Satori - Don Winslow

 Back in 1979 Rodney William Whitaker (1935-2005) wrote Shibumi, a spy novel, under his best-known pseudonym Trevanian.   In 2011 Don Winslow, author of The Cartel, wrote Satori, which is a prequel to Shibumi.   I am a die-hard fan of Winslow and am fascinated by Trevanian (see my review on this blog of his spoof spy novel The Loo Sanction).   I had to read Satori.

Trevanian's hero, Nicholai Hel, is a retired assassin.   Winslow's story, set more than a quarter century earlier, is why he retired.   Hel is the son of an exiled Russian aristocrat, born in Shanghai in 1925 who masters the game of Go under a Japanese master, who also happens to be a general in the Japanese army that invaded China in the Thirties.   After the Japanese surrender in 1945 Kishikawa is tried for war crimes.   Nicholai, who has also become a master of the Naked Kill, visits him in prison and, at the general's own request, murders him, for which he too is imprisoned and tortured.   Ultimately he is freed and recruited by the US Intelligence Service. in October 1951.

They embroil him in a complex plot to smuggle rocket launchers to the communist insurgents in Vietnam in the hope of preventing American involvement in the coming war.   In return Nicholai gets a new life plus the names of those who tortured him.   An added bonus is that the Rushian spy chief he gets to hoodwink and ultimately kill, is the man who seduced his mother and stole the family fortune.

It's all great fun, very cleverly plotted and of course beautifully written.   I love the way Winslow has a voice for each strand of his fiction whilst never losing the narrative force of simplicity.   I got lost in the later sections of the book, knowing absolutely nothing about the geography of south Asia, but I was always entertained and the concluding battle was highly sarisfactory.

The Weight of the Dead - Brian Hodge

 A novelette, a work of fiction longer than a short story, shorter than a novella, typically between seven and seventeen thousand words: that is what Brian Hodge has written here.   It turns out to be the perfect length.   Less would have been inadequate, more would have been padding.   It is a form I really must experiment with myself.

The Weight of the Dead is not post-apocalyptic, it is post-frazzle.   Within living memory the Day the Sun Roared caused a power surge which burned out all electrics, instantly turning the Technological World into what survivors called the World Ago.   Without tech or transport humankind reverted to nomadic lifestyles.   A generation later they began to settle into fortified villages, like the one Melody Banks lives in.   Melody is fourteen; the male of the species is being to notice her.   One such, Ted Harkin, became inappropriate, causing Melody's father Grady to beat his brains out.   Now Grady must pay the price.

The villagers are not barbarians.   They do not have the death penalty.   Instead, Grady Banks must bear the weight of his crime - literally.   Harkin's corpse is fastened to him and he is banished into the woods outside the defences until such time as his burden is lifted, either by death or putrefaction.  Obviously Melody can go out and visit, take her father food and necessary supplies, but she cannot take anything that might free him of Ted's corpse.

The woods are not entirely safe.   Myths and rumours have already evolved about the people who wander out there and what they might have become...

A really skilful, beautifully written and controlled, example of short weird fiction.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years - John Scalzi

 Continuing the theme from my last post, 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, is not a novelette, it is a longish short story.   John Scalzi is an award winning American novelist.

The theme here is time travel, which has become a reality in the not-so-distant future.   This future is a continuation of our world, so naturally it has become commercialised.   Cost of the tech makes it an elite luxury, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience for others.   Our unnamed narrator is (apparently) the man who works the machine.

Scalzi takes the time to outline the process and its rules.   There are two chambers and two doors, one in, one out.   Customers go out to their chosen time, and come back a second later through the other door.   It is a second in our time but in theirs it has been either 3 days, 9 months, or 27 years.   These are the 'resonances' that have been found to work best.   It doesn't matter if they interact with their younger selves or successfully intervene in the assassination of JFK (the traditional rules of time travel fiction) because the moment they arrive in the past an alternate reality has been created, which then continues.   They can travel to any time in the past, near or distant, so long as it is longer than 27 years ago.   They cannot travel forward in time.   That is impossible because the future doesn't yet exist.   That is the official line.  But of course it is possible...

It is amazing how many ideas Scalzi gets into such a short work whilst carefully avoiding techno-babble or pontificting.   This is a thought-provoking read with a really effective twist.   I'm very impressed.

A Cold Wind from Moscow - Rory Clements

 The latest in the Tom Wilde series, A Cold Wind from Moscow is a particular rich example of what is best in a long-running series.   Time has moved on (to 1947 and the UK's coldest recorded winter), characters have developed and changed (Philip Eaton has apparently been outed as a 'useful idiot' for Stalin's Soviets) and new characters have stepped forward to take their place.   Freya Bentall, for example, is the de facto boss of MI5, albeit the former police gangbuster Percy Sillitoe is the nominal chief.   She asks Professor Wilde to take a short break from his university duties to try and identify which of three MI5 agents is possibly a double.   Meanwhile Uncle Joe Stalin has personal instructed his 'black work' specialist Lazar Lukin to go to the UK and stir up chaos in order to shield their prime nuclear asset Klaus Fuchs who, as Clement neatly points out, was the man who built the nuclear bombs of America, Britain and Russia.   Among Lukin's alloted tasks is the elimination of another veteran of Los Alamos, Basil Rheinhaus.   Reinhaus is a brilliant scientist with a gambling problem, which led Fuchs to try and recruit him as a Russian asset.   Reinhaus, however, preferred to report Fuchs to MI5 and is now in hiding.   One of Tom's suspects is Reinhaus' contact man.   He takes Wilde to an arty event at the home of the super-rich socialite Vivienne Chalke, at which Wilde recognises Reinhaus.   Then all hell breaks loose.

And, I almost forgot, the novel opens with the murder by ice axe of another MI5 agent in Tom's set at college.

A Cold Wind from Moscow is the best of the Wilde novels I have read to date.   Several of the supporting characters are superb, Vivienne Chalke for instance, and East End ice-axe man Terry Adnams.   Tom's wife Lydia is training to be a doctor at St Ursula's in London and I missed her dry wit, and I didn't take to the young woman the Wildes have drafted in to look after their young son.   Other than that, I found only one misjudgement on Clements' part: there is an unnecessary appearance by three of the actual Cambridge spies in the epilogue.   Why?   Unless, of course, that is our clue as to what comes next in the series?   We shall see.

The Strings are False - Louis MacNeice

 An Unfinished Autobiography is the subtitle and something of an understatement.   A Scarcely Begun Autobiography would be more accurate.   What it is, in detail, is a conflation of two manuscripts left with his friend E R Dodds in 1941 (when MacNeice was only 34) and not touched again until after MacNeice's death in 1963.   It is then padded out with another account by MacNeice of his childhood and an essay by John Hilton who knew him well at school and university.

