after he accidentally kills a young man; and his return to Umuofia to find that Christian missionaries have established a church and the old ways which Okonkwo fought so hard to live up to are quickly falling apart.   It is this last phase which finally lets us date the story to the end of the nineteenth century, otherwise everything is as it always was.

Whilst Okonkwo is the central character, Achebe explores the ancient traditions, myths and religious practice.   These can be bizarre and brutal on the one hand, beautiful on the other, particularly in terms of the animal stories the mothers tell to their children.   Underlying it all is a discourse on the male and female aspects of life.   Okonkwo is ultra male because his father was an idler and a failure.   Okonkwo barely remembers his mother but when he goes into exile in her home village he is welcomed as a long-lost child.   Okonkwo's eldest son is a failure despite his father's attempts to beat some masculinity into him.   He becomes an early convert to the Christians.   Okonkwo wishes that his daughter Ezinma, by his second wife, could succeed him.   He cannot say this openly, of course.   Such things are not possible.

Things Fall Apart really is a literary masterpiece - complex yet beautifully simple.   It was written in English and first published here by Heinemann.   I am keen to explore more African literature, especially by black authors.   Hitherto the only African literature I have read and seen are the plays of Athol Fugard, who has always been on the right side of the argument but was never one of the oppressed. 

Shoot at the Moon - William F Temple

 A sci-fi semi-classic from the Sixties by a pioneer of the postwar British genre.   William F Temple was never as famous as Arthur C Clarke or as idiosyncratic as Brian Aldiss, but he knew them both and had his own literary characteristics.   I have already reviewed The Four-Sided Triangle, Battle on Venus and (the best title) Fleshpots of Sansato on this blog.   Shoot at the Moon is every bit as good.   As an extra bonus it took me back to the mid-Sixites when the debate among schoolboys was Is it even possible to land on the moon?

Well obviously it was, and Temple, being of a scientific bent, never seems to have doubted it.   He follows Clarke in his advocacy of atomic engines being the best and least damaging way to do it, and they may well have been right.   He then works in Charles Eric Maine's debut trick of murder in space.   Indeed, he doubles down on the device with two murders.   But the Endeavour only has a crew of five to begin with: the proto Musk, Colonel Marley, who has funded the expedition, his schizophrenic daughter Lou, who happens to be a leading scientist, her ex-husband Thompson, the celebrated Johan, Pettigue, who has a reputation of being the only survivor of several expeditions, and our narrator, the jobbing space pilot Franz Brunel.   Well, it can't be him, we assume - that would be taking the unreliable narrator too far.   And it can't really be either of the two victims, certainly not the first.   Temple hints that there are other crews elsewhere on the Moon, so it may be them, especially since the Endeavour is on a literal gold hunt on a forbidden patch of the Dark Side.

I'm not going to reveal the killer.   Just to say, it's a good one when it comes and provides an excellent chase to finish with.   The characters all have their strengths and weaknesses, their motives and guilty secrets.   Shoot at the Moon is Temple on top form.   If retro British sci-fi is your thing, you'll love it.

Man of Straw - Heinrich Mann

 The tricky thing with satire is drawing it out to fill a decent-sized novel.   Heinrich Mann pulls it off with Man of Straw.   Diederich Hessling is the ultimate New Man of turn-of-the-century provincial Germany, obsessed with the Kaiser, with being a Kaiser in his home, work and personal life.   Mann's first achievement is to make Diederich his hero (so many lesser satirists make the object of their dislike a secondary character).   The second is to humanize him.   We see what made Diederich a New Man: his childhood, sickly and frightened of everything; his awkward time at University in Berlin where he ultimately finds his place with the Neo Teutons whom he imagines will take over Germany; his army service, which he loves but which is cut short by ill-health.

In practice it is only Diederich who makes a success of Neo Teutonism.   Other members he encounters in later life are failures, oddballs.   Diedrich returns to Netzig to take over his father's paper factory.   He does the round of the great and good of the town.   Among them is his hero, Herr Buck. a man involved in everything and universally admired.   His is the position Diederich aspires to.   But Buck is a social reformer - a liberal by modern standards - and Diederich a royalist ultra-conservative.   His son, Wolfgang, whom Diederich befriended in Berlin, is ever so slightly decadent.

Diederich's progress is neither easy nor straightfroward.   He calls out Old Buck's son-in-law, Lauer, for derogatory comments about the Kaiser.   This is a criminal offence.   Diederich is the chief witness for the prosecution.   Wolfgang Buck leads the defence.   Diederich panics and tries to wriggle out of the situation.   But he can't.   Mann shows him writhing in the witness box, struggling to find an answer to Wolfgang's cross examination.   And in the pit of despair he finds a crumb of courage and responds.   To his amazement Lauer is convicted and imprisoned.   Deiderich has won.

The business is losing money.   Diederich in his pomp and ambition has overstretched himself.   He tries to cheat his suppliers and finds an unlikely ally in his machinist, the social democrat union man, Napoleon Fischer.   They become partners in fraud and politics.   Diederich joins the town council.    Fishcher ultimately makes it all the way to the Reichstag.

And alongside all this we have Diederich's personal life.   He has let a girl down in Berlin.   He wins the local hieress Guste from Wolfgang by starting a rumour that they are half-brother and sister, which perhaps they are.   He cheats one of his sisters, Magda, of her inheritance, but protects his other sister, Emma, when she is let down.

