Thunderstruck - Erik Larson

Thunderstruck is one of those great ideas that doesn't quite work.  Larson had scored a hit The Devil in the White City, about the parallel careers of Daniel H Burnham, architect of the White City at the Chicago World Fair, and H H Holmes, who killed and processed so many visitors at his Murder Hotel. The key is that the two men were active in the same city at the same time.

Thunderstruck juxtaposes the stories of H H Crippen and Guglielmo Marconi. The link between them, obviously, that Crippen was tracked and caught by virtue of Marconi's sea-to-shore wireless telegraphy. The snag is that Crippen and Marconi were rarely in the same place at the same time. The time discordance is fatal; all the interesting events in Marconi's career were before 1910 - indeed, by 1910 he had become rather unpleasant - and Crippen's time in the spotlight was entirely 1910.  Larson's technique is to interleave their stories, thus by the tricky middle part of the book their apparently continuing lives are five years adrift.

The middle section is where I lost interest slightly.  Crippen's story was coming to the boil just as Marconi's had dwindle to a tedious simmer.  The beginning and the end are both great, though, and Larson writes prose perfect for his subject-matter.  He is a writer who obviously cares about and loves his work. Not all can say the same.

I should perhaps make it clear that Thunderstruck is non-fiction and that Larson's research is more than thorough, it's incredible - far more than I have met in any other account of either Marconi or Crippen, both of whom fascinate me, too.  Actually, I should modify that last statement slightly: it is the secondary characters in the stories of Marconi and Crippen that intrigue me - people like Sir Oliver Lodge who demonstrated wireless telegraphy several years before Marconi and Inspector Dew who chased Crippen across the Atlantic.  And I suspect they came to intrigue Larson too, because he gives Lodge, in particular, more coverage than he perhaps warrants.

An excellent read, I must definitely chase up The Devil in the White City.

The Best Short Stories - Rudyard Kipling

Kipling is such a difficult writer to pin down.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but wrote only one novel; he celebrated British Imperialism but was in no sense blind to the squalor in which so many of its citizens lived; he often seems misogynistic yet in so many of his stories he celebrates strong, capable women; he is at home in a very personal brand of mysticism yet is utterly fascinated by the latest technology of his day; he is best known for his anthropomorphic tales (Jungle Book etc,) but can also produce a piece as startlingly and subtly original as any post-modernist.

Now, I hated two of the anthropomorphic tales here - "The Ship that Found Herself" and (ugh!) "Below the Mill Dam", which was so cloyingly twee, I couldn't force myself to the end. "The Maltese Cat", on the other hand, I found tolerable in that at least it was about an animal, which we can all accept has a certain level of thought process and, furthermore, it was set in India, which Kipling knew so well.  There are naturally several Indian tales here.  For me the best was "At the End of the Passage", which is about the downside of working in colonial service.

There are tales of the macabre, notably "Wireless", which exemplifies Kipling's blend of mysticism and modernity, with the titular wireless somehow channeling the spirit of the poet Keats (who was a qualified apothecary) into the soul of an Edwardian pharmacist and fellow consumptive.  'They' was profoundly affecting - a ghost story in which the presence of dead children is a cause for celebration.  Again, it is the narrator's up-to-the-minute motor car which attracts the inquisitive spirits.  'They' really is a beautiful piece of work.

The two best stories, though, are "The Finest Story in the World" and "Mrs Bathurst".  I think most Kipling readers would agree on the merits of the latter.  The former is still very clever and layered - a wannabe writer tells a more experienced hand about his idea for a story.  The narrator, recognising the potential of the idea, buys the rights for a pittance.  But the youth falls in love with a shop girl and cannot remember how the story ends.  The misogyny and the snobbery implicit in the device is, I accept, a major flaw.  It's ironic, given that the next story in this collection, "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot" is a slice of life at its rawest, set in the London slums, in which Badalia is strong, honest and honourable, despite her circumstances.

As for "Mrs Bathurst" - what a marvel it is.  Mrs B is a widow based in New Zealand whose fame has spread through the Empire.  She is indirectly recalled by an ill-assorted group of men who happen to come together in South Africa.  She herself only appears in an early cinema film of people getting off a train in London - a moment of sheer genius on Kipling's part, again showing his fondness for the latest gadgetry. The end is both startling - two unidentifiable human figures reduced to charcoal by lightning - and inconclusive.  There is nothing to say if either victim is the lady in question or her apparently final lover.  The story's power lies in its elusiveness.  And its power is extraordinary.  I cannot stop thinking about it, three days after reading it.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of introductions to books.  I make an exception for that of Cedric Watts in this instance.  He is especially useful on "Mrs Bathurst".  I read his comments both before and after reading the story itself.