The Templar, the Queen and her Lover - Michael Jecks

 Blimey, turns out it's twelve and a half years since I read Jecks and his Sir Baldwin series.  The last one I read, in the earliest days of this blog, King's Gold, post-dates this one, which is set in 1325, primarily in France, where Sir Baldwin and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock, are part of Queen Isabella's security as she tries to negotiate a treaty with her brother, King Charles IV.

The stumbling block is that Charles and Isabella have not been on the best of terms since Isabella told her father Philip IV that the wives of Charles and another brother were promiscuous adulteresses, carrying on their debauches in the infamous Tour de Nesle.   Both wives were put away.   Charles's wife Blanche is still alive in 1325, a prisoner in the squalid Chateau Galliard, the marriage long since annulled.   Charles is about to marry for the third time, a child bride who is also his first cousin.

Isabella has been likewise sidelined in England, because her husband has replaced Piers Gaveston with a new and more demanding lover, Hugh le Despenser.   Despenser wants the mission to France to fail and Isabella to be discredited.   Edward II's former friend and general, Roger Mortimer, is living in Parisian exile.   He is actually not yet the Queen's lover.

As a former Templar, Baldwin himself is in danger in France, Philip IV being the king who destroyed the Temple and burned the leading Templars.   Baldwin wasn't in France at the time but still has a price on his head.   Meanwhile people in the retinue are dying: Enguerrand, Comte de Foix, is killed after an argument with Baldwin; his squire, Robert de Chatillon, is attacked and later murdered; an old soldier associated with Foix and Robert is killed in the first attack.   Before any of this, the garrison at Chateau Galliard, the prison-keepers of the woman who would have been queen, has been wiped out, Blanche herself having disappeared.  The garrison, moreover, comprised men hired by Robert de Chatillon on the orders of Comte Enguerrand.

The mystery is tantalizing and complex.   The book, however, is too long and its structure too fractured.   It would have been better to focus only on what Baldwin and Simon know, experience, or discover.  It was enjoyable enough but, being so splintered, lacked grip.

Brainquake - Samuel Fuller

 Samuel Fuller had a long and controversial career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, director and, ultimately, auteur.   He had an even longer career, almost sixty years, as a novelist.   Brainquake is his last novel, written and published in France in the early 1990s but never published in English until Sam's widow suggested it to Hard Case Crime in 2014.

What a triumph it is, brimming over with Fuller tropes: crime, of course; racism; calculating, predatory women; heroic women; and, ultimately, new life in France.

Paul Page is a bagman.   The trade is almost hereditary - his father was a bookie and bagman.   Mental illness is also hereditary.   His father suffered from brainquakes and so does Paul.   These rosy-tinged hallucinations prevent any attempt at living a normal life.   Paul's early life is so abnormal - he doesn't go to school, his parents have to patiently teach him to speak - that bagman is the only hope for him.   His father's contacts land Paul the best possible job.   For ten years he moves millions of dollars for the Mafia, posing as an independent taxi driver.

He speaks to no one.   He barely speaks at all.   He lives alone, in the house inherited from his parents.   He intereacts with no one except the female Boss and the people he passes the money to.   But then he sees Michelle Troy, a young mother wheeling her baby through the park.   And becomes obsessed.   He is watching Michelle in the park one day - the first time he has seen her with her husband - when, somehow or other, the father is shot dead from inside the pram.

"Sixtyseconds before the baby shot its father..."   That is how you start a thriller of the darkest shade of noir.   And Fuller keeps up that standard for 300+ pages.   And let us not forget that he was well into his eighties when he did so.   The supporting characters are masterfully drawn - the six-foot-plus Black homicide detective Zara, Father Flanagan, the mob hitman who poses as a Catholic priest and has an appropriate method of murder, the Cody brothers, Al and Eddie.   Fuller creates them lovingly but is always prepared to sacrifice them, brutally, where the plot demands it.   Story is everything to Fuller but he doesn't stint on the nuts and bolts of literary craftsmanship.   The prose is crisp, the dialogue punchy.

A fascinating read - rounded off with an excellent afterword from publisher Charles Ardai.   Highly recommended.

Under Occupation - Alan Furst

 

Alan Furst is, with Joseph Kanon, at the forefront of American wartime fiction.  Like Kanon, Furst is wholly European in outlook.  His sympathies are with the occupied, those who, against all the odds, fight back.

Under Occupation is one of his slighter works, only 200 pages.  Furst writes with such authority that I assumed he was writing about real people - until I tried to look them up on Wikipedia.  His hero is Parisian author of crime and spy fiction Paul Ricard - a moderately-known figure on the fringes of society.  A secret blueprint is thrust on him in the street and he feels obliged to try and deliver it to the resistance.  Progressively, Ricard is drawn in, paired up with the Polish lesbian Kasia, and run by Turkish aristocrat Leila, Ricard ends up running a safe house near the Gare de Lyon.

