The Life of Dylan Thomas - Constantine Fitzgibbon

 The first and probably the most illuminating life of Thomas is this, by Fitzgibbon, who knew him, drank with him, and even put him up from time to time.   It was written in 1965, just over a decade after Dylan's death.   It's worth remembering that Dylan, had he lived, would only just have turned fifty.   Even so, many myths had already sprung up and it's one of Fitzgibbon's aims to debunk as many as he can.

Fitzgibbon was an American anglophile living in London.   He is therefore especially good on Fitrovia, before, during and after the war, and on Dylan's obsessession with America.   Fitzgibbon's position, which presumably stems from discussions with the man himself, is that both Thomas and his wife Caitlin envisaged their future in  America.   Dylan's four tours, which ended up killing him, were laying the groundwork for emigration.

The book is extremely readable.   The problem is the lack of quoted sources.   There are no foot or end notes, no appendix dealing with sources, and those which Fitzgibbon does cite in the text don't seem to exist, at least not in the form he references.

Life Class - Pat Barker

 Life Class is the first of Barker's second World War I trilogy, as far as I know unnamed, the follow-up or complement of the award-winning Regeneration Trilogy.   Regeneration told us things we really didn't know about the war, in particular the never-discussed subject of the jitters, shell-shock, or PTSD as it is called today.   It had its real-life heroes - Owen and Sassoon - mixed with fictional characters.   It also gave us a meaningful woman's take on the situation through the nurses at Craigavon Hospital where traumatized soldiers were given ground-breaking experimental treatment.

The second trilogy is about art students at London's Slade School.   Here some of the real-life people are flimsily disguised.   You don't need a post-graduate degree from the Courtauld to recognise Kit Neville as the flawed and brilliant Christopher Nevin.   In fact you don't need much background knowledge to know all this stuff.   It's common knowledge, entry-level stuff.   I quite liked Toby's Room, the second in the trilogy, because the loss of a young life was beautifully and insightfully done.   I'm afraid Life Class is more cliched than insightful.   The real people were much more interesting, though it's far too early in the war to get too involved with the one who interests me most, the surgeon-turned-art-tutor Henry Tonks.

The thing about World War I is that it was a complete waste of time.   Hundreds of thousands of young lives were squandered in horrific circumstances.   Barker tries to describe the horror by setting all of the war action in a field hospital.   Unfortunately her key character, Paul Tarrant, just isn't interesting enough to take us into the heart of darkness.   He blocks it out and so, I'm afraid, do we.

Nothing by Pat Barker can ever be bad.   She is a magnificent writer but not always the best deviser of stories.   Regeneration was brilliant and terrifying.   The Silence of the Girls is, to my mind, far and away the best of the recent feminist takes on Greek myth.   Life Class is not quite as good.

Nova Scotia - John Byrne

 Nova Scotia (2008) is the fourth part of Byrne's Slab Boys tetralogy.   It brings things into the era of devolved Scotland and cell phones.  It is not as powerful as the first and second plays of the trilogy (the second is not very good at all - see my review below from late last year).   Sex and death are not such motivators for those in late middle age.   And Byrne makes far too much of the new mobile technology.   We must be thankful he didn't carry the story on into smartphone territory.

Phil McCann is still the dropout painter of 1958 who has failed to ever drop in.   His young partner Didi, though, is hugely successful, her installations have her up for the Turner Prize and a possible Thames & Hudson book.   Didi supports Phil in a Highland Castle.   The action takes place in the garden area where Phil has built himself a studio which every else assumes is where they store their bins.

Didi has given permission for an arts feature to be made in the grounds.   What no one has yet realised is that the subject is Phil's old mate from the Slab Boys, George 'Spanky' Farrell, now a living legend in LA, and now back with the sex-bomb of the old print shop, Lucille, who was also briefly married to Phil.   Lucille and Phil's son Miles is directing the feature.   Miles has also been doing some research into the complex family tree, using a technology that is highly relevant to the plot, DNA.