There are three tremendous episodes of pure farce in Man of Straw which anchor the theme.   The first, at the end of Chapter One, is in 1892 when Diederich is a student in Berlin and comes across a huge crowd of the unemployed protesting in Unter Den Linden.   The Kaiser comes to face them down.   He does not address them, he certainly doesn't give them the bread and work they demand.   He simply appears, on horseback, with his entourage.   He simply shows himself and the protestors are silenced.   Diederich is one of the cheering throng who run after the imperial retinue.   He finds himself in the park, on a bridle path.   He finds himself facing the Kaiser himself.   Diederich falls into a puddle.   The Kaiser laughs.

On honeymoon with Guste in Switzerland, Diederich spots the Kaiser again.   This time he follows him all the way to Rome where he keeps a sort of personal guard outside the Kaiser's hotel.   And finally, after the unveiling of the statue of the first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, in Netzig - Diederich's personal project, which has cost millions to achieve - turns into a total waterlogged disaster, Diedrich turns up at the Buck house and watches from the corridor outside Old Buck's sickroom as his first, fallen hero, the Kaiser of Netzig, dies.

The best and most challenging novel I have read so far in 2024. 

Lions and Shadows - Christopher Isherwood

 Isherwood's autobiography from 1938, written after his return to England from Nazi Germany and alongside his Berlin trilogy that ultimately became Cabaret, comes with a warning:

Because this book is about the problems of a would-be writer, it is also about conduct.   The style is the man.   Because it is about conduct, I have had to dramatize it, or you would not get farther than the first page.   Read it as a novel.   I have used a novelist's licence in describing my incidents and drawing my characters: 'Chalmers,' 'Linsley,' 'Cheuret' and 'Weston' are all caricatures: that is why - quite a part from the fear of hurt feelings - I have given them, and nearly everybody else, fictitious names.

This is slightly and deliberately misleading.   There is very little that seems to be either dramatic or dramatized.   The real identities of most renamed participants are obvious to those in the know (which large numbers would have been in 1938, when the era of the Auden Gang was coming to an end).   'Weston' is Auden, 'Chalmers' is Edward Upward, and 'Stephen Savage', who literally bursts in during the last chapter, is Stephen Spender.   Isherwood uses fake names because these are his friends and might not remain so.   Cecil Day Lewis, for example, a pivotal member of the Auden Gang, is not here at all, nor Louis MacNeice.   Given that Auden was the hub around which the group revolved - everybody except Upward was a separate friend of Auden and met the others only through him - his long journey to China with Isherwood in January 1938, and removal to America, again with Isherwood, a year later, was always going to cause resentment.

Christopher remains Christopher Isherwood.   The books he talks about writing are real books.  The fantasy he made with Upward at Cambridge ('Mortmere') is real.   The extracts of writing by Upward and Auden are all real.   The book ends with the publication of Isherwood's first novel, All the Conspirators, in May 1928 and his departure for Berlin, where Auden was spending the year, in March 1929.

The area in which Isherwood holds back information is the personal.   How well off his family was, far richer than any other member of the Auden circle, is never made clear.   The family itself is rarely mentioned - the loss of his soldier father in the War is not here, even though the theme is Christopher finding and facing 'The Test' which the previous generation of men faced in the War to End All Wars.   The big unmentionable, though, is Isherwood's homosexuality.   Obviously this was illegal in Britain at the time and, in fairness, he finally came to terms with it in Weimar Germany.   It is therefore a subject dealt with in his books about his life in Germany, in the mighty A Single Man (1964) and in the eventual successor to Lions and Shadows, Christopher and His Kind (1976).   Perhaps, then, discounting the role his sexuality must have played in his friendships with these lightly-disguised literary men is the fictional element.

In summary, a fascinating experiment and an enthralling read.

Sunset Swing - Ray Celestin

 Sunset Swing is the closing number of his City Blues Quartet.   It's Christmas 1967.   Ida Young has recently retired, selling her PI business in LA.   Kerry Gaudet, a USAAF nurse, facially scarred by napalm, has flown in from Vietnam to find her missing brother.   Nick Licata, boss of the LA Mob, calls in fixer Dante Sanfelippo to find his missing son.   Louis Armstrong flies in to perform on Steve Allen's Christmas special.

Armstrong and Ida are friends from way back in New Orleans.   Dante and Ida have worked together before.   Ida has retired and Dante is about to, hoping to exchange his wholesale booze business for a vineyard in the Valley, deeds to be signed on December 26 - coincidentally the day Licata Jnr is due to answer bail, otherwise his father is out half a million bucks.   Kerry, of course, only has a few days leave.   So the clock is running from the outset, always a bonus in any thriller.

Meanwhile the Night Slayer is prowling the city.   He might have killed a young woman called Audrey.   Dante doesn't think so, given that she was Riccardo Licata's secretary.   Ida has no interest - until the cops find her name and former office number in Audrey's handwriting.   Slowly, gradually, the threads are drawn together to unpick a massive conspiracy, government agency against government agency, and a horrible truth becomes apparent.   The CIA are using Faron, the legendary killer Ida almost caught in postwar New York in The Mobster's Lament (see review below) twenty years earlier.  Faron is a serial killer but he is not the Night Slayer.   The feds are using him to track down and kill the handful of losers who might be the Night Slayer.   Kerry Guadet's brother Stevie is one of them.

It's complex, maybe slightly far-fetched, though much of conspiracy angle is fact-based; but Ray Celestin has the writing skills to pull it off.   Sunset Swing reads like a breeze (like the Santa Ana which is fanning LA wildfires in the novel), pacy, punchy, noir when its needs to be, and yet always compassionate.   Dante builds a touching relationship with a stray dog he has picked up along the way, Ida with Kerry; and Ida's longtime friendship with Satch has always been a welcome distraction.   Celestin even gives us a musical motif - a tune I don't know by Chet Baker - which ends with a beautiful Christmas twist right before the shooting starts.