I won't reveal what happens next.  What I will say is this: every page reeks authenticity.  I never for a second lost interest or lost belief.  I was fascinated, enthralled and, at the end, thrilled.  I have no grounds to say, this is Paris as it was under the Nazis.  But I can say this is Paris as it should have been in 1942-3.

In the Absence of Men - Philippe Besson

It's unfortunate that I read the Radiguet so recently because this is a homage written 85 years later with the sole twist being that the illicit love is a gay one.  Instead of betraying the trust of a soldier at the front, 16 year old Vincent sleeps with one.  Meanwhile Vincent is flirting with the celebrated novelist Marcel P, who doesn't take a lot of identifying.

That said, it is a beautifully written novel which truly honours Radiguet's daringly frank style.  Every sentence is expertly crafted.  The deployment of tense and person is brilliant; the characterisation good but not really anything new.  I must say I didn't like the epistolary section in the middle.  Another quibble: the war never really convinced me.  I appreciate that Besson presents Paris as a bubble but surely it can't have been totally cut off?

So - yes, I enjoyed In the Absence of Men, but I don't feel enlightened by it.  Unless Besson's other works offer more originality (and judging by the outline of Lie With Me in the endpapers, it doesn't seem likely) I shan't be reading any more.

Laughing Torso - Nina Hamnett

 

Nina Hamnett was a wild child of the nineteens and twenties.  Posh but not rich, she escaped from rural Wales to London where she studied, on and off, to be a painter - and from London to Paris before and after the War, where she slept with a variety of painters, did a lot of drawing, and sold the odd painting to keep the wolf from the door.

They are all here - Modigliani looms large, Brancusi, Cocteau and Radiguet,  Hamnett drops the big names like small bombs.  She introduces Valentino to James Joyce.  Some names are evidently so big that she has to refer to them as A or Countess B.  It's a whirlwind of parties and balls and cabarets, liberally sprinkled with nude dancing.  Hamnett does not judge and doesn't care how you might judge her.

There is no real structure to the narrative.  She tries to be chronological but frequently fails.  It doesn't matter.  This is gossip and tittletattle in a breathless rush.  And she's really good at it.  She brings exotic scenes alive and makes highly-strung artists instantly human.  Laughing Torso provoked outrage and glee when it was published in 1932.  Aleister Crowley tried to sue; he failed but he needed publicity more than he needed cash.

There is a sequel, Is She a Lady?, which came out in 1955, the year before she fell (or threw herself) out of the window of her flat in Paddington.  I will have to track it down.

There is no better account than Hamnett's of Bohemianism of the period on both sides of the Channel.  As a painter, there is no better portrait of W H Davies, the 'Supertramp', than hers.

Mr Wilder & Me - Jonathan Coe

I've read a bit of Jonathan Coe before and always enjoyed them - but Mr Wilder & Me is in another league.  It's simply a masterpiece of fiction.  The story is simple enough - in 1977 a young Greek woman called Calista Frangopolou is asked to provide translation services for the Greek shoot on Billy Wilder's penultimate film, Fedora.  She becomes innocently friendly with Wilder, his writing partner I A L Diamond ('Iz') and their respective wives.  She continues with the crew as they move on to Munich and Paris.  In Munich she hears about Wilder's wartime service and a postwar documentary.

In the obvious sense it's a study of a refugee who became a feted director but outlived his vogue - mirrored, of course, in Tom Tyron's rather trashy novel about Fedora which I rather enjoyed at the time.  But Calista is telling her recollections from circa 2013, when she has become a moderately successful composer of movie music and has twin daughters about to leave the domestic nest.  Lessons learnt from Wilder and Diamond back in the day come into play.

I don't know how Coe has done it, but in a book only 250 pages long he manages to create an enormous amount of room for his characters to move and develop in.  This is how he is able to avoid cheesy coincidence and deploy extremely poignant subtlety instead.  And in the middle of the book, when Billy's secret is revealed, he slips effortlessly into movie-script format - more brilliantly still, he does it in Wilder-Diamond style.  Like everything else in Mr Wilder & Me, it's note perfect.

The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola

 

This is the Modern Library translation of Zola's shortish novel of Les Halles, the third in the Rougon-Macquart sequence.  Florent Quenu has finally returned to Paris, having escaped from Devil's Island.  He was unfairly imprisoned for a minor role in an abortive uprising.  He finds sanctuary with his brother who runs a successful charcuterie on the fringes of the newly-built market complex with his wife, the Beautiful Lisa.  Florent is ultimately found a job as inspector of the fish market where he is targeted by the Beautiful Norman, who initially only wants to spite her rival Lisa.