There is thus nothing about MacNeice's innovative and important radio plays, virtually nothing about his writing or his close association with W H Auden and Stephen Spender.   The other member of the circle, Cecil Day Lewis, only merits a single line in The Strings are False; it as if MacNeice barely knew him.   Indeed, why anyone who seems determined to say nothing revelatory about himself or his emotional life should want to even start an autobiography defeats me.   His divorce - his wife ran off to America with their lodger, leaving MacNeice to bring up their year-old son alone - warrants only slightly more detail than Day-Lewis.   He doesn't bother to tell us the lodger's actual name (Charles Katzmann).

That said, this is all there is - the only personal writing MacNeice ever did.   Before the war (the time I am reseaching) MacNeice seems to have been the perpetual absentee in literary circles - always somewhere else - but nevertheless making a name for himself as poet and lecturer.   If you want to know about Auden in the Thirties (and again, I do) you have to read The Strings are False.   If you have to read The Strings are False, it helps to know quite about poetry of the 1930s and MacNeice's place in it.

Blacktop Wasteland - S A Cosby

 I picked this up by chance in my local library - and what a treat it turned out to be!   I recently lost a week trying to cme to terms with William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolum (great writing but the action pushed so far back I simply couldn't engage).   Blacktop Wasteland is set in a similar landscape but seen from a very different viewpoint.

To start with, the majority of characters are (like the author) black.   Beauregard 'Bug' Montage learnt how to be a wheelman from his long-vanished father Ant.   Indeed he served a manslaughter sentence in youth detention for running down a bunch of crooks threatening to kill Ant.   Now he runs an auto repair shop in Red Hill with his cousin Kelvin and lives in a double-wide with his wife Kia and two boys.   But he still has the car he did the killing with and races it sometimes in outlaw muscle-car drags.

A rival repair shop has opened up in town.   Beauregard's business takes a hit.   Debts are mounting.   Then Ronnie Sessions turns up with a diamond heist for which he needs the best possible wheelman, which is Bug.   Everyone knows Ronnie Sessions is white trash.   He still owes Bug for the last job they did together.   But Bug is desperate for ready cash.   One big score will clear all his problems and allow him to refurbish his shop and thus see off the competition.   And it turns out the hit is much bigger than anyone thought.   Problem is, the jewelry store that held it was a front for mob moneylaundering.

The standout element of Blacktop Wasteland is the way Cosby handles the driving action.   He takes us all the way into Bug's mind as he's doing it, the rational decision-making process and the visceral thrill alongside.   We speed with Bug.   We become totally invested in the outcome.   Despite the brutality, the unsparing treatment of the ripples which spread out from his illegal actions, we want him to win.

Blacktop Wasteland is no mean debut.   I'm looking out for Cosby's next.

Middle Eastern Mythology - S H Hooke

 

I can never resist a Pelican blue.   This appears to have been published in 1963 when its author was 89.   That can't be right, surely?  I can find no source that gives an earlier date, and certainly this short overview presents us with a long lifetime's consideration of what became the root of three of the world's great religions.

It begins with a discussion of the elements of myth and ritual.   Hooke then moves on to Mesopotamian myths, which of course includes the Gilgamesh cycle which fascinates me.   Egyptian myth does not interest me so much and yet it has to be covered here because it clearly influenced the Jews that Moses led out of Egypt and Hooke is excellent in highlighting the links - for example, Moses being hidden to avoid the slaughter of the first-born in Egypt and Jesus being taken into Egypt to escape Herod's slaughter of the first-born.   I have no idea, even after carefully reading the chapter, where Ugaritic myths arose.   I have some very basic understanding of the Hittite cultural and at least know where it was based.

Hooke then moves on to Hebrew mythology which, as a white Englishman who won all the prizes at Sunday school, is also my mythology.   Hooke is downright brilliant here (he was the editor in chief of a Bible in 'basic' English which I must get hold of).   He definitely added to my knowledge, particular in relation to Joshua and the myths of Elijah and Elisha.   He devotes a short but separate chapter to the Book of Daniel, which is outright brilliant.   He rather boldly, I think, for 1963, ends by following the myths into the New Testament.   Here, my personal interest lies in the four gospels and their authors; Hooke covers them but shies away from John (which I consider to be the most reliable) because it contains the least myth and almost no ritual.

Excellent book, highly readable and strikingly modern, especially when we remind ourselves that S H Hooke was born in 1874 and was a grown man when Queen Victoria died.

The Honorary Consul - Graham Greene

 A major novel from 1973, The Honorary Consul is Greene at his very best.   On the Argentinian border with Patagonia, Charley Fortnum, a mate farmer who has never been to his father's homeland (and never much cared for his father), has somehow become the Honorary Consul for the few, the very few, locals who can claim British protection.   It's a pleasant title that means nothing, albeit Charley has managed to persuade local customs that he is entitled to the diplomat's perk of a new car every couple of years, which he promptly sells on.

The US ambassador is in Argentina and wants to visit Charley's patch.   Charley's deep local knowledge is useful, and he does speak the local languages.   He has recently married a young Argentinian girl (she is eighteen at most, Charley is sixty) and she is pregnant.   All is looking good for Charley.

But then Charley is kidnapped by Patagonian rebels who mistake him for the US Ambassador.   An unlikely go-between with the kidnappers and the Argentinian security services is Dr Eduardo Plarr, a Patagonian exile, who was at school with one of the kidnappers, drinks with Charley, and is the father of Charley's much anticipated child.

Eduardo's English-born father has been a political prisoner in Patagonia for more than a decade.   He is one of those to be freed as part of the kidnappers' demands.   Even that has been bodged.   One of the kidnappers was in the same prison and saw Plarr senior shot down dead trying to escape.   The whole thing is hopeless from the outset.   Britain isn't going to pull out the stops for a consul who is only honorary.   The general who rules in Patagonia is on holiday in Argentina and may not even know what has happened.

Eduardo's old schoolfriend Leon is a former priest.   Thus the main characters end up in a native hut, the forces of law and order closing in, discussing the role of God in the modern world and the true nature of male honour.   Fascinating, compelling, ingeniously constructed, and absolutely brilliant.   If you only read Greene's early work, good though that is, you might wonder how come everyone thought he should be in the running for the Nobel Prize.   This is why.