The Quartet has plenty of through-lines but unlike so many epics you don't need to read them in order.  I didn't.   Each novel stands alone, has its own themes and developments.   Jump in with the first one you come across - and enjoy.

Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia - Paul Willetts

 Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) was a gifted but prodigal writer across most genres who could never keep hold of a pound note and who drank himself to an early death in the postwar pubs of northern Soho or, the catchier version, Fitzrovia.   He was close to Dylan Thomas when they worked together for a documentary film company in the later years of WW2.   He knew and drank with Nina Hamnett (see my review of her Laughing Torso), collaborated on a movie script with my favourite forgotten British sci-fi writer Charles Eric Maine, and is remembered chiefly for his posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties (also reviewed here), which is the key text for any student of British arts in the Twentieth Century. 

This, by Paul Willetts, is the only full-length biography.   The research is impressive - the cover is very good - the editing is not.   Whilst it is clear that JML led a peripatetic life and tried to hide his whereabouts from his legion of creditors, there is far too much made of his ever-changing address and, in the final chapters, when either Willetts or his editors were running out of vigilance, it is way too often accompanied by terms like 'about November' which is a nonsensical phrase, easily improved.   As it is, it hits like a cracked church bell striking midnight - over and over and over in the final chapters.   I would also suggest there are insufficient examples of our hero's writing to justify the claims made for his talent (which I agree with, by the way, having read his Memoirs more than once).

So, could have been better, but nevertheless Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia is worth having and well worth reading.   A genuine window into a vanished world.

W H Auden - Richard Hoggart

 I find Longman's Writers and their Work series absolutely invaluable: authoritative criticism given in brief, with an overall assessment built up from focused scrutiny of the major works.   Richard Hoggart is just about as authoritative as they come: tutor, lecturer and professor at Hull, Leicester and Birmingham, three cities very important to me.   His first book was a study of Auden in 1951 and that led to this distillation and update of his thinking in 1957 (though he revised it a further three times).   

I have hitherto found Auden off-putting, but my own researches have shown how significant he was considered when his first volume came out in 1931.   He founded a movement which was not really a movement, more a circle with him at the centre, some key like-minded friends who were not necessarily friends of each other, and a whole bunch of imitators.   Auden changed, understandably, after he moved to America immediately before the war, and the subsequent work is not my particular interest at the moment.   Nevertheless Hoggart's account of it had me gripped.

The Templar, the Queen and her Lover - Michael Jecks

 Blimey, turns out it's twelve and a half years since I read Jecks and his Sir Baldwin series.  The last one I read, in the earliest days of this blog, King's Gold, post-dates this one, which is set in 1325, primarily in France, where Sir Baldwin and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock, are part of Queen Isabella's security as she tries to negotiate a treaty with her brother, King Charles IV.

The stumbling block is that Charles and Isabella have not been on the best of terms since Isabella told her father Philip IV that the wives of Charles and another brother were promiscuous adulteresses, carrying on their debauches in the infamous Tour de Nesle.   Both wives were put away.   Charles's wife Blanche is still alive in 1325, a prisoner in the squalid Chateau Galliard, the marriage long since annulled.   Charles is about to marry for the third time, a child bride who is also his first cousin.

Isabella has been likewise sidelined in England, because her husband has replaced Piers Gaveston with a new and more demanding lover, Hugh le Despenser.   Despenser wants the mission to France to fail and Isabella to be discredited.   Edward II's former friend and general, Roger Mortimer, is living in Parisian exile.   He is actually not yet the Queen's lover.

As a former Templar, Baldwin himself is in danger in France, Philip IV being the king who destroyed the Temple and burned the leading Templars.   Baldwin wasn't in France at the time but still has a price on his head.   Meanwhile people in the retinue are dying: Enguerrand, Comte de Foix, is killed after an argument with Baldwin; his squire, Robert de Chatillon, is attacked and later murdered; an old soldier associated with Foix and Robert is killed in the first attack.   Before any of this, the garrison at Chateau Galliard, the prison-keepers of the woman who would have been queen, has been wiped out, Blanche herself having disappeared.  The garrison, moreover, comprised men hired by Robert de Chatillon on the orders of Comte Enguerrand.

The mystery is tantalizing and complex.   The book, however, is too long and its structure too fractured.   It would have been better to focus only on what Baldwin and Simon know, experience, or discover.  It was enjoyable enough but, being so splintered, lacked grip.

Quichotte - Salman Rushdie

 It's the breadth of imagination which hooks us in, the depth of thought and compassion that enthrals.  Salman Rushdie may just be the greatest living novelist in English.  Rushdie, however, lives in America, as do both of the heroes in Quichotte.   I say both because Quichotte (pronounced key-shott) is a double picaresque, blending the journeys of the ageing seller of opioids in his quest for the affections of former Bollywood star, now US talk-show host, Miss Salma R, and his creator, the pseudonymous author 'Sam DuChamp' who is trying to put his family back together before he dies.   Both protagonists were born in India and live in America.   'Sam' has a sister who is a British peer, Quichotte has a half-sister who lives in America; both have survived breast cancer.   Sam has an estranged son who has become embroiled with US Security Agencies.   Quichotte conjures up an imaginary son, whom he names (of course) Sancho.

Before we know it, Sancho (like Pinocchio), has become a real boy.   So real that other people can see and speak with him.   Because Quichotte's picaresque also includes Magic Realism.   One of the towns they pass through is being terrorists by mastodons - technically humans turned into rampaging mastodons, some of whom still walk upright and wear green suits.   It is all brilliantly done, all enthused with empathy and a profound humanity.

Quichotte may not be as celebrated as Midnight's Children nor as controversial as Satanic Verses.   It is nonetheless a mini masterpiece, a triumphant autumnal work brimming with life even as its protagonists consciously face death. 

