Libra - Don DeLillo

 Libra (1988) is Don DeLillo's version of the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy.   Primarily, it is the Oswald story with a background narrative of various conspirators who draw him into their network, largely to cover themselves over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.   The conspirators include CIA agents, Guy Bannister associates, and most compelling of all David Ferrie, the alopecia-victim who knows them all.   A third narrative strand is the recruitment of Jack Ruby by mobsters who want the Oswald problem to go away.   Was Oswald just a patsy?   Let's settle for not entirely.

It is really well done - this story is so compelling, it's hard to see how any retelling can fall short.   Oswald is well drawn.   One problem, which is historical, though I only realised it on reading this, is that he was so young (only 24) and yet his backstory is so crammed with incident: marine, Russia, verious short term jobs, Marina, two kids, the attempt on General Walker...   I hadn't realised, either, how recently he had started work at the Book Depository.

Other than Oswald, Ferrie is the standout character in Libra.   DeLillo makes him splendidly creepy.   The night he tries to seduce Oswald will live long (and vividly) in my mind.   The making of the novel, though, is DeLillo's signature style, somewhere between Norman Mailer and James Ellroy, with dialogue, I feel, superior to both.   Brilliant - the best DeLillo I have read thus far.

The Shot - Philip Kerr

 What a range Philip Kerr had!   The best 'good Nazi' series ever, with Bernie Gunther, supernatural, sci fi, and, with The Shot (1999), perhaps the best Kennedy conspiracy thriller of all time.

Sam Jefferson is an assassin, America's finest.   He has carried out hits for the CIA, FBI and even the Mafia, but he doesn't work for any of them.   He is independent.   Or perhaps, after being a POW in the Korean War, he answers to different masters.

In late 1960 the mob brings him down to Miami to take out Castro and enable them to recoup their Cuban assets.   Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli are collaborating, informally, with the CIA.   Giancana has just delivered the crucial Chicago vote which enabled John F Kennedy to defeat Nixon in the presidential election.   Sam's deal with Kennedy's crooked father Joe is that the Kennedy administration will lay off the Mob.

Sam Jefferson heads for Havana and scopes out the Castro hit.   He has no problem moving around the city because he is half Cuban himself.   He delivers the feasability study to Johnny Rosselli and promptly absconds with Sam Giancana's money.   Giancana therefore hires local FBI man Jimmy Nimmo to track Jefferson down.

Sam meanwhile is working with another Miami FBI staffer Alex Goldman.   Together, they are planning to assassinate the president-elect.   Why? - I'm not going to say.   However, one suggestion is that Sam wants to kill JFK because a mob guy 'accidentally' played him a tape of Kennedy having sex with Sam's wife, who is one of his election staffers.   Mary ends up dead soon after.   Sam has disappeared, emptying the house of clues.

But Sam has other residences, other names.   Franklin Pierce is one of the names he goes by in New York.   Sometimes he's Marty van Buren.   He has other women in his life, women from Central America.

Attention moves to Jimmy Nimmo's investigation.   Nimmo is a likeable character.  He tracks down Jefferson's NY apartment.   He figures out that Sam is planning to take out Kennedy before the swearing-in on January 20 1961.   The question inevitably arises for the reader: We all know when Kennedy was actually taken out, November 22 1963; so how can this fictional version be satisfactorily resolved?   BY the supremely capable Philip Kerr, that's how.   I didn't fully twig even as it played out on the page in front of me.   And I absolutely love it.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

A phantasmagorical medley of paranoia, conspiracy and latent psychodelia, Pynchon's second novel appeared in 1966. It is of its time in that it references the West Coast music scene, specifically of San Francisco, that was to erupt in 1967 and the widespread use of hallucinogens. At its core it has a much deeper timeline, dating all the way back to Thirteenth Century Europe where the German princelings of Thurn und Taxis built a staggering fortune on the back of the first transnational postal service. This went underground after the Thirty Years War and now services only syndicalists and anarchists. It's that peculiarly American obsession, postal fraud, and Oedipa, trying to observe her duties as executor of the will of her onetime lover Pierce Inverarity, sees its symbol of a muted post horn everywhere. Ingeniously the Tristero post boxes are marked W.A.S.T.E.

For such a short novel, only 142 pages in this edition, there's an awful lot of story and ideas. The ending is awkward. We find out what W.A.S.T.E. stands , what Lot 47 is and how come it is crying or cried, but really you get the impression that Pynchon has simply run out of steam. It's a lot of fun, though, and I'm really pleased I finally got round to reading it.

The Shakespeare Conspiracy - Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman

I'm a sucker for the who-really-wrote-Shakespeare genre. Let's get it straight, though - I don't for one moment that Shakespeare of Stratford was largely responsible for most of the plays that appeared under his name in 1623. He probably wrote most of Titus Andronicus and nothing of Comedy of Errors. For the late great plays - say, 1600 to 1610 - he wrote the vast majority but never all of the texts, which is why they are the best plays. He wrote very little of The Tempest or Timon of Athens or indeed Taming of the Shrew, which are mostly by John Fletcher. The so-called witty dialogue (or, as I prefer to think of it, space filler) in trash like Much Ado, As You Like It, is Thomas Middleton, and Middleton also wrote the witchy stuff in Macbeth. It is simply not possible for him to have written 37 plays in blank verse in a career of barely twenty years. Try it and see. Nor was it required. Stage plays were a team effort in Jacobeathan times, just as TV series are now. Shakespeare in his prime was team leader. He came up with the core plot, wrote the big speeches, and had final cut on the contributions of those lower down the food chain. The only bits he couldn't control were the clown bits (Will Kemp and Robert Armin), which is why they are so toe-curlingly bad. The reason nobody in Stratford seemed to notice he was a playwright is that they didn't know and didn't care; there was no theatre locally, and so far as the neighbours knew he was a prosperous merchant with a big house and two daughters likely to come with decent dowries. It is simply not true that we know more about other playwrights of the period. We know more about Marlowe because he was a spy, a student and he was murdered. He was also, in my opinion, a much more original writer who invented the form (Shakespeare was a better man of the theatre). Try, for example, to trace the life of Shakespeare's collaborator Fletcher, or Fletcher's collaborