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. 

Classic Carnacki - now on Draft2Digital

 

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.