The Centauri Device - M John Harrison

Suddenly everyone wants Captain John Truck, which is odd, given that nobody has ever wanted him before.   General Alice Gaw of the Israeli army wants him, as does her opposite number with the Arab socialists, and Dr Grishkin, and even Chalice Veronica host of the longest running party in the universe.  Hitherto John Truck and his ship My Ella Speed has had to make do ferrying second rate cargo around the lesser spaceports at the ass-end of the Galaxy.   Now, people are kidnapping him off the street, recusing him and snatching him for their own nefarious purposes.

The thing is, the Opener archeologist Grishkin has found the legendary Centauri Device on Centauri VII, the only planet to have been murdered.   Nobody knows what the Device will do.  The Israelis and the Arabs assume it's a super-weapon that will decide their endless Earth-shattering war.  Grishkin dreams it is a religious revelation, possibly apocalyptic.   Chalice envisages the high of all highs, or at least trading it for a megaload of drugs.   The one thing upon which all agree is that only a Centaurian can operate the Device.   Which is a problem, given the race has been all but exterminated.   Truck is the all-but in question.   His prostitute mother Spaceport Annie coupled with one of the last Centauri and space John is the result.

It's a hell of a take on the Grail Quest - an off-kilter, typically Harrison take - complete with Fisher King 9the aesthetic anarchist Pater) and a Merlin of sorts (Pater's son, the conjurer Himation.   Guinevere has a scarred face and Truck is an unlikely Lancelot.   But he gets there in the end.   He conjoins with the Device and---

I simply cannot get enough of M John Harrison.   This is the third of his novels I've read this year and I want more.   He is so different, so unique.   Nobody does it like him.   Nobody does what he does better.

Engine Summer - John Crowley

 Engine Summer (1979) is a post-apocalyptic coming of age story.   A millennium or more in the future, Rush That Speaks grows up in Little Belaire, a town of truthful speakers.   The Storm has knocked humankind back into the stone age.   They have no writing or literature but pass on history as stories.   Here and there relics and ruins of former glories linger on, regarded as the work of angels and thus unfathomable.   Saints wander the land, spreading insights and speaking of other settlements elsewhere.   Rush That Speaks dreams of becoming a saint when he grows up.

But first he must deal with adolescence and his love for Once a Day, a neighbour belonging to a different cord but taught by the same teacher, Painted Red.   One day members of Dr Boot's List visit Little Belaire, as they do every year, to trade.   Once a Day decides to travel with them, and leaves.   Rush cannot fathom this.   Why would anyone want to leave Little Belaire?   Why would Once a Day leave him?   He expects her to return.   Everyone does.   But she doesn't return.   Finally, he feels he has no choice but to track her down and rescue her.

People have no transport, but believe that Road leads everywhere.   Rush gets distracted by a hermit called Blink, who lives up a tree and hibernates.   Rush had heard Blink called a saint, though Blink flatfly denies any such thing.   Ultimately Rush finds Once a Day in Service City.   The List have different skills and practices.   They lives with large cats and emulate the feline lifestyle.   Once a Day doesn't want to leave so Rush decides to stay with her.   He is assimilated into the List.   Finally, he is taken to meet Dr Boots, and learns his destiny, a revelation that sends him reeling, half-mad.   Visions, hallucinations, insights - until it is revealed who he is telling his story to.

From the very first page it is clear that Rush is speaking to someone other than us.   Every now and then someone asks italicized questions.   There is mention of crystals which seem to be recording what Rush says (recording? we wonder, in a world without machines?).   There are four crystals and each facet is a chapter.   The answer, when it comes, is quite something.

It is a boy speaking, so the style is straightforward and provides a framework in which we learn alongside Rush how to navigate his world.   The half-remembered names of things from Before the Storm is a fun device.   The title for example, try saying it aloud.   Avvenging and avengers took me longer to figure out.   Dr  Boots is best of all.   Rush's tortured pubesence is of course timeless, instantly familiar.   The characters are nicely defined, the locations differentiated.

All in all, an intriguing classic of the post-apocalypse.

The Mobster's Lament - Ray Celestin

 Book Three of the City Blues Quartet, the setting is New York, late 1947.   The mobster in question is Gabriel Levenson, manager of the Copacabana nightspot and fixer of choice for Frank Costello, the boss of all bosses in New York.   Gabriel has been on the take for some time, syphoning off cash to fund his escape from New York.   He has good reason for corruption: he is sole career for his young niece since his sister's suicide and wants to be able to give her a good, mob-free future.   There is also his own skin to be considered.   Swindling Frank Costello is bad enough - but Gabriel's business partner at the Saratoga racetrack is Albert Anastasia, of Murder Inc.   Gabriel has two weeks before his accounts will be presented to both business partners and the deficit will become clear.

Meanwhile, Costello has a job for Gabriel.   The late Benny Seigel, founder of the nightclub scene in Vegas, seems to have raised two million from various senior gangsters to bail out the floundering Flamingo, but the money never made it to his account.   Costello wants Gabriel to find the money.   Gabriel is also keen to find the money, given it's just about the same amount he has syphoned off.   Substitute one for the other and ... who knows?

Gabriel asks around.   Apparently Benny was talking about a jazz type called Gene Cleveland.

Meanwhile there has been an awful killing in a flophouse in Harlem.   A black guy, a white guy and the female deputy manager.   Even the famously corrupt NYPD have no trouble finding a culprit.  He was standing over the bodies clutching a bloody cleaver when they arrived.   He is a young black doctor with a drug habit, called Tom Talbot.   He is now on Riker's Island, being pressed to do a deal by his attorney.

