The Darkest of Nights - Charles Eric Maine

 Charles Eric Maine (real name David McIlwain) was a pioneer of British sci fi in the late Forties through to his early death in 1981.   To my mind, only John Wyndham is better.   Maine's gift is for very near future cataclysm brought on by man's reckless technical innovations.   In The Tide Went Out nuclear tests crack the earth's crust and all the water drains away.   Here - startlingly - a covid virus develops in the Far East and becomes a worldwide pandemic.  In reaction, governments hugely restrict personal freedom and protect the elite in secure underground bunkers.

The relevance is so extreme that even this British Library reprint predates Covid 19.   The novel itself came out in 1962.   I mean ... wow!  OK, there are differences.  For one thing there are always two versions of the Hueste virus; one which kills in hours, another which is harmless to the victim, granting them immunity but making them carriers.  Actually, that second version sounds very much like Covid 19, now I come to think about it.   The other major difference is that the underclass rise up in rebellion when they are effectively left to die by the state.   Of course, Maine wrote before social media - indeed, before absolutely every household had a TV.

As ever, once he has set up his disaster, Maine personalises it through characters at the heart of the dilemma.   He does so especially well in The Darkest of Nights.   Pauline Brant works for the International Virus Research Organisation (IVRO) in Tokyo, and is thus on hand when the virus first begins to spread.   She is sent back to England where she reunites with her husband Clive, Foreign editor for a major Fleet Street newspaper.   Clive has been offered a gig in America and wants a divorce so he can marry the boss's daughter.   Pauline asks for time to think it over.   Then the virus comes to Britain and Pauline is subsumed back into IVRO where she meets DR 'Vince' Vincent.   The triangle plays out to very end, with a twist I didn't foresee.

Whilst not perhaps the Maine novel closest to my academic interests (that remains Spaceways), The Darkest of Nights is a better novel than The Tide Went Out, itself very good.  My appetite for more is whetted and fortunately series editor Mike Ashley includes some useful pointers in his introduction.

Myron - Gore Vidal

 Myron is not as good as Myra Breckinridge for two reasons.   Firstly, it's more about Myra and her attempts from Myron, and secondly, the second joke is rarely better than the first, especially when your first sally is as good as Myra Breckinridge.   That said, Vidal upends expectations.  We assume Myron is a prequel but it is actually a sequel.   The original pre-Myra Myron was a cinema geek, an intellectual, whereas this Myron, following Myra's car crash and surgery is a dull-as-ditchwater middleclass Californian in the Chinese Food business.   Time, of course, has moved on and we find ourselves in 1973 at the height of the Watergate scandal.   Myron, meanwhile, finds himself (with a stroke of Swiftian brio) stuck on the set of the MGM movie Siren of Babylon in the summer of 1948.   Here, it is always the summer of 1948.  When the movie finishes shooting, they simply start shooting again.  Out-of-towners like Myron, who have somehow time-slipped here, stay at the Thalberg Hotel, largely unnoticed by the locals.   When they try and speak of their situation, it comes out as meaningless gibberish.

In these circumstances Myra, deeply and firmly supressed by Myron, starts to re-emerge.  Being herself a made-up character she registers better with the locals.   Among the out-of-towners at the Thalberg is Maude, a gay hairdressers with a sideline in drag, who helps Myra regain her looks.   Myra makes it her mission to save MGM, to make transgender eunuchs ubiquitous and thus prevent overpopulation and the various geopolitical crises which she knows will make the western world the ghastly place it is in 1973.

Chaos and further slippages ensue.   It is all great fun but cannot  quite equal the gobsmacking transgression that was Breckinridge. 

Bad Actors - Mick Herron

 How hard a choice was this?  One of my favourite writers offering a take on my favourite subject.  OK, it was slightly disappointing when I realised it wasn't about substandard thespians.  The plus side is that it's Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses at their very best.

Mick Herron gets better with every book.  The development here is structural.  We start with Act Two and then go back to Act One.  In terms of plotting and the unravelling thereof, it's very, very clever.  We also have the bonus of Shirley Dander on the rampage.  The Seige of the San by the Ultras is one of the best, perhaps the actual best, set pieces of the entire Slough House series.