The Night Wire - (ed) Aaron Worth

 I have long been a devotee of these British Library anthologies of forgotten writing of the weird.   Many of them are reviewed elsewhere on this blog.   They are always a mixed bag and one cannot expect to find them all of equal standard.   The Night Wire, which on the face of it should be exactly my milieu being focused on weird media (cameras, telegraphy, radio and television, all of them my specialty) sad;y turned out to be the exception.   A couple of them caught my attention.   Unfortunately none thrilled me in any way or sparked my imagination.   Even Rudyard Kipling, describing the early experiments of Marconi and possible contact with the Other Side, turned out to be a beautifully written dud.   Sorry, just not up to the usual standard.

Other Paths To Glory - Anthony Price

 Anthony Price won the CWA Silver Dagger for his debut, The Labyrinth Makers (reviewed here earlier this year).   He won the Gold Dagger for this in 1974, which was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, the best of the last fifty years.   It is really quite something.

Price sticks with the unlikely hero of The Labyrinth Makers, the eccentric polymath Dr David Audley of Military Intelligence.  But he is not what might be called the front line protagonist here.   That is Paul Mitchell, a young researcher who is making himself an expert on certain aspects of World War 1.  Mitchell is researching at the Imperial War Museum when he is approached by Audley and Colonel Butler.   They want academic assistance - something to do with the Somme.   Mitchell refers them to his superviser, Professor Emerson.

That night, returning home via the canal towpath, Mitchell is approached by two other men.   They too ask if he is Mr Mitchell.   They don't want assistance.   They want to kill him and chuck him in the canal.  Fortunately he survives, which is more than his mentor Emerson managed earlier in the day.   He was bludgeoned to death in his own home, which was then set on fire, destroying all the research for his next groundbreaking book.

Before he knows it, Mitchell is in Flanders Field, disguised as Paul Lefevre of the Tank Corps, seconded to assist coach tours of veterans revisiting their traumatic youth and paying respects to fallen comrades.   But one war cemetery, by Bouillet Wood where hundreds of troops were simply annihilated, is difficult to access.   This is because the French secret service have acquired the manor house there for secret summit meetings, one of which is scheduled imminently.

That, as we might expect in a first rate espionage thriller, is not strictly true, and it is Mitchell's task to find the truth.   He is backed up by Audley, who has been drawn in by his French counterpart and old friend 'Ted' Ollivier, and Nikki MacMahon, who really isn't a representative of the French Ministry of Tourism.

Other Paths To Glory is every bit as good as The Labyrinth Makers (for me, it was slightly better but only because it is about precisely the aspects and events of WW1 that most interest me).   Like the very best thriller writers - like Len Deighton, for instance - you feel confident that Price has done his research and knows his subject backwards.   There's an excellent quote on the back of this edition, from the Sunday Times: 'Price unbeatably blends scholarship with worldliness, flattering us to bits."   Yep.

In Flanders Field - Leon Wolff

 Wolff (1914-91) was an American author who only wrote four books, of which In Flanders Field (1958) was by far the most important internationally.   It set in stone the image of Earl Haig's incompetence during the Allied campaign of 1917 - "The greatest and most futile slaughter in modern times", like it says on the cover blurb.

Wolff is no academic.   His account is down-to-earth, detailed and brutally factual.   The notes and sources are here, as they should be, but relegated to the end so as not to interfere with the journalistic narrative.   The literature review, with which most of us begin, is in the last chapter, which is about what happened to the main characters next.   Usually I would shy away from that sort of epilogue but Wolff makes it eminently worthwhile as a means of highlighting Haig's fate.   He got his earldom and a grant; otherwise he was ostracised from the corridors of power.

To show how powerful and important this book is, not just to academics and students but to anyone who cares about the issues of war, this is how Wolff handles the conclusion of hostilities:

It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452.   Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million.   The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude.

The Night of Wenceslas - Lionel Davidson

 I have reviewed three other Davidson novels on this blog: The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights in 2019 and The Chelsea Murders in 2022.   I was bowled over by the first two but found the latter to be as bad as I thought it was when I read it as a young man.   I can therefore place Davidson's first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, in context.   It is as good in its way as Kolymsky Heights, not quite as good as The Sun Chemist, and leaves me wondering how anyone who could start with a novel as complex and thrilling as this could end up wasting time and paper and ink on something as trite as The Chelsea Murders twenty-five years later.

Wenceslas is in the tradition of John Buchan.   A young man gets accidentally involved in an international conspiracy, ostensibly about unbreakable glass, in fact about Cold War espionage.   The Cold War element is probably what made it so successful in 1960 (it won two awards).   Davidson was ahead of Le Carre and the Bond films and Len Deighton.   He takes us behind the Iron Curtain, to a communist country that no longer exists (Czechoslavakia), to a Prague as yet unblighted by drunken tourists on stag nights, an imperial gem under a fairly light-touch autocracy in which everyone is expected to keep a wary eye on one another.

We are about half way through, and our hero Nicolas Whistler is on his second trip when we begin to suspect there is something deeper going on here.   Nicolas has taken up with a local girl - Davidson, with a touch of genius, makes her a hefty Slavic girl, by no means without charm - and has cultivated a working relationship with the floor attendant in his luxury hotel.   He finds ways of using them to make his escape from the secret police to the British Embassy.   He has to do so during the National Celebration.   Fantastic stuff, and as in Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Davidson seems to know his stuff.   He lived in Israel for a time, which explains Sun Chemist but Soviet Russia and 1960 Prague?   Indeed, he seems to know these places better than he knew London in the 1980s.   That said, his portrayal here of bedsit London recovering from the Blitz, with lock-up garaages and men of dubious natonality in obscure offices strikes all the right notes.

The Night of Wenceslas has not only restored my faith in Lionel Davidson, I've already bought another.

The Silence - Don DeLillo

 I've reviewed two DeLillo novels previously on this blog, Running Dog in 2015 and Libra in May this year.   The Silence is nothing like either of them and yet it is quintessentially DeLillo.

DeLillo specifically calls it a novel but it is really a novella, only 116 pages in huge and beautiful American typewriter font.   There are only five characters: Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, who we find onboard their flight from Paris to New Jersey; and an older couple in their New York apartment, Max Stenner and Diane Lucas, and their guest Martin, who is a physics teacher and Diane's former student.   Martin has an obsession with Einstein's 1912 manuscript of The Special Theory of Relativity, which he can and does quote from.

It is Super Bowl Sunday 2022 (but DeLillo wrote the book in 2020) and the game is about to start.   Jim and Tessa are due to join the party later.   But something happens.   The TV blacks out.  The same system failure hits the plane.   Fortunately the pilot is able to glide in.   Motor vehicles still work but all digital systems are down.

There is no resolution - and, of course, in real life we would be able to do nothing in this situation, no matter if our domestic group included a retired physics professor and a savant on the theory of Relativity.  The lack of resolution is another trait suggesting this is really a novella or longish short story.   Whatever it is, it's damn fine writing.