Tom's father Michael is not convinced of his son's guilt.   Michael Talbot is a retired gent from Chicago.  He is also a former cops and former Pinkerton's agent.   He has come to New York to save his son.  He is joined there by his former protegee Ida Parker, a recently widowed private detective with a bureau all her own, who has been head-hunted for a secret but lucrative new job in LA.   But first...     Michael and Ida investigate the crime scene which turns out to have been the room of a black guy now missing.   A jazz type called Gene Cleveland.

That is a basic summary of the beginnings of just one of the plotlines.   There are several others.   Celestin's debut novel was the first of the Quartet yet he has marshalled his storylines with masterly technique.   There are dozens of characters, not all of whom are around for long, yet we never lose track or become confused.   Information is given us piecemeal across 500+ pages, so that the denouement, when it comes, makes perfect sense.   The denouement also happens to be a shootout in the dead of night of the frozen Hudson River, which is prettty damn impressive.

Celestin is great.   I shall be reading more.

The Shroud and the Grail - Noel Currer-Briggs

 I have been fascinated by the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau since Henry Lincoln began his Chronicle series in 1972.   I even read the book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, when it came out in 1982.   I managed to steer well clear of the Dan Brown phenomenon, fortunately, and was able to remain interested if not committed.   Twenty years later, I was reading a fantasy story about magic when I stumbled over a reference to the book by Noel Currer-Briggs.   Was it real, I wondered.   If so, was it available?  Yes to both.

Noel Currer-Briggs (1919-2004) was Yorkshire-born (can't be helped), a scholar, a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during World War II, and a genealogist.   He came to the subject of the grail through Ian Wilson's books on the Turin Shroud, which I have also read.   Currer-Briggs theorised that the grail was the vessel in which the cloths that shrouded Jesus's body were kept after his resurrection.  Specifically these are the Shroud itself, now in Turin, and the face cloth which was destroyed during the French Revolution but has been recorded in countless artworks as the generally accepted face of Christ.

Currer-Briggs' aim in this book was to work out where the Shroud had been since first being seen by western eyes in Constantinople during the First Crusade, and ending up in the possession of the dethroned king of Italy, who gave it to Turin cathedral for safekeeping.   Genealogy is his tool.   He argues that the Templars spirited it away from Constantinople when the city was looted during the Third Crusade, took it to Germany, then on to France where the Templars had their western HQ.   When the Templars were suppressed in 1307 it then passed into the keeping of one particular family with extensive Templar links drawn ever tighter as their descendants married into other Templar families.   Ultimately it passed to the House of Savoy, which became the royal house of Italy.

It's all intriguing and adds to the fascination.   What I don't entirely get is how one school of thought is that the Grail was a chalice, another a bowl, when (according to Currer-Briggs) it was in fact a flat wooden box.   On the plus side, despite living in East Midlands, I had never heard of the Nottinghamshire alabaster carvings that profess to be of John the Baptist's severed head but which make much more sense as references to Christ's Resurrection. 

Essential reading, then, for those like me who are fascinated by the arcane.

Palm Beach Finland = Antti Tuomainen

 What do you get when you cross Carl Hiaasen with gloomy old Finland, land of a hell of a lot of water?  Come on, clue's in the title...   Yep, Palm Beach Finland.   It really is as simple as that,

The concept is brutally simple, but the execution is really good.   OK, it's not as funny as the Poet Laureate of Florida in his Nineties heyday, but it's a lot funnier than Hiaasen has been since the Millennium.   The plotting is involved but never ridiculously so, and the characters are all well-drawn and likeable.   Which, given that one of them is a Helsinki hitman, is no mean feat.

The set-up really is that everyone has a dream.   Jorma Lievo has a vision of (like it says in the title) Palm Beach, only in Finland.  The heat is less oppressive, there is no tide for surfing, but otherwise...   Jorma has built it, giving the chalets the names of characters from Miami Vice.   It will take off in time, especially if he can expand.  But expansion is blocked by a ramshackle property which Olivia Koski has just inherited.   Olivia has been away in the big city, with poor-quality men who have drained her financially and emotionally.   Her dream is to restore the family home, starting with the plumbing, which is going to be expensive.  Jorma Lievo, meanwhile, wants her out as cheaply as possible.   The cheapest possible method is to pay two deadbeats on his payroll, Chico and Robin, to conduct a campaign of low-key nuisance.   They start by heaving a brick through Olivia's window.   The brick hits a burglar who comes at the pair with an electric blender.   Struggling, they accidentally break his neck.   The local police get nowhere with their investigation, so Helsinki sends in undercover Jan Nyman.   Meanwhile the hitman, Holma, receives bad news: his half-brother, the sibling he didn't know he had until recently, has been inexplicably murdered in a place inexplicably called Palm Beach Finland.   OK, Antero was a nut-job and a nuisance, but blood is blood...

I enjoyed Palm Beach Finland thoroughly and will happily read anything else by Tuomainen that I come across.   It's not life-changing, nor does it pretend to be.   Honest entertainment, deftly done.

Tightrope - Simon Mawer

 My first encounter with Simon Mawer's fiction.   It should have been sooner, given the awards he has been nominated for.   It won't be the last.

It took a couple of dozen pages to realize that, as it says on the cover, this is 'literary espionage.'   In Mawer's case it means an extremely high literary ability with plotting and depth that comes very close to le Carre at his best.   For one thing, he is telling his story on two levels: the story of Marian Sutro, who was recruited by the SOE in World War II, and parachuted into France to extract a French scientist needed to work on the A-bomb.   Marian chooses not to accompany the scientist on the flight out.   Instead she is captured by the Nazis on a railway platform, tortured and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp.   She survives, returns to England and spends part of her recovery with an Englih family, becoming a source of fascination to their young son Sam.   The second story is that of Sam as he investigates Marian's story, becoming personally involved in it, and ultimately tracking her down in her old age.