We're what now?  Nine or ten novels in, plus extras like The Drop, the central character of which, John Bachelor, continues here.   The frame for Bad Actors is the really bad actors of the recent Tory government.  It is pretty obvious who the Machiavellian Andrew Sparrow is based on and there are absolutely no prizes for identifying the lying narcsicist he props up.   Sparrow has hired himself a super-forecaster (remember those?), a Swiss citizen called Dr Sophie de Greer.  John Bachelor sees her on TV and recalls a moment from his undistinguished past.  He recognises her mother in Dr Greer and the mother was not in any sense Swiss.  Bachelor tells Slow Horse Lech Wicinski.  You tell any Slow Horse anything and it will inevitably get to Jackson Lamb.   Meanwhile the power-crazed Sparrow is plotting to add Spook Street to his portfolio, which means unseating First Desk Diana Taverner, which in turn threatens the future of Slough House and Jackson Lamb's joes, which is never going to end well.

Bad Actors is a real treat, a perfect marriage of political lunacy and the essential madness of a professional espionage service.  Joyful in every way.

Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller

 The classic play from 1947, in a fresh Penguin Modern Classic edition with a besautifully evocative cover.  Miller sets out to do what nowadays seems impossible to conceive - a tragedy played out in suburbia.  Yet he achieves everything he wanted.  I can't remember reading a playscript so moving, with characters that leap off the page.  And as a four-time graduate in drama, let's just say I have read a lot of playscripts.

Willy Loman is a travelling salesman, thirty-five years on the road, but he's coming to the end.  He literally can't keep his mind on the road, which makes him a danger to himself and others.  He can't afford to retire, nor does he want to.  The road is his life.  The road enables him to maintain the illusion he's a big shot, a success.  Being at home is, for Willy, a reminder of failure.  Whatever his successes, real or imagined, as a seller of goods, as a father and provider he's a dud.  His two thirty-something sons are back in their boyhood bedroom, Biff a failed football player back from being little more than a bum out West, and Happy, assistant to a deputy in some dead-end business.  The house Willy has slaved to buy is crumbling, like the car and refrigerator both on hire purchase.

The rwo days we experience in the two acts are when the tragedy builds to its inevitable climax.  All the lies, the pretences, the missed opportunities - all come crashing down.   I didn't spot a flat note in the entire script.  What a challenge for actors!   What a feast for play-goers and those, like me, who can now only bear to read plays, such is the decayed condition of the theatre in Britain.   A reminder of what once was possible.

Where Angels Fear to Tread - E M Forster

 I was put off E M Forster by the fuss surrounding the publication of Maurice in the early Seventies, then all those arch Merchant-Ivory movies that brought in the era of the aristocratic actor.  Not my sort of thing at all.  Nowadays I am more tolerant.  All I want is an author with a voice and style that stands out in the crowd.  Forster certainly has that.   Where Angels Fear to Tread a black comedy that pivots on two tragic deaths but nevertheless manages to maintain an atmosphere of genteel social satire.

The young widow Lilia and her companion Miss Caroline Abbott leave one of the quieter and more rural suburbs of 1904-5 London for a tour of Italy, suggested by the effete pretensions of her mollycoddled brother in law Philip Herriton.  Before long the Herritons receive the ghastly news that Lilia has become engaged to a young Italian - and fellow not only young and Italian but the son of that social anomaly a rustic dentist!  Italianate Philip is despatched to put a stop to this nonsense, only to find Lilia and her Gino are already married.

Worse news follows within the year.  Lilia has not only given birth to Gino's son, she has died doing so.   Her former mother-in-law Mrs Herriton does what any respectable middleclass Englishwoman would.  She sends Philip and his bluestocking sister Harriet to buy the baby from its father and bring it home.   Miss Abbott, meanwhile, feels obliged to involve herself in the enterprise.