Meanwhile Florent has slipped back into his anti-establishment ways.  He gets subsumed (he rarely takes action) into a gaggle of local hotheads who gather at a local bar.  This draws the attention of the market busybodies and ultimately leads to disaster.

The Belly of Paris hinges on the fat and the thin.  Florent is constitutionally thin whereas Lisa is fat and complacent and conservative.  All of life is contained within the huge market, a world of its own with officials like Florent, merchants like the Norman, and an underclass which subsists on the leftover produce.  As always with Zola the world is mapped and documented.  What makes this novel different is the focus on food.  Several times key revelations are set against the preparation of food.  This is where this translation comes into its own.  Mark Kurlansky is a food writer who came into translation through his researches into international cuisine.  He knows exactly what Zola is talking about and the food sequences really glisten with fat and scent and colour.

A wonderful translation of an interesting book.  Highly recommended.

The Last Days of New Paris - China Mieville

The Last Days of New Paris is a novella, and better for it. The other Mieville novel I have read (Kraken, which I reviewed here last year) went on just that bit too long. Here, the ideas are fizzing throughout but the tighter narrative seems to help Mieville maintain the high standard of his prose.


The idea itself is a corker. Surrealist concepts are brought to life in Nazi-occupied Paris. As a result Paris is still occupied - indeed, cordoned off from the rest of the world, with the rest of the world's blessing - in 1950. These manifestations ('manifs') are predominantly on the side of the resistance (specifically the Surrealist resistance, the Main a plume) of which our hero Thibaut is a member. Thibaut wears one manif, the armour of Surrealist women's pyjamas, and joins forces with another, the Exquisite Corpse (featured on the cover) dreamt up by Breton, Lamba and Tanguy. The Nazis created the manifs with the S (for Surrealist) bomb, the creation of which in 1941 is the secondary storyline here, but the manifs naturally hate them for it. The Nazis have therefore done a deal with Hell and signed up hellish demonic monsters. Also involved is Sam, an American woman photographer, who may or may not be with the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. She is collecting photographs for a book called - typically Mieville - The Last Days of New Paris.


I enjoyed this hugely. It is precisely my cup of tea, right down to the account of how Mieville came by the story and the learned notes at the end. Just reading it inspired me. Hopefully it will do the same for you - because you have to read it.

A Hero in France - Alan Furst

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Alan Furst just gets better and better. A Hero in France came out in 2016. It's the usual territory - World War II, Europe, spies and agents - distilled down to the consistency of a fine cognac. It's the shortest of Furst's novels, just over 200 pages, with all extraneous matter chiselled away so that every word not only counts, it resonates.



It's early 1941 and Britain, France's only ally, is losing the war. 'Mathieu' - his cover name or, more appropriately, his nomme de guerre - has set up one of many independent resistance cells smuggling crashed airmen out of France and allied agents in. But the net is tightening. Berlin has tired of the French security service's attempts to crack down on resistance and is thinking of sending in the Gestapo. Before they do, however, they send Berlin's top cop, Otto Broehm, to coordinate attempts to break down the Parisian cells. He recruits an undercover agent, the Serbian criminal Kusar, to infiltrate Mathieu's group.



As always with Furst, the setting is impeccable, utterly convincing. You feel confident that he knows these streets, has visited these bars and cafes, has ridden these trains. His characters are mostly pseudonymous yet they all have back stories, the full range of emotions, hopes and fears. They interact. They have the sort of relationships that feel completely right in wartime. Indeed, I could have done without the last couple of pages in which their real names and what happened to them are revealed. It's not something I felt the need to know. And it also means we will not be meeting them again in a future book.

The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco

The Prague Cemetery is the sixth and penultimate novel by Umberto Eco, who died last year. It came out in 2010, thirty years after his first, The Name of the Rose. Eco the academic was fascinated by conspiracy, ritual and the interlocking or layered nature of hermetic texts. His gift was the ability to turn his obscure themes into potent literature without preaching or treating his readers as idiots. Here he uses the same materials that Dan Brown bowlderised in The Da Vinci Code. The end product is very different and for me much superior.


Eco takes a document like the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He traces its development from earlier similar texts. Everyone has always known that the Protocols are fake, yet they remain the foundation stone of twentieth century anti-Semitism. This is where the great international Jewish conspiracy sprang from. Eco asks the unasked questions: Who wrote it and why?


He gives us our fictional forger, 'Captain' Simone Simonini, an Italian living in France, who began his career forging wills in a lawyer's office. He lives in Paris because France in the 1890s is virulently anti-Semitic. He sells endless versions of the stories told by his half-crazed (real) Italian grandfather and these ultimately become the Protocols.