Marian has become bored after the war and is re-recruited by the same man who originally took her in to the SOE.  Now he is operating for an unspecified service.   Marian's task is now to persuade her Russian lover to defect.   He, meantime, reluctantly recruits her for Russia.   The Russians have kompromat on her brother, physicist Ned, and his illegal gay practices.

That gives a flavour of how complex and many-layered the plot is.   Mawer also skips back and forth in time, though we never lose track of where and when we are.   The characterisation is simply stupendous.   Marian is very much the star, the object of everyone else's fascination.   She retains her allure and mystery to the end.   Even Sam cannot get to the inner essentials of her psyche.

Impressive - and a great read.

The Brothel in Rosenstrasse - Michael Moorcock

 In 1897 Ricky and Alexandra are staying at a luxury hotel in Mirenburg.   Alexandra is sixteen, Ricky twice her age.   Ricky is one of several Counts von Bek, not the important one, but a wealthy adventurer.   He and Alexandra have exhausted the permutations of sex and Alexandra in particular is keen to try something new.   So Ricky takes her to Frau Schmetterling's internationally renowned brothel in Rosenstrasse where he himself was educated in sexual matters.   They indulge.

Meantime the prospect of war hangs over this enclave of Mittel Europe.   Wedged between three mighty imperial powers, Russia, Germany and Austria, Waldenstein has remained proudly independent but disgraced politician Holzhammer has done a deal with the Austrians.   Soon Mirenburg is under siege.   The hotel is hit by a cannonball.   Ricky and Alexander become residents of the brothel in Rosenstrasse.   For a time they are safe - Frau Schmetterling's girls have after all served the senior officers on all sides - but Ricky fears he is losing Alexandra to a houseful of lesbians (all of whom he has had sex with in the past, or hopes to soon).   He starts to plan his escape.

This is very different from the usual Moorcock.   Ricky is a von Eck but he is not a Champion, far from it.   There is a stream punk element here - balloonists, etc - but nothing far-fetched or in any way fantastical.   The fantasy here is Mireburg which, despite the minute detail served up, including extracts from books of the period, is wholly 100% imaginary.   The other fantasy element is, obviously, sexual fantasy, in particular lesbianism and, in Ricky's case, paedophilia.   Alexandra is by no means his youngest; he goes into fond reminiscence about a younger girl whose virginity he bought from her disabled father in Naples.

Indeed, the book is Ricky's memoir, written on the eve of World War II, somewhere warm.  The text is peppered with interruptions from his manservant-nurse Papadakis, who also has his secrets, it seems, though they are only hinted at.

Written in 1992 this is Moorcock's take on the decadent fin de siecle literature of the 19th century.   Some of the material here is pretty hardcore but the brilliance of Moorcock's writing just about accommodates it.

The Hollow Man - Oliver Harris

 The Hollow Man is the first of Harris's Nick Belsey series.   Belsey is already deep in trouble when we meet him.   He's up in front of Internal Inquiries and knows it's only a matter of time before he's sacked.   He's basically filling in time when he gets the call about a missing person in The Bishops Avenue, one of select Hampstead's most exclusive addresses.

The misper is a reclusive Russian oligarch called Devereux.   Even the maid has never set eyes on him.   So Belsey does what we'd all do under the circumstances.   He moves in and starts taking over Devereux's home, belongings and identity.   If he can parlay the latter into, say, a hundred grand, he can quit Britain for somewhere warmer, with no extradition treaty.

But then a sniper assassinates an eighteen year-old girl in a local Starbucks, right in front of Belsey, who remains a good enough cop not to let such things pass.   He gets drawn deeper when he realizes that the girl was an escort claiming to be in love with Devereux.   There's also the complication that Belsey has found Devereux sitting in his own safe room at the house with his throat slashed open.

Belsey digs and uncovers conspiracies and cons involving international high finance, high stakes gambling in highly unusual locations, and high level corruption in the City Council.   It's complicated, gripping, and occasionally comical.   The characters leap off the page.   The pace is incredible - and I'm reasonably sure this was Harris's debut.   I've read the third Belsey novel and also the first of Harris's spy novels.   He is different and extremely good.   Thriller is a term used too easily.   Oliver Harris is one of the few actually writing them right now.

Outbreak - Frank Gardner

 Frank Gardner writes top quality spy fiction.  Of course, he has the advantage of twenty years as the BBC's security correspondence, and we all know how he was shot and left in a wheelchair by terrorists in Saudi.   He knows how these things work.   Unlike most novelists, he knows how it feels to be shot.   All of these advantages are deployed in Outbreak, his third Luke Carlton thriller.

It's 2021, in the immediate aftermath of the Covid pandemic.   In Norway British researchers have to seek shelter from the storm and stumble upon a man with a terrible disease.   One scientist realizes she must be infected and stays with the dying man.   One of her colleagues tries to stay outside, the other runs for it.   Luke's first task is to oversee the extraction and track down the runaway.

In fact, all three have been infected.   The scientist who tried to stay outside initially checks clear and is repatriated, thus bringing the contagion into the UK.   It is fatal, incurable, and has been genetically engineered.   The obvious suspects are the Russians - the shed in which the first victim was found is near a Russian mining colony.   There are the usual stiff diplomatic exchanges - this is, after all, in the immediate aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings.   Some of the chemicals involved trace to a factory in Lithuania.   Luke is sent in with expert Jenny Li.

