Shadowlands - Matthew Green

 Shadowlands is about vanished settlements where an echo of what once was still lingers.   They are all British (albeit some people struggle to believe that Skara Brae and St Kilda really are part of the UK) and Matthew Green has chosen to sort them chronologically, which I admit caused my interest to falter a little towards the end, as I prefer deep history to things I can just about remember.

Green therefore starts with Skara Brae, the semi-subterranean housing cluster in the Orkneys which is over 3000 years old.   I learned much here - and I already knew quite a bit.  Among the things I didn't know before was that the igloo-shaped, stone-built dwellings were insulated over centuries in their own midden or waste, and it was only when the whole cluster was covered over that the subterranean tunnels went in.   Next up was Trellech and Winchelsea, both developed by the greatest English king, Edward I.   Trellech was for a time the biggest city in Wales.   Now it is barely a hamlet.   It was built up as a powerbase by the Marcher lords of the Clare family, and when the last of them died, Trellech went into decline.   Winchelsea, of course, remains - but this is New Winchelsea, moved from the silting-up Old Winchelsea mainly because King Edward made it his first choice port for visiting his other domain in France.   I found both of these stories fascinating and both were equally new to me.   Wharram Percy was Trellech in a minor key, another settlement that crumbled when its dominant family moved away, and Dunwich a much better known (and more recent) variant of Winchelsea.  Dunwich literally fell into the sea through coastal erosion, a process forever underway and nowadays facing dozens of other easy coast settlements.

Green then moves on to the twentieth century.  St Kilda, frankly, I couldn't engage with.  I suppose it echoes in a way the story of Skara Brae, but I cannot mourn its loss; it seems to me a community that evolved to a certain fairly basic level and then stopped as the world moved on.  Next is one of those rural communities that were taken over by the military for training during the War and never returned to their original inhabitants.   I had not heard of the Stanford Training Area in Norfolk, which is still being used for simulated battlefields today.   I suppose that sort of thing has to be done somewhere and it seems to have developed something of a local employment base for people playing the enemy.   The final essay is Capel Celyn, a flooded village and valley in Wales.  Now, in the middle of a heatwave with privatised water supplies failing everywhere, is not the time to read it.   Yes, the locals put up a brave fight to save their homes.  Yes, modern Britain needs to harvest its water.   I don't remember the battle for Capel Celyn but I do remember, a few years after, the polite fuss when Rutland Water, which supplies my water, was created.   Villages were submerged, highly fertile farms drowned.   Somewhere in the middle of it is a steepled church, something for all the leisure sailors who use it now to be wary of.   And hey, when preparing the ground for flooding we discovered several prehistoric sea monsters!

I liked Matthew Green's style.   Yes, I would have edited here and there or at least questioned the need fr some bits.   But Green's passion for his subject always shines through.   His research is meticulous, his judgements balanced.   His ability to conjure up a place that, by definition, no longer exists is a gift to be cherished.   I'll be fascinated to see what he writes next.

The Broken Afternoon - Simon Mason

 After The Goodbye Coast last month, here we are with another excellent crime novel with an unnecessarily silly central premise.   The Broken Afternoon is the second in a series featuring two detectives with the same rank and almost identical names working out of the same police station.   Theoretically possible but in practice ridiculous.   Ray and Ryan Wilkins are neither rivals nor brothers in arms.   They have each been loaded with black and white opposite attributes.   Ray is a procedure man, black but middle class and university educated.   Ryan is white, underclass, school of hard knocks, a gut-driven investigator.   Ryan is a single father, living with his gobby sister, a single mum.   Ray's wife is pregnant with twins, constantly ill and therefore demanding.   Ryan is not actually a cop when The Broken Afternoon begins; he has been sacked for whatever happened in the previous novel, A Killing in November, and working nights as security on a van-for-rent business on a bleak industrial estate.   One night he comes across an old friend, Mick Dick, once a promising boxer, now an ex-con down on his luck.   Ryan gives him a break.   The next he hears, Mick is found in a ditch, victim of an apparent hit and run.   He leaves behind a partner and a little girl.   So obviously Ryan has to look into things.

Meanwhile a young girl has been abducted from outside her nursery school.   The new Superintendent at Aldgate Police Station in Oxford, Dave Wallace, "hard bastard of the old school", puts golden boy Ray Wilkins on the job.   Meanwhile Wallace is reviewing Ryan's file, and calls him to discuss possible reinstatement.

This is a very different Oxford from the cloistered world of Inspector Morse, more akin to the Oxford of Mick Herron in Reconstruction and the Zoe Boehm novels.   The missing girl is from the privileged class, Mick Dick from the basement of the underclass.   It was Simon Mason's evocation of this multi-faceted Oxford that kept me hooked.   Mason has an effortless style and keeps just the right note.   His characterisation, overall, is excellent; even the paedophiles who are inevitably involved are granted human traits.   I still don't like the Wilkins duality - they could simply be two cops, dissimilar in everything but the need for justice - but I really enjoyed the book, which stimulated as well as entertained, and will happily read more of Mason.

The People Immortal - Vasily Grossman

 Years ago, I struggled to engage with Life and Fate.   Since then Grossman's wartime fiction has been fully translated as a trilogy, of which The People Immortal is the first and Stalingrad the third.  I wanted so much to try again and starting at the beginning, with the shortest of the novels, seemed to me ideal.

And it was.   I was gripped from the moment it began.   It is set - and was written - during Operation Barbarosa, the German invasion of their supposed ally in June 1941.   Grossman, despite having to use a walking stick at only 35, volunteered for service and was embedded as the front line correspondent for Red Star.   His articles and notes became material for this novel, written during a two-month leave of absence in April and May 1942.   The events depicted are fundamentally real but fictionalised.   Captain Babadjanian, for example, who inspires one of the two protagonists (Bogariov) was absolutely real.  Grossman shows him killed him in battle, which was what Grossman thought had happened.  In fact he wasn't dead and joked about the mistake when Grossman interviewed him in Berlin immediately after the war.

Commisar Bogariov and Semion Ignatiev are our two protagonists, the former an academic turned senior officer, Ignatiev a light=hearted peasant in Babadjanian's Rife Company.  I hadn't understood what a Commisar was in wartime.   I do now.   Bogariov is the political commander alongside and equal to the military commander.   In The People Immortal Bogariov lambasts Major Mertsalov, the regimental commander, for losing sight of the big picture - that it is the Soviet Union's destiny to smash fascism - thereby inspiring Mertsalov to take the radical, unexpected tactic which secures victory in the battle that is the climax of the novel.   Bogariov in turn takes inspiration from Ignatiev, who embraces his life knowing full well that it could end at any moment.   Ignatiev is not fighting for a political creed, he is defending the land he loves.

That brings us to the key point of the novel.   This is not a victory which sends the German army back where it came from.   It is a victory gained against the odds during a full scale retreat.   Russia is not winning overall.   It trying to rescue crumbs of comfort from a massive defeat.   Germany invaded on June 22; a week later they had taken Minsk and captured 300,000 Soviet troops.   By mid-September they are encircling Kiev having taken another half-a-million prisoners of war.

Grossman knows the Nazis are killing Jews and destroying communities.   He illustrates this in the novel with the story of Lionya, the son of a general, who is tries to walk to Moscow after fleeing the village where he lived with his grandmother.   For all Grossman's realism and light hand with the fictional gloss, we are genuinely moved when Lionya finds safety in the vast forest, and when our two protagonists emerge together from the carnage of battle.

Can I handle Life and Fate now?  It's surely worth a second try.   By the way, the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler is brilliant.   I'm pretty sure Robert translated Life and Fate.   Must check...