The Underground Man - Ross Macdonald

 This is one of the later Lew Archer novels.   Archer is middleaged, methodical.   He is, basically, Paul Newman in his prime.   Newman played him in Harper and The Drowning Pool but Peter Graves took the role in the TV adaptation of The Underground Man.

The story is essentially one of a disfunctional family in and around old money.   The old rich are aloof and stuck in their ways, the infiltrators are either nouveau riche or grifters.   Macdonald comes up with a brilliant metaphor.   The Broadhurst family owned the entire canyon until Mrs Broadhurst entered into a dubious deal with property developer Brian Kilpatrick.   Now the hills and forest above the new housing are ablaze.

Mrs Broadhurst married a fly-by-night pilot after the war.   He soon left her for a local teacher.   Mrs B's son Stanley is obsessed with finding his father - but now Stanley has disappeared.   He was last seen in his sports car with a very young woman who the day before was so stoned she jumped off a yacht into the sea and Stanley's young son Ronny, whom Archer had come across in his yard that very morning.   It's all very incestuous (without actually being incestuous) - a restricted number of closely interrelated relationships most of which involve abandonment.

Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar, 1915-83) was a master craftsman and was in his prime with the Lew Archer series.   The story moves along at a brisk place, the writing chiselled to a fine edge without ever going to extremes.   There is psychological depth, suspense, and whilst Archer himself never seems to be in danger, the necessary jeopardy comes from the fire, which is especially effective given what happened lately to Southern California.

Another (#21) in Penguin's magnificent Crime & Espionage series of Modern Classics.

Requiem for a Dream - Hubert Selby Jr

 Requiem for a Dream takes us straight into the rotting heart of New York in the disaster years when heroin ruined everything.   Harry Goldfarb and his buddy Tyrone C Love dream of one big score.   Harry's mother Sara sits in her apartment and dreams of being on a TV show.   Harry and Tyrone do indeed score.   Tyrone's contact has some dynamite dope which, even when cut, gives good bag.   But the boys can't resist a taste of their own product.   It is only right to share with their ladies, Marion and Alice.

Harry is a good Jewish boy.   When he is in funds he splashes out on a giant TV for his mother, the best Macy's has on offer.   He finds his mother changed.   She's lost a lot of weight.   She's twitchy and grinds her teeth.   It turns out Sara has been cold-called by a guy claiming to discover contestants for TV quiz shows.   Naturally Sara applies - and immediately starts creating the persona she wants to the viewing public to see.   She especially wants to be able to fit into the red dress she wore for Harry's bar mitzvah.   A friend recommends a doctor, the doctor prescribes weight-loss pills and before you know it Sara is hooked.

At the same time Harry and Tyrone's contact runs out of dope.   There's no decent heroin to be had.   The friends find themselves hustling the streets like the runny-nosed dope fiends they once looked down on.   Things get really bad, really quick.   No one does grim like Selby.   

Selby writes free-form, a sort of bridge between the Beats and the likes of James Ellroy.   It takes a moment to get used to - and he isn't always consistent - but it works brilliantly.   Any other approach and I don't believe readers would stick with it.   As it is, Selby's characters are fully rounded from the moment we meet them.   We empathise with their dreams even though we hopefully don't share them.   Somehow our empathy enables us to bear the horror.   A masterpiece of a very bleak genre.

The Magician out of Manchuria - Charles G Finney

 My only other acquaintance with Charles G Finney was back in October 2018 with The Unholy City.   I suspect I bought this soon after and then lost it in my to-read mountain.

The Magician out of Manchuria is even shorter than The Unholy City.   It is billed as adult fantasy, because the female lead spends a lot of time nude, and not once but twice depilates.   It is in fact a fantastical tale with a sexual side to it.   None of the three main characters has a name, they are simply the Magician, his chela or apprentice, and the Lascivious Queen of La.   The magician's black ass does have a name, Ng Gk.

The main inspiration seems to be Communist China.   There has been a Great Leap Forward; the old lordships have been overturned and the bureaucrats have taken over; magic is being driven from the world.   Some fishermen land an unusual catch, a naked woman whom the magician is able to resuscitate - by the kiss of life rather than magic.   She is dumpy and unattractive but the magician has magic balm that can fix that.   She tells her tale - one of three sister queens who have been betrayed by the ultimate scheming bureaucrat Khan Ali Bok.   The mage and his chela undertake to help her recover her throne and in so doing manage to secure a haven for magic.

Finney is at his best when he lets his imagination run riot.  The riverboat 'Flower of the Lotus' transforms into a craft than can walk on land and then sprouts wings; it therefore becomes triphibian.  Excellent.

(I still haven't tracked down a copy of The Circus of Dr Lao.   That's an asap essential.)

Defy the Foul Fiend - John Collier

 I was not up to speed on John Collier.   No wonder, really.   He was noted (never famous) for contributing the screenplays of famous films (The African Queen, I Am A Camera) and short stories for magazines like the New Yorker.   He died in 1980.   His only novels, three of them, appeared in the 1930s and did well but not brilliantly.   In other words he was before my time and long since out of my main sphere of interest.

I forget now how I came across him.   I acquired two of his novels some time ago and they gradually disappeared into my ever-increasing mountain of the waiting-to-be-read.   Then, by chance, I unearthed Defy the Foul Fiend, the last of the three, published in 1934.   It is a comic novel very much in the style of the young Evelyn Waugh.   Time has moved on however, the dark cloud of the Great Depression hangs over the comedy.

Willoughby Corbo, our hero, is the illegitimate son of the aristocratic waster Lord Ollebeare.   When the cook who bore him runs off with her lover, Ollebeare dumps the boy on his brother Ralph, a grim stockbroker who has a wife desperate to be a mother.   The wife dies and Willoughy is left largely to his own devices.   In the fullness of time he has to go out into the world with which he is largely unfamiliar.   Ollebeare manages to get him a post as secretary to Lord Stumber, an elderly campaigning peer who happens to have a very young wife with remarkably compelling breasts which fascinate Willoughby and other young men of his acquaintance.   So Willoughby gets the boot and embarks on his quest for feminine beauty and a meaningful role in life.

He tries all options - a young prostitute, a sultry siren; hawking unnecessary domestic appliances door-to-door on a purely commission basis.   But Willoughby is essentially mule-headed and a bred-in-the-bone Tory.   We all recognise early on that the rather limpid and artistic Lucy is the girl for him and that Willoughby is fated to follow the Corbo inheritance in all its aspects.