The people at the factory are definitely involved - but maybe the Russians aren't.   They offer to work with SIS.   General Petrov is tasked with finding out who leaked the tech required.   Luke and Jenny are invited to assist and observe.   Meanwhile, in England, people are definitely preparing some sort of bio attack.   Meanwhile, problems loom in Luke's private life.   His girlfriend Elise is pregnant but a little calendar work proves that Luke cannot be the father,

This is a good twist, the sort of twist that I wanted when I read the first Luke Carlton thriller, Crisis, back in 2017.   It's reviewed on this blog.   I enjoyed it but found a few minor faults.   Insufficient in-depth characterisation was one of them.  Gardner has come on since then.   I found no faults in Outbreak.   It's a first class thriller and highly recommended.

Empty Space - M John Harrison

 Spanning time, space and planes of existence, Empty Space is just breathtaking in conception.   It may well continue stories from earlier books - Nova Swing is the name of the beat-up spaceship owned and run by Fat Antoyne and his two shipmates, and also the title of the Harrison novel immediately before this.   It doesn't matter.   Everything we need to know is here.

On what we might call the terrestrial, twenty-first century plane, Anna Waterman is a widow in her late fifties or early sixties, living in a prosperous village on the fringes of London.   After two unsatisfactory marriages Anna has rather lost her way in life.   At her daughter Marnie's insistence she is grudgingly seeing a London psychiatrist.   Half the time Anna doesn't show up or forgets.   Marnie fears the onset of dementia.   Anna, however, is mapping out a future for herself.   It isn't easy.   Her summerhouse keeps setting on fire without being burnt, and there are copper-coloured poppies in her garden.

About as far away from this as it is possible to get, on the scrubby minor planets of the Kefahucki Tract, Toni Reno wants Fat Antoyne to collect and transport what can only be called mortsafes.   This being the far distant future, the mortsafes are self-aware.   Meanwhile an assistant investigator in Saudade City is called to a troubling death.   The victim is suspended in mid-air, as if falling in empty space.   Toni Reno soon becomes another victim, and the chop-shop proprietor who artificially enhanced (tailored) the nameless assistant.  They may not actually be dead, but they are certainly fading away, literally.

One of the mortsafes might possibly contain the Aleph.   The Aleph may be someone we have already met.

Harrison's skill in handling all the strands and bringing them together at the end is just staggering.   I was swept along throughout, totally engrossed.

Crook Manifesto - Colson Whitehead

 Carrying on the story of rising furniture store owner and part-time dabbler in crookery Ray Carney from Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto takes us through the early seventies.  Three linked novellas - 1971, 1973 and 1976, all of which I remember well, albeit I was in rural England, corrupt East Yorkshire, then parts of Lancashire where in those days coppers feared to tread.

The first story, Ringolevio, brings Ray out of criminal retirement to help bent copper Detective Munson out of a spectacular hole.   It ends badly for Munson, but at least Ray gets tickets for the Jackson 5 for his daughter May.   In Nefertiti TNT Ray's store is taken over by a movie crew making a blaxploitation movie helmed by former local firebug and boudoir photographer Zippo, whom we remember from the second story in Harlem Shuffle.   The actress playing the titular warrior for justice (who had a mention in the first story of the first book) goes awol and friend of the family and feared enforcer Pepper is offered folding money to retrieve her.   It is really a Pepper story, rather than a Ray, but none the worse for that.   And finally, The Finishers, in which both Ray and Pepper get dragged into a showdown at the Dumas Club, which we remember well from Shuffle.   It is a club where corrupt politicians get to mingle with the business elite of Harlem.

I loved Shuffle, I loved Manifesto even more.   I don't know if Whitehead has a third instalment up his sleeve (Manifesto only came out in 2023).   If he does, I'm reading it.

The Mad Islands - Louis MacNeice

 The Mad Islands is a radio play from 1962.   It is a fantasy derived from tropes of Irish mythoogy, with echoes of St Brendan and Hy-Brazil (spiced with a healthy borrowing from Hamlet).   Muldoon is off on a quest to find and kill the man, the Lord of Eskers, who killed his father.   His crew is a motley group led by the professional seafarer Ursach but including a jester and Muldoon's foster-brother.   They are soon joined and assisted by a being half-woman, half-seal and absolutely perfect for radio, called Skerrie.  Skerrie acts as their guide around the various islands, all of which are inhabited or ruled by people who are mad one way or another.   The hermit on his rock is religiously mad.  Sisters Branwen and Olwen are mad about their cats and even madder about the possibility of men.   The Miller of Hell is omnipresent.   It's all light and fantastical until the twist at the end, which is eminently satisfying.   Not up there with MacNeice's finest - The Dark Tower and Person From Porlock - but close enough.

The Emigrants - W G Sebald

 What a wonderful writer and thinker Sebald was.  Having started with his last masterpiece, Austerlitz, I wondered if an earlier work like The Emigrants could be anywhere near as good.   Yes, it was.   Every bit in every way, as good.   That said, there's only ten years between them and Sebald was a mature thinker before he went anywhere near fiction.   How near to fiction he gets is always the question.