There are some fine moments in the play, notably regarding the DNA, which those familiar with Byrne's story will be able to guess.   Phil, of course, is a version of Byrne, though nowhere near so famous or successful.   Is Didi Tilda Swanson?   Only in terms of age difference.   Is Spanky Gerry Rafferty?   Possibly.   These are the games Byrne encourages us to play.   Nova Scotia is, generally, a fun game, a fitting swansong for Byrne's theatrical career.   The book, like its predecessor, also gives us his drawings, which are as brilliant as ever.   

Reconstruction - Mick Herron

 Reconstruction (2008) is Mick Herron before Slough House.   Immediately before - so close on Jackson Lamb;s heels we can almost smell his fags.   But tt's not Slough House and it's not about Slow Horses.   Instead it's about how a Secret Service forensic accountant Ben Whistler ends up negotiating a hostage situation in Oxford in, of all places, a pre-school nursery.

The Dogs are here, and have clearly messed up.   The Dogs are unleashed because one of Ben's colleagues, Miro Weiss, has gone missing.   Along with quarter of a billion pounds syphoned off from the money that was supposed to be reconstructing Iraq.   Or, more exactly, from the funds that had already been syphoned off by the crooks who were contracted and sub-contracted to do something about the mess Bush and Blair had created in Iraq.   Miro has vanished without trace, which was not surprising, given that he had largely lived without trace.   Ben Whistler worked in the same office but barely knew him.   Then, out of the blue, Miro's boyfiend, Jaime Segura, rings the SIS asking for Ben Whistler.

The Dogs are unleashed: Bad Sam Chapman and Neil Ashton.   It's supposed to be a simple containment exerice.  The Queens of the Database know exactly where in London Jaime is.   All Bad Sam and his oppo have to do is ... not let Jaime see them coming.   But Jaime does see them coming.   He gives them the slip and hops on a bus that happens to be heading for Oxford.   Bad Sam and Ashton, naturally a little put out, track him to a layby just outside the city of sleeping spires.   Jaime runs.   Ashton decamps from the car and gives chase.   Ashton has a gun, which is news to his partner Sam.   It's a commuter road, rush hour.   Ashton slips, falls into the road and under a car.   The gun goes flying.   Jaime grabs it and flees.   The next thing we know he's wandering round South Oxford asking, not for Ben Whistler but The Lady.

Before you know it he's in the reception class annexe with a pair of toddler twins, two ladies, the guilty father of the twins and an unofficial SIS firearm.   Outside, the media is massing.   Since Bad Sam has gone off piste on business of his own, there's only one answer.   Send in Ben Whistler.

It takes a chapter to get used to how different Reconstruction is from the better known Herron of today.   In many ways it is better than the very latest Herron output because in Reconstruction he is still experimenting, still perfecting his authorial voice.   I ended up thoroughly loving it.   It bursts with twists and subplots and the characters are wonderfully diverse.   I am enthused.

The Doors of Eden - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 This was my first Tchaikovsky.   To be fair, I'd only recently come across him.   A 99p Kindle deal opened the door and I had already secured my next Tchaikovsky before finishing this one.

Two lesbian crytozoographers are seeking monsters on Bodmin Moor when something happens.   Mal disappears completely, Lee is left alone in London.   Four years later Mal gets back in touch - a different Mal, tougher, fitter, and with what looks like a Neanderthal in tow.   Meanwhile transsexual maths genius Kay Amal Khan is attacked by rightwing loons.   This draws the attention of MI5's Julian Sabreur and his partner Alison Matcham, whose boss Leslie Hind is fixated on a techno-billionaire called Rove, who is somehow involved.

Thus we are drawn into a multiverse which is literally coming apart at the seams.   We discover other Earths which have diverged from ours and are populated by very different evolutionary outcomes.   Tchaikovsky's first stroke of genius is to seduce us with scholarly interludes in which these branches of the Darwinian tree are outlined by Professor Ruth Emerson of the Uinversity of California.   These, she reminds us, are not our Earth - and Professor Emerson is not entirely what she seems.   The second stroke of genius are multiple-choice solutions for the threatened universes, all of them set out in alternate Chapter 17s.