I was fascinated with the twist at the end that is strikingly similar to one in Mrs Craddock which I finished immediately before starting reading this.   Defy the Foul Fiend is also let down by a problem which I noted in the post below Maugham never had.   Maugham always knew when to finish.   Collier very much doesn't.   At least a third of this book could have been cut and what remained would have been brilliant.   There are great jokes here, affecting characters, many well-drawn scenes, but there is also waffle, pages I ended up skipping.   Perhaps this is why Collier only contributed to famous screenplays.   He could enliven and amplify but he cannot construct.

Mrs Craddock - W Somerset Maugham

 

Mrs Craddock was the third or fourth of Maugham's novels, written in 1900 but not published until 1902 - because William Heinemann, of all people, thought it was in some inexplicable way offensive.   He agreed to publish a slightly expurgated version but since 1955 we have all had the real deal.   And there is nothing in any way offensive about it.

This is Maugham's attempt at a New Woman Novel.   The New Woman was a literary genre in the last decade of the Victorian era, sparked by suffragism and various campaigns for womens' rights.   It found expression in 'Theodora: A Fragment' by 'Victoria Cross' in The Yellow Book and the publisher of that journal, John Lane of The Bodley Head, launched a series of books on the theme called Keynotes after the first in the series, a novel of the same name by 'George Egerton' (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright).   Two notable works in the series were The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen, and The Woman Who Didn't by the aforementioned 'Victoria Cross' (Anna Sophie Cory.

Because of the difficulty in getting Mrs Craddock into print Maugham missed the crest of the New Woman wave.   Nevertheless it was a success and in many ways cemented the reputation he made with his debut Liza of Lambeth five years earlier.   The intervening novels, The Making of a Saint and The Hero, hadn't done especially well and Maugham was still searching for his central theme.   He found it in the question of quiet nonconformity.

Bertha Ley is a New Woman.   Coming up to twenty-one, and about to come into a comfortable inheritance, she forms a passionate attachment to the young farmer, Edward Craddock, one of her tenants.   She is determined to marry him immediately and no one can persaude her otherwise.   Her aunt, a middleaged spinster and a woman of independent opinions, sees no point in trying.   The marriage goes ahead and for a time Bertha is blissfully happy as Mrs Craddock.   Edward is an excellent manager of the estate and she finds him physically irresistable.   But she loses her baby son after a nightmare confinement.   The local doctor warns her she can never have another.   Edward does his duty but Bertha cannot recover her passion for him.   So she leaves him and goes to London to lodge with her aunt.

Ultimately Bertha returns to her family home in Whitstable where Edward has simply got on with things in her absence.   Things about him that Bertha once found attractive - his manly appetite, his old-fashioned code of behaviour, his lack of sophistication - she now finds offensive.   Edward is putting on weight, balding slightly, and standing for the County Council.

Maugham handles it all brilliantly.   Bertha is compulsive and irritating.   Edward is dogged and dull.   The character who holds the narrative together, acting as the reader's voice, is Bertha's aunt, Miss Polly Ley, who has actually been a New Woman since before the term was invented.   She lives alone in London and spends the unpleasant winter months abroad.   She has a busy social and intellectual life.   Her counter is another spinster, Fanny Glover, the vicar's devoted sister, who would have made Edward the perfect wife.

For me the proof of Maugham's genius is his ability to make his fiction exactly the right length - a few pages under 300 in this instance.   Unlike so many modern novelists he always seems to know precisely when to stop.

Count Luna - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Count Luna is an absolute work of genius by an extremely fine writer who is inexplicably under-translated into English.   Sadly, I have now read all three of the more-or-less available: this, plus Baron Blagge and I was Jack Mortimer.   My posts on the other two have had great responses and loads of clicks, so I don't see some enterprising publisher starts digging into Lernet-Holenia's back catalogue.

Like the others, Luna is a work of wit and imagination.   It also hinges on a serious subject: how does a vanquished people deal with its guilt over the crimes against humanity committed in their name?

Alexander Jessiersky, a third generation millionaire of Polish extraction, lives in a palace in central Vienna.   He has a beautiful wife and loads of children.   He is not especially interested in the family transport business but it functions prosperously without him.   Before the war, however, the board of directors wanted to buy a property owned by the down-at-heel aristocrat Count Luna.   Luna wouldn't sell - it was the last of his inheritance - and the board of directors therefore reported him to the Gestapo who hauled him off to a concentration camp.   Jessiersky had nothing to do with it - but he knows he should have intervened and used his veto.   Guilt has gnawed at him throughout the war and after.   During it, he tried to send Luna money and food.   Now he is obsessed with the notion that Luna has survived his ordeal and is back in search of revenge.

Jessiersky is an obsessive researcher, happiest in his well-stocked private library.   He delves, develops theories - and goes quietly mad.   He takes to killing people.   He flees Austria and ends up in the catacombs of Rome.   We know this from the outset - his disappearance below ground in the Church of Sant' Urbino is where Lernet-Holenia starts his fable.   The interest - the game - is how he came to be there.   The genius is that Lernet-Holenia doesn't leave it there.   He takes us with Jessiersky into what happens next, which is something rather beautiful.

Lernet-Holenia writes like a dream.   He juggles complex ideas like guilt and death and the possible hereafter with deceptive ease.   Jessiersky has done no more than thousands of his compatriots did.   His only sin is that he failed to do something.   The outcome of his inaction may not have been too terrible.  But what Jessiersky does to himself and others fifteen years later is terrible.   Terrible yet empathetic and therefore sad.   We laugh and we sigh but always with sympathy.   Which is what makes Count Luna an absolute masterpiece.

Tales from the Forbidden Planet - Roz Kaveney (ed)

 This was a chance aquisition.   I was in London, in my favourite second-hand bookshop (Skoob, in the Brunswick Centre) and I didn't want to leave without a purchase.   That, I felt, would be letting the side down.   So I saw this, thought what the hell?   Wandered up to the counter where, of course, one of the books I had wanted for some time was on display ... but that's another story.

It was only when I was on the train, leafing through, that I realised this was a collection from the sci fi era currently interesting me - the Interzone Eighties, 1987 in fact, featuring several writers I have beens looking into recently.   Moorcock, of course (an End of Time story), Kilworth, Keith Roberts, and Lisa Tuttle, all of whom featured in the Other Rdens and New Worlds anthologies reviewed here in the last few weeks.   Aldiss is here, too, with a really enjoyable one called 'Tourney', and Iain M Banks (excellent).   I liked John Brunner('A Case of Painter's Ear'), Josephine Saxton's 'The Interferences' and Gwyneth Jones's 'The Snow Apples'.   I did not like in any way the story by Harry Harrison, but that's the point of anthologies, isn't it?