Key to the novel's success is its brevity, only 160 pages in this iconic Penguin Modern Classic edition.  It would be difficult to maintain the comic element any longer.  Yet in that narrow space Forster manages to cram deep insight into all his main characters (and plenty into the deftly-drawn supporting cast).  The action romps along and yet all the pre-work, the structure essential to the farce, is in place.  If not quite a masterpiece, Where Angels Fear to Tread is arguably a significent work by a supreme master.

The Magician - Colm Toibin

 The only Toibin books I had previously read were Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary.  Both were interesting and definitely well written, but they were very short.  The Magician is substantial, almost 450 pages.   It is a novelisation of the life of Thomas Mann, which also includes his children, especially the two eldest, Erika and Klaus.   I am very interested in Thomas Mann, having found my way to him over the last twelve months or so.   I discovered Klaus as recently as last month.

I am therefore the ideal reader for The Magician.   Toibin is also clearly a huge fan and he has read a lot more Mann than I have.  Even so, it is clear that Toibin has chosen to write the novel in the cool, detached style of his hero.  It works brilliantly.  He has also been careful to avoid the trap into which so many novelists fall when writing novels about other novelists.  Mann used autobiographical elements in some but by no means all of his novels.   What he says about such elements in the books is not necessarily his opinion.   Toibin knows this.

Toibin structures the book by place, emphasising his concept of Mann as a lifelong exile.  This is especially effective at the end, when Mann visits Germany from America and ends up living in Switzerland.   The women in Mann's life, from his wife Katia to his three problematic daughters, his Brazilian mother and his two sisters who both commit suicide, are brilliantly evoked, all very different.   He is, I felt, oddly less successful with brother Heinrich and son Klaus, who I would have thought were grist to the mill of any novelist.  Perhaps he thought that because Thomas clearly didn't understand them, neither should the reader of a book about Thomas.   Nevertheless their deaths are touchingly handled.

One of the blurbs on the cover calls The Magician a masterpiece.   I'm not sure it is possible to write a masterpiece novel about another novelist.   Two of Mann's masterpieces, after all, feature composers rather than writers.  That said, Toibin and The Magician come very close.   It is a wonderful achievement, humane, empathetic, deeply considered.

Cesare - Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is 85 years old and has been publishing novels for more fifty years.  So why am I only just hearing about him?  Why has he been so disgracefully underpublished in the UK?

Congrats to Oldcastle/No Exit for getting hold of Charyn's 2020 novel Cesare.  They have published and publicised it well.   Cesare is the teenaged naval cadet Erik Holdermann who rescues a man being attacked by hooligans - only to learn that the man is Admiral Canaris, Head of the Abwehr.  Canaris is a man of honour who repays his obligations, and Erik becomes 'Cesare' to Canaris's Caligari (referencing the expressionist silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), assassinating his master's enemies.

Erik is Aryan but was brought up by prostitutes in the Berlin ghetto and educated at a Jewish school.   He is adopted by the wealthy Baron von Hecht and becomes besotted with the baron's half-Jewish daughter Lisalein.  By the time war breaks out Lisalein has married the Nazi Valentiner, formerly her father's accountant.  She and Erik smuggle Jews out of Berlin.   Ultimately, inevitably, the Gestapo catch up with them both.

They are reunited at Theresienstadt, the concentration camp 'paradise' which the Nazis created to mask the Holocaust.  Also here is Benhard Beck, the Jewish cabaret artist who was the orinal Mack the Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.  He colludes with the commandant in maintaining the myth of the camp - until the Red Cross finally turn up to inspect it.

Cesare is an astonishing book.  It is violent, comic, and makes no bones about the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.  The fictional characters are as convincing as the 'real' people.  Erik, Lisalein and Beck are benificent monsters; Canaris, who was executed by the Nazis a month or so before their defeat, is a martyr.  I hope Cesare opens the floodgate for mass publication of Charyn's backlist.  Meanwhile I have tracked down an ominibus of his Isaac Sidel novels from the mid-Seventies.