The sheer inventiveness drew me in.   Then there is the scientific/technological depth on one hand, the wit with which leading characters like Lee and Khan are handled.   I normally baulk at books this long but I enjoyed every minute of The Doors of Eden.   Highly recommended. 

The Sacred Wood - T S Eliot

 Eliot's first book of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood, came out in 1920, and consists largely of work that had been published in journals and papers slightly earlier.    Yet there is no mention, not the slightest hint, of the war that set Europe on fire or the covid apocalypse that was currently decimating the survivors.   Instead the man who was yet to write The Waste Land gives us criticism in the style and shadow of the Victorians.   Who now cares about Swinburne or Hopkins?   Yet these are the 'moderns' he writes about whilst admitting that even in 1920 they were somewhat forgotten.   Most of the other critics he discusses are lost to us today.

And yet The Sacred Wood is well worth reading.   It may even be essential to understanding the man who broke the mould and thus dominated English poetry for more than half a century.   His references might be obscure but his reasoning is valid.   He especially stresses the critical dissociation which, certainly to me, still throws a veil over the Four Quartets.   

Eliot and I will have to disagree over William Blake.   We are, however, in accord over the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.   Indeed, I was surprised to find that Eliot shares my belief that Shakespeare was a team-leader rather than a singular genius.   We are in absolute accord over the genius of Dante.  We couldn't be further apart on his youthful ideas about poetic drama.   In that respect I have the advantage of hindsight, but that doesn't explain how I seem to know a great deal more about poetic drama in English in the first quartet of the Twentieth Century than he, as a London-based member of the literati seems to have done.  Where is his mention of Masefield or Yeats?   I shall have to investigate further.

Nemesis - Rory Clements

 I enjoyed the first Professor Tom Wilde novel, Corpus, so much (see my review below),  I was always going to pick up future novels in the series.   They didn't actually have the second instalment (Nucleus) so I settled for the third, Nemesis.

It's August 1939, the world is heading for war.   Wilde and Lydia are in France on what should have been their honeymoon.   Wilde is approached with a message from Marcus Marfield, one of his former students.   Marfield is in a French internment camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Marfield was a chorister at Cambridge, with the look and voice of an angel.   Wilde always found him a bit distant, but the least he can do is visit.   He finds Marfield half-starved and wounded - shot, not in Spain but here in the French camp.   Of course he gets him out, gets his wound attended to, and takes him home to Cambridge.

That is when things start to go astray.   Not everything about Marfield is as it seems.   His fahter, for example, commits suicide on the day his son returns to Britain.   Then the psychologist who is persuaded by Lydia to examine Marfield for what we now call PTSD, does the same.   Gradually, Wilde gets drawn into the mystery.

Meanwhile a U-Boat sinks the liner Athenia, which is packed with American citizens returning from Europe, among them Jim Vanderberg's wife and two young sons.   Jim is Wilde's college friend and now with the US Embassy in London.   The rumour circulates that it was really the Brits that attacked the ship in an attempt to prevent Roosevelt joining France and the UK against Germany.

The war is only days old.   A lot of British fascists have yet to choose their side.   A lot of Communists are appalled by Stalin's pact with Hitler.

It's a great premise for a thriller and Clements handles it very well.   Unfortunately it's not quite as good as Corpus.   In places there's something hurried about it.   Nothing a decent edit couldn't fix, but do editors bother these days?   In both books there are little side scenes that are there for plot reasons and don't directly involve the main characters.   In Nemesis there are just one or two too many, the surplus ones explaining plot points we probably don't need to know.   Personally, I tend to take the view that if you're going to do that sort of thing, you're better off doing lots of it.

That said, Nemesis is still a cracking read.   If Corpus was A*, Nemesis is easily B+.   I'm definitely looking out for more.