One of the things that attracted me in the shop was the fact the stories all had an illustration by a British illustrator of the period.   I thought this would be a bonus for me and my own illustrations.   As it happens, the only one I enjoyed was Dave Gibbons for the Banks story 'Descendant'.   I liked the cover illustration, too, the work of Brian Bolland.

Turns out the common denominator for the collection is that all these authors had done sessions at the Forbidden Planet bookshops.   As good a connection as any.

Antwerp - Roberto Bolano

 I remember reading The Savage Detectives when it first came out in English translation, sometime around the Millennium.   I loved it.   I remember eagerly awaiting the appearance of 2666.   By then Bolano had died.   I got hold of 2666 but couldn't come to terms with it.   The other day I spotted this in the British Library bookshop.   A novella - perhaps even a series of vignettes - by Bolano?   No brainer.

And I have really enjoyed it.   Antwerp might even have been his first attempt at sustained fiction, back in 1980, tinkered with over the years (as Bolano himself tells us in a sort of preface) and finally published in Spain in 2002, the year before he died.   It wasn't even called Antwerp back then.   I prefer Antwerp and Antwerp is probably my favourite anecdote in the book.

It's experimental, naturally, with few if any clear links between the fragments - a hunchback, probably Mexican, the struggling writer who can't write anything other than bursts of words, detectives on a mystery trajectory, thin young women.   It's a world of ideas whipped into a swirling mass with us, the reader, standing in the middle with Bolano, trying to snatch the odd one as it whirls by.

It's only seventy large-print pages but it took me three sittings to read.   It is so densely packed, so stuffed full of ideas and wit and suggestions of things to come.   Maybe it's time for another go at 2666.

NOTE:

Well, what do you know?   I'd completely forgotten I'd read Bolano's The Third Reich back in 2017.   I only found it when 'Roberto Bolano' turned out to be already saved in my labels.   Try it yourself - it's also in the labels for this post.   Or use the search box.   Spoiler - I moaned about 2666 but absolutely adored The Third Reich.

Other Edens - Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock (eds)

 Other Edens is a sci fi collection from 1987 and very much from the Interzone period of British imaginative fiction.   Some of the most noted writers are respresented - Moorcock, Harrison and Aldiss - but not with their best work.   Those who stand out here are those who were then breaking through: Garry Kilworth, who I only knew from Interzone; Lisa Tuttle, who I had heard of but never read; and a couple of others completely new to me, such as Graham Charnock and Keith Roberts.

Roberts' story Piper's Wait was probably my overall favourite, a temenos story stretching very effectively over the ages.  Tuttle's The Wound was a close second, a very exciting take on mutable sexuality.   Kilworth's Triptych was by far the most radical and complex, a fragmented three-parter positively bursting at the seams with ideas.   I am increasingly interested in Kilworth.  He seems to have been extraordinarily prolific with over eighty novels spanning many genres, so it shouldn't be too hard to track one down.

The Labyrinth Makers - Anthony Price

 Number 26 in the new thirty-strong run of Penguin crime and espionage modern classics, this drew my eye with the legendary green cover.   Anthony Price was a high-grade journalist who wrote on the side and The Labyrinth Makers was his first novel in 1970.   It won him a Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association, and no wonder.

Twenty-five years on from World War 2, we are deep into the Cold War.   Dr David Audley is a reclusive desk operative for the Secret Service, specialising in the Middle East.   Then a wartime RAF Dakota is unearthed during construction work for a natural gas pipeline and Audley finds himself inexplicably switched to a multi-agency investigation.   The plane and its pilot are no mystery: everybody has been looking for Flight Lt John Steerforth and his Dakota since they vanished during the Berlin Airlift in September 1945.   Until now they were assumed lost at sea.   But Steerforth evidently managed to nurse his plane back to England after ordering his crew to bale out over the North Sea.   The question is, what became of his cargo?

Because John Steerforth was not only a decorated war hero, he was a post-war smuggler.   For him the ruins of Berlin were a honey-pot of looted goodies and Steerforth might, by accident or design, have hit upon a very special treasure indeed.   The Russians, from whom it was stolen, have never given up looking for Steerforth's plane.   Now it has been found, they are very interested indeed.   And because they are interested, those higher up the intelligence food chain in London are also interested.   And they have decided, for reasons unknown, that David Audley is the man they need on the ground.

The snag is, the crates found in the wrecked Dakota are not the crates the Russians are mad keen on recovering.   They are decoys, filled with building rubble.   Which means that Steerforth must have stashed them on the day before the doomed flight, somewhere near his isolated base in Cambridgeshire because there was no time for one man working alone to move and bury so much treasure.   Which is why Audley has been winkled out of seclusion.   He might have no experience of field work but he does have a gift for lateral thinking.

The Labyrinth Makers is a great read, a classic espionage thriller of its era, smartly written with genuinely interesting characters.   Faith Steerforth, for example, the late Flight Lieutenant's daughter, is not just sex interest, as she would have been in Ian Fleming or even John le Carre circa 1970.   She helps Audley solve the mystery.   Likewise our supposed villain, the Soviet masterspy Nikolai Andrievich Panin, whose reputation is cleverly built up until he finally turns up thirty pages from the end, is no one-dimensional Fleming villain or even the far complex Karla; he wants the stolen booty back because he suffered the ignominy of losing it in 1945.   His only plan for the treasure is to donate it to a German museum.   The two files of old intelligence files which Steerforth took with it by mistake, Panin is quite happy to burn right here and now.

A real find, this.   I want more and quick internet searches reveal there is quite a lot more.   Price even has another Dagger-winning novel in the Penguin series.   His Other Paths to Glory is at lucky number thirteen in the list.

The Glass Pearls - Emerich Pressburger

 Another fabulous reissue from Faber Editions - the second and final (1965) novel from Emeric Pressburger following his break with movies and his legendary partner, Michael Powell.   At the time, apparently, The Glass Beads was critically panned, thus silencing Pressburger for his remaining twenty-odd years.    It's understandable, but a terrible shame.   Understandable because 1965 was probably too soon for a sympathetic Nazi as protagonist.   A shame because it is a magnificent work of fiction.

We know early on that Karl Braun, an amiable but solitary London piano tuner, is in fact a Nazi war criminal in hiding.  Indeed Dr Otto Reitmuller was the very worst kind of war criminal, a brain surgeon who experimented on the brains of living concentration camp victims, thus one of the most wanted Nazis still at large.   In February his former colleague von Stempel came to London to try and persuade his friend to emigrate to Argentina - only to die of a heart attack on the London Underground.   Worried that the net might be closing, Braun has changed his rented room.   He has now moved in with two amiable Jews, Strohmayer and Kolm, in Pimlico.