Simonini brings his talents to bear on many other forgeries and conspiracies, working for the French and Russian secret services. Indeed he becomes involved in every conspiracy in the Age of Conspiracies, not just Jews but Freemasons and Dreyfus and even. as a youth, Garibaldi.


This being Eco, there is a further twist. When Simonini walks the streets of Paris he is always in disguise - he wears a false beard and a wig. Is he really Simononi, we wonder? And who is the mysterious priest who seems to occupy another part of his dwelling? He obviously can't be the real priest of that name, because Simonini killed him in Sicily. He too wears a disguise. They never meet but they correspond by note - an extra textual layer. They both suffer from short term memory loss. Both wonder, are they different aspects of the same person?


The Prague Cemetery - a cemetery, it should be noted, that Simonini has never seen in a country he has never visited - is a magnificent achievement. I am interested in many of the things that fascinated Eco. I already knew some of the things revealed here. I wonder how accessible or enjoyable the book would be to someone less familiar with the topic. I also wonder, I must say, if Robert Harris came across The Prague Cemetery before writing his take on the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy. There is a passage in the Eco which could almost be a synopsis of Harris. Then again, they are working from the same, well-documented story. So - conspiracy or coincidence? How very Eco.

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

The seven-chapter structure is the clue.  The Bad Girl is Vargas Llosa's view of the Seven Ages of Woman. Written when he was nudging 70 it is, unfortunately, a tad sentimental, more than a little self-serving, and - it has to be said - downright misogynistic. Good old reliable, hard-working, studious Ricardo is always the good boy and the object of his lust (he prefers 'love of his life'), with her sudden disappearances, reinvention, forever changing persona and sexual self-indulgence, is perforce the bad girl.
You could certainly read The Bad Girl on that premise, and no doubt enjoy her fall from grace, the inevitable ruin of age and promiscuity. But never forget that Vargas Llosa is a genius. On a more prosaic note, remember his predilection for marrying relatives. This may reflect women he has known but he has surely never known a single woman like this bad girl.  This is fiction, not autobiography. So we should question Ricardo's self-righteousness - to what extent does he let himself be mistreated because that is how he likes it?  To what extent does he relish the ultimate triumph, when he gets to tend her like a pet because she has used up all the life in her whereas he has doled out his life, like Prufrock, in coffee-spoons? And Lily, who was never even Lily to begin with, what of the vast majority of her life which we don't see?  What caused her to live this life of assumed personas? How much of the pretense is artifice, how much delusion? In this respect, Vargas Llosa offers one insight, in the penultimate chapter, magnificently entitled "Arquimedes, Builder of Breakwaters".
The book only achieves maximum effect if you constantly challenge what you are being told. Even to the extent of asking, is Arquimedes really who he claims to be, or just an old chancer telling the guy who buys him drinks what he wants to hear? The bad girl is, after all, the good boy's dream girl. And The Bad Girl, the novel, is a magnificent achievement, published in the 21st century but really a classic of the late 20th. Hugely, unreservedly, recommended.

Others books by Mario Vargas Llosa discussed on this blog:
WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO?
THE FEAST OF THE GOAT

La Place de L'Etoile - Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature.  La Place de L'Etoile is the first novel in his Occupation Trilogy and was also his first novel, published in 1968, when Modiano was only 23.

Though nothing of what happens is specifically in 1968 it is very much a book of 1968.  I can't imagine how readers who don't remember the excitement of '68, when the whole of Western Europe seemed to teeter on the brink of revolution, can come to terms with Place de l'Etoile.  Our hero is Raphael Schlemilovitch, or so he says; his persona is readily changeable.  What doesn't change is his Jewishsness, although he is not practising and is not in any way persecuted.  Instead, in his main persona, he is an incredibly rich young man of Venezuelan origins but born and brought up in Paris. He fancies himself a writer of belle-lettres and amateur philosophy.  His main preoccupation, though, is the Nazi occupation of France, which he is not old enough to remember but re-lives, working backwards from university to college to school and immersing himself - not with the Jews who suffered - but in those who hated them, especially the antisemitic artists who collaborated.

First and foremost amongst these is the novelist Celine.  Celine himself does not appear yet he is everywhere.  His characters become Modiano's characters.  The very first passage of the book is a pastiche of Celine's unique style - short, staccato, semi-sentences and exclamations.

The plot radiates from the central pivot of Raphael and his obsession.  Time is relative.  Every passage is a self-contained prose poem. People appear and disappear only to pop up again years later, or earlier, in another city entirely.  Even the narrative person changes when Raphael falls in lust the Marquise and her passion for sexual role-play.  Yet it all makes sense in a surreal way.  I was enthralled.

It's a very short book, just over 100 pages, but you have to take your time reading it or you will miss some of the nuances.  Just to sum up, I'm pretty sure the Place de L'Etoile has nothing to do with any of it.