There are four emigrant stories here, linked by a fifth, who is unnamed but resembles Sebald in so many ways.   As ever, the Sebald-narrator encounters these people at various stages in his life and their stories set him off on research trips which incidentally reawaken personal memories for him.   He meets the first, Dr Henry Selwyn, as he (Sebald) is beginning his thirty-year stint as an academic in East Anglia.  Selwyn came to England from Lithuania in the late thirties, not speaking a word of English.  Now he is a fully fledged, reclusive English eccentric.   Next up, in 1984, is Paul Bereyter, who taught our narrator in primary school in Bavaria in the early Fifties.   Paul has committed suicide in a particularly horrible way.  Our narrator returns to Germany and meets Paul's friend Lucy Landau, who arranged for his burial.  She tells him about Paul's life-changing time as an emigrant in France.   As a Jew Paul was forbidden to teach in Nazi Germany.   The third is great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth who seems to have made a huge success of emigrating, becoming the butler to one of the great American millionaire families.   As a young man he was especially close to the son and heir Cosmo Solomon, with whom he travelled the world.  On the eve of the first world war they end up in the Holy Land.   And finally we have Max Ferber, who is first encountered in the bleak midwinter of 1966-7 when Sebald, like our narrator, pitched up in Manchester to begin his research.   Is it a coincidence that Sebald, too, preferred to be called Max?   Ferber is another pre-war child refugee from Germany who has stubbornly remained in Manchester, in a studio down by the docks, where he spends more time scraping off paint from his canvasses than putting it on - as our narrator does with the texts he begins to write as he researches Ferber's back story.   There is no real secret to Ferber's story - he hands it over to our narrator in the form of an account handwritten by his mother (with photographs) who did not get to emigrate.

The photographs, as usual, add verisimilitude to the narrative.   We never know if they really are what they claim to be.   Sometimes they don't seem to link directly to the text - yet they add to it.   As do the epigraphs on the title page of each story.   You sense how carefully Sebald chose them.   Apparently he also supervised the translations of his stories.   He lived and taught in England for almost two-thirds of his life, yet he wrote and published in German.   You read his beautiful lucid texts - you empathise, admire - and you wonder, which I suspect, is exactly what the great man set out to achieve.

The Bull and the Spear - Michael Moorcock

 Sometimes we need something different, a palate-cleanser, short and sharp.   The Bull and the Spear did the job for me.   I have long been curious about Michael Moorcock and his work.   I have previously read (and reviewed on this blog) a variety of books by him, and enjoyed them all.   This is the first volume of the Chronicle of Corum and the Silver Hand (1973-4), successor to what is known as the Swords Trilogy (1971-2).   We don't need to have read the first trilogy, Moorcock begins with a useful summary.   The Chronicle begins eighty years later.   Corum, who is virtually immortal, has survived his beloved human wife Rhalina and skulks in his castle, bored and troubled by dreams in which a group of humans is calling him.   His old comrade Jhary-a-Conel turns up to tell him these are humans on another plane of the multiverse (yes, Moorcock was using that term as early as 1973) who regard Corum as their sleeping champion who will rise and save them from annihilation.   That moment has come.   The magic of these particular humans is not strong, and Corum has to be willing if he is to transcend to their plane or dream.   Why not, thinks Corum.

The plane he finds himself on is like his, but not the same.   Corum's Castle Erorn is indistinguishable from the rock on which it stands, because Corum left it a thousand years ago.   The people who summoned him are being frozen out of existence by the Fhoi Myore, seven monstrous beings who have escaped from the void between the planes of the multiverse.   To defeat them, the people must regain two lost treasures, the spear Bryionak and the Black Bull of Crinanass.   The former will allow them to control the latter.   The problem is, the spear is with its maker, the smith Goffanon, the last of Sidhi, and he lives on the mystical island of Hy-Breasail which no human has ever visited and returned from.

Corum is not entirely human.   He belongs to one of the races which preceded humans.   He is one of Moorcock's eternal champions.   As a youth he was mutilated, losing his left hand and his right eye.   In the Swords trilogy he was given magical prosthetics but these have gone now and he uses a silver hand of his own making and wears an eyepatch embroidered by Rhalina.

The book is only 150 pages.   It races along, packed with ideas and amazing twists.   Goffanon, for instance, considers himself to be a dwarf - but is in fact eight feet tall and four feet wide, a dwarf giant.   Lots of the mythos is ancient Celtic slightly adjusted -  the British Atlantis, Lyonesse, is here Lwym-an-Esh, homeland of Rhalina.   The bull is both the bull of the Irish Tain bo Cuailnge and the bull cult of Crete.   But there is also Moorcock's personal, self-created mythology.    Jhary-a-Conel, the companion of champions, is obviously an echo of Moorcock's first eternal champ, Jerry Cornelius, the Swinging Sixties dandy.   How Moorcock manages to achieve so much story in something little more than a novella is astounding, and what keeps drawing me back to his work.

The April Dead - Alan Parks

 I remember coming across the first of Alan Parks' Harry McCoy series four or five years ago.   Bloody January and February's Son are reviewed on this blog.   I somehow missed the third, Bobby March Will Live Forever (great title) and here we are with number four, The April Dead.   Still back in 1974 Glasgow, McCoy is called to a tenement flat where a young man has blown himself up making a bomb.   This of course is the heyday of the Troubles in Ulster, mainland IRA outrages, the Angry Brigade and all that.   But what got this kid so fired up?

Then Harry is approached by an American, Andrew Stewart, whose son Donny has gone missing from the naval base at Greenock.   Harry agrees to look into it, but first he has to collect his old pal from the in-care days, Stevie Cooper, about to be released from six months in prison at Aberdeen.   Stewart and Stevie take to one another.   Meanwhile forensics find someone else's blood in the bombmaker's flat, a very rare type, Donny Stewart's type.

Homemade bombs start going off everywhere - a smallish one in the cathedral, something much bigger at a local brewery.   People are dying.   Harry finds himself leading an nvestigation into rightwing nationalism, the Territorial Army, and torture techniques developed for officially-denied use in Northern Ireland.

As ever, the characters are brilliantly well-drawn and the plot keeps deepening.   I especially enjoyed the way Parks handled the involvement of the travelling fairground community.   The April Dead is every bit as good as the first two in the series.   I really must look out for March and May.