Braun is still a youngish man, and yearns to find a woman to settle down with.   The prim and proper Lilian Hall, at his workplace, has developed a crush on him.   He, meantime, is rather taken with Helen Taylor, the letting agent who found him his new accommodation.   Braun takes them both to the opera.   Miss Hall appreciates the occasion, Helen is just a humble divorcee with a child but eager to learn and easy to impress.

Still Braun finds himself under mounting pressure.   The statute of limitations, which had been twenty years and thus about to end, has been extended for war criminals to twenty-five.   A former assistant at the camp has started giving evidence against Reitmuller to save his own neck.   It's in all the papers. Braun has to find a way out.   He and von Stempel smuggled out some hard currency when they escaped Germany and set up a numbered bank account in Switzerland.   Now von Stempel has died, Karl can claim the lot, which will easily fund the flight to Buenos Aires and a comfortable retirement when he gets there...

He talks Helen into a brief trip to Paris...  And then things start going very wrong...

The twists are brilliant and, unlike critics in 1965 we should never forget that Pressburger lost his entire family in the Holocaust.   Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and I for one remember the effect documentaries about the camps had when they started to be shown on TV.   But that was in the seventies, otherwise I would not have been old enough to watch.   My dad, who was an eighteen year old new recruit when the Hamburg concentration camps were finally liberated, and who processed some of the Nazis involved because he was a good German speaker, never ever discussed it with me but did force himself to watch the docs.   I wonder now how he felt.   I know absolutely that before about 1970 facing up to those horrors from their youth was too much for most of those involved in the liberation.   Hence the failure of The Glass Pearls.

Now, though, when unspeakable autocrats are actively committing crimes against humanity in various parts of the world, might be the perfect time to celebrate Pressburger's achievement.   I hope so.

The Lowlife - Alexander Baron

 Alexander Baron (1917-99) was a genuine Jewish Londoner. a communisr and active anti-fascist in the thirties who, after serving throughout WW2, became a professional writer - journalist, novelist and screenwriter.   This beautiful new issue of The Lowlife (1963) from Faber Edition comes with an introduction by his fellow Hackney chronicler, the mighty Iain Sinclair.

Harryboy Boas is a professional gambler in his early forties.   He lives in a rented room in Hackney, spends his days in bed or reading classic novels and his nights at the dog track.   His entire life is devoted to gambling.   The money is not important.   If he has plenty, he spends it.   All he needs to get by is rent-money and food-money for local cafes.   He is not a drinker or a womaniser.   For the latter he has an arrnagement with Marcia, an upmarket prostitute who has the same attitude to sex that Harryboy has for gambling.   Long term aspirations for both involving building property portfolios, slums earmarked for clearance, that they will let out to immigrant families.

Meanwhile in the house in Hackney a young family have moved in downstairs, the Deaners, Vic and Evelyn and their spoilt demanding toddler Gregory.   Vic is bookkeeper for a local supermarket.   Evelyn is lower middleclass and expects greater things.   When the old lady who occupies the upstairs room across the landing from Harryboy dies, a black family take over.   They are helpful, friendly people but Evelyn has the prejudices of her class.   She wants out - a move to a better district.   Vic is weak.   He gives in to the pressure and embezzles money from his employer.   Following Harryboy's example, he stakes it all on the dogs and loses the lot.   Now he needs to repay his employer and get a deposit together for a new, better flat.    Harryboy has played the big man, making empty promises.   Now Vic is pressurising him to help...

This is a brilliant read, fizzing with life and ideas plus a penetrating social study of a world in transition.   Eighty years ago the Jews were East End pariahs, unwanted immigrants with alien appearance and mysterious customs.   Now they are upwardly mobile, united against the new wave of immigrants.   I hope there will be more reprints of Baron's novels.   In the meantime, I will be scouring the sellers of second hand books, online and in person.

[NOTE: This is one of those rare occasions when I have read and reviewed a novel twice.   You can link to my review from 2013 by clicking here.

The Man in the Bunker - Rory Clements

 It is the summer of 1945.   The war in Europe has ended and Professor Tom Wilde of Cambridge University is looking forward to his first term of teaching in what seems like years.   But for spies like him, the war never ends.   His friend Philip Eaton persuades him to undertake one last mission.   Is Hitler really dead, and if not, where is he?

Eaton takes him round the various survivors of the Berlin Bunker who are now in England.  Then it's off to the American sector of Berlin where Wilde is teamed with Mozes Heck, a Dutch Jew, raised in Germany, now a lietenant in the British Army.   All of Heck's family died in the Holocaust.   Thus Heck is on something of a crusade.

The fluctuating relationship between the two adopted Brits, the American professor and the Dutch avenger, is what gives the novel its tension.   The trail eventually leads them to the Tyrol where the fallen Fuhrer may be hiding and where a second Fuhrer is definitely on the rise.   The eventual showdown is well done and Clements leaves us with sufficient untied ends to anticipate the next in the series.

A niche subgenre of Oxbridge spies and Nazis has emerged over the last decades and Rory Clements was one of the first.   He remains one of the best and I always enjoy his Wilde series.   You can start reading them at any point - I certainly did. 

The Ghost Slayers - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Thrilling tales of occult detection...  Yes!   Ghost-finders - my absolute fave.   And favourite amongst them, John Silence and Thomas Carnacki, both prominent in this compilation of classics by Mike Ashley for the British Library.   My second faves, Aylmer Vance and Flaxman Low, both appear, too.   The Silence and the Carnacki were both familiar to me - Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson both only wrote one collection each and I have long had both - but I was reminded how superior Blackwood was with Ashley's choice of 'A Psychic Invasion.'   Sadly, 'The Searcher of the End House' is to my mind one of the lesser Carnacki tales.

New to me were the tales by Bertram Atkey, Dion Fortune, Moray Dalton, Gordon Hillman and Joseph Payne Brennan.   The latter two were especially effective.   'Forgotten Harbour' (1931) by Hillman is a tale of spooky doings at a fog-bound lighthouse, absolutely dripping with menace.   Brennan's story, 'In Death as in Life' is by far the most recent of the tales, dating only from 1963, but his ghostfinder, Lucius Leffing, is a Victorian out of his time, and the ghost when it manifests is literally dripping, truly horrible, and squishy.   Brennan's real stroke of genius is to make himself Leffing's Dr Watson.

A fantastic collection, essential for any fan of the sub-genre.

Plays 3 - Steven Berkoff

 Steven Berkoff entered the theatre about the same time I began training for it.   He has therefore always figured in my theatrical consciousness, though I have never seen his work and, for some reason, none of it has joined my vast collection of plays - until I picked this up earlier in the week.