Railsea - China Mieville

 In a post-apocalyptic world life revolves around the Railsea, a nexus of railway lines populated by mole-trains, navy trains, pirate trains and salvage trains.   Sham ap Soorap is an apprentice doctor's assistant aboard the mole-train Medes.   Giant feral animals burrow the wasteland between the rail lines of the Railsea and Captain Naphi of the Medes is obsessed with a giant mole, a Great Southern Moldywarpe known as Mocker-Jack, which she claims bit off her arm.   Mocker-Jack is Naphi's obsession; all captains have them, just as salvagers have their specialisms, the junk they know best.   Whenever a train docks, the cities buy their produce and sell them rumour.

Sham is not content with his life aboard the Medes.   He rather fancies himself as a salvager, but a chance find sends him to the Shroake siblings in Manihiki, and they, eventually, lead him on a quest for the legendary end of the line.

I love Mieville's writing style, a sort of techno-baroque.   He endows his characters with endless cheerful eccentricities.   Even the pirates here have their good sides.   He handles action like a master.   Railsea is a quest novel and a good one.   The world imagined here is convincing and the book rather peters out when the object is attained.   The object, of course, has to be obtained otherwise the whole narrative is pointless, and the good thing is that Mieville has the taste and discrimination to leave it there, without tying up every loose end as lesser authors might.

Alexander - Klaus Mann

 Alexander (1929) was Mann's sixth novel which, given he was born in 1906, is a measure of whar a prodigy he was.   On the one hand he didn't exactly have to fight for publishers' attention, being the son of Thomas and the nephew of Heinrich.   On the other, he didn't get on with his father, being gay, a heavy user of drugs, and somewhat on the socialisr side politically.

Only Mephisto (1936) really remains in the literary consciousness, mainly on account of the film.   If Alexander is typical of his other work then this neglect is downright scandalous.   Had I not already looked up his dates I would have thought Alexander the work of much older writer.   Hesse's Siddhartha sprang to mind; Hesse was forty-five when he wrote it.   Alexander has something of the same episodic nature.   The battles are background matters as Mann focuses on the Macedonian prodigy's sexual problems and his inability to establish and keep friendships as his empite grows.   Essentially Mann's Alexander is a superhero in search of a secret identity.   He browses the cultures of the vanquished but only to see if he can fit himself in there.   He takes on the exotic, the freakish.   In every sense he is trying to determine how far he can go.

I was captivated.   This is a beautiful book that should be much better known.   I really like the presentation of this Hesperus edition.   The translation by David Carter seems stylish and fine, but the punctuation is too often disastrous.   Proof-reading required.   On the plus side, the management of notes is spot-on.

The Women of Troy - Pat Barker

 I thought The Silence of the Girls was Barker's best work since the Regeneration Trilogy.  Good news - The Women of Troy maintains the standard.   This covers a period of the Trojan story I am more familiar with, having spent a lot of time and thought on Euripides' play of the same name.   Troy has fallen, its princes have been killed; the men have either been massacred or enslaved and sent back to Greece as farm labourers.   This, self-evidently, is about the surviving women who have been portioned out as prizes to the Greek leaders.

Briseis is Barker's principal character in both books.   She was claimed by both Agamemnon and Achilles and caused a feud between them.   Achilles won out and she is now pregnant with his child.   Achilles, of course, is dead.   On his deathbed he gave Briseis to his lieutenant Alcimus, who has given her the best status and security by marrying her.   Other women are not so fortunate.   Cassandra has been given to Agamemnon, Hecuba to Odysseus.   Andromache, widow of Hector, has been granted to Pyrrhus, the sixteen year-old son of Achilles, who hacked down Priam and murdered Andromache's son.   Brilliantly, Barker makes him, not Andromache, the other main character of her novel.   Pyrrhus is haunted by the memory of the father he never really knew.   He is as strong as his father but he has no wisdom, and knows it.   The Myrmidons adore him but Pyrrhus the boy-man only loves his horses, in particular Ebony, one half of his chariot team.

I devoured this book.   If anything I found it even more enjoyable than Silence of the Girls.   Next up, apparently, is The Voyage Home.   Definitely a must-read for me.