The collection here is of his minor work, two of which have never been performed (though there has been an acted-out reading of The Messiah).   That does not mean they are neglible.   All three appeal to me largely because they happen to be subjects which I have researched: the blood libel of Jews in medieval England, Jesus the man, and the Oedipus myth.

Ritual in Blood is the fully realised play, given at Nottingham Playhouse in 2001.   I wish I had been involved with theatre at that time - I would have loved to see it.   The piece is ambitious, dozens of characters coming and going, and Berkoff and I come to same conclusion: it's all, always, about money.  The Messiah naturally deploys similar devices - Berkoff famously developed idiosyncratic, highly personal forms of acting and writing.   I feel sure he would have reworked some elements of this text had it gone on to be fully staged.   I have considered the same twist or explanation for the miracle but did not find it entirely satisfactory here.

Oedipus I thought was excellent.   Firstly we are not dealing with the same level of reality here.   It has always been a myth and Berkoff's style is brilliantly 'mythic'.   Like Sophocles, he makes the action continuous - one unbelievably awful episode - and breezily ignores or overrides the obvious problems involved.   Indeed, it is the pace which gives the piece its power.   I especially enjoyed his device for a couple of necessary flashbacks: instead of dull narration, characters act out the incidents as if they were there, witnesses to things happening now, before their eyes.

Fascinating and intriguing.

The Unknown - Algernon Blackwood

 Another excellent collection from the sadly defunct Handheld Press.   The idea here is to demonstrate Blackwood's range beyond the usual suspects, 'Wendigo' and 'The Willows'.   Editor Henry Batholomew four key topics - Canada, Mountain, Reincarnation and Imagination - and illustrates each with three examples, an essay or article, and two short stories.

I was especially taken with the Reincarnation section, which firstly demonstrates how Blackwood came to view the topic, then follows with 'The Insanity of Jones' from 1907 and 'The Tarn of Sacrifice' from 1921.   'The Insanity of Jones' was my favourite in the book, a tale of ancient revenge carried out in the present.   The third wheel as it were, the spirit who sucks the meek clerk Jones into his act of revenge, was truly scary.   I would also single out the story 'By Water' in the final Imagination section, largely because it is the story Blackwood talks about writing in the essay 'The Genesis of Ideas' which immediately precedes it.

Highly recommended.

Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg

 Interesting concepts abound here.   A decade after the planet was restored to its sentient people, Edmund Gundersen feels a compulsion to return to Belzagor to put things right on his own account.   A former worker for the colonial power, Gundersen was peripherally involved in some of the misdeeds that went on.   He encountered the notorious Kurtz (yes, Kurtz) who shared snake venom with one of the two sentient people, the elephantine nildoror.   Gundersen once saw Kurtz, venomed up to the gills himself, dance with the nildoror.   Gundersen's time on Belzagor wasn't all bad, though.   He met and fell in love with the beautiful Seema.

But now Seema is partnered up with Kurtz.   Kurtz, she says, is off on an expedition, but her sulidor (the sulidoror are the other sentient people on Belzagor, giant ape-like people) tells Gundersen that Kurtz is hidden away on the compound, ill.    Gundersen sees him - and is horrified.

It is rare for a planet to have two sentient races, particularly two races so strikingly different.   Both have speech, both are said to have souls.   The land is divided between them.   The nildoror have the fertile plains, the sulidoror occupy the misty uplands.   The nildoror are vegetarian grazers, the sulidoror omnivore hunter-gatherers.   There is no emnity: the two races come and go across one another's territory   Both have seemingly come to terms with their colonial past in which the sulidoror were servants, the nildoror transport.   They continue to provide these services for human tourists.   Now they do it by consent.

Gundersen has always got on reasonably well with the natives of Belzagor.   He can speak both languages, though he is not so fluent with the gestures that provide nuance.   He politely seeks permission from a senior nildor to go to the hill country.   Permission is granted so long as he brings back Cedric Cullen, who has apparently commited a serious transgression and exiled himself among the sulidoror.   Gundersen wants to find out what happened to Kurtz in the hill country.   Most of all he wants to find out about the rebirth ceremony the nildoror undergo there.   Every twenty years ot so a nildor is summoned to the rebirthing.   This was Gundersen's transgression: he needed nildoror to help repair a breached dam and prevented them going on their rebirthing trek.    So off he goes - into the heart of darkness.

Yes, Downward to the Earth is a sci fi take on the Conrad classic.   The question in both is what has Kurtz found that has turned him into a monster?   'The horror ...  the horror...."    Silverberg's version pays off big time, with a twist that I absolutely didn't see coming.   This is the first time I have read any Silverberg.   I was very impressed.

New Worlds 8 - (ed) Hilary Bailey

 New Worlds magazine was founded before WW2 and taken over by Michael Moorcock in the sixties.   With the aid of an Arts Council grant Moorcock turned New Worlds into the monthly journal of the British New Wave in sci fi: Moorcock himself, Ballard, Aldiss etc.   Around 1970 the magazine started to flounder.   Moorcock persuaded Sphere to continue it as a 'quarterly' paperback.   By 1975 when this eighth and last edition came out, Moorcock's wife Hilary Bailey was editor and their close longterm collaborator M John Harrison was literary editor.

Bailey made a good job of editing this one.   The stories appear in descending order of quality.   We start with Harrison's 'Running Down', a Yorkshire-set tale combining his interest in climbing with nature horror.   Then we have 'White Stars', an interlude from Moorcock's long-running and intricate Dancers at the End of Time thread.   I was initially put off Moorcock by Dancers when I was a young teenager, but I thoroughly enjoyed 'White Stars'.   Barrington Bayley's 'The Bees of Knowledge' is different and well-written.   Peter Jobling's 'Building Blocks', which Bailey in her introduction suggests might be a debut piece, is equally interesting but not quite so well written.   The other, shorter, stories did not greatly appeal.

I was fascinated by the two book reviews at the end, one by Harrison, the other by John Clute.  Is this what sci reviews were like in the Seventies?   By way of illustration, I give you title of Clute's ten-page review of Brian Aldiss's novel, The Eighty-Minute Hour: 'I say Begone! Apotropaic Narcosis, I'm Going to Read the Damn Thing, Ha Ha.'   Worryingly, Harrison's marginally shorter review of Thomas M Disch's collection Getting into Death is in similar vein.

John Clute went on to become one of the founders of Interzone, which is in many ways was the successor to New Worlds.   The issue I have just acquired contains work by Harrison and Aldiss and Thomas M Disch.   I'll report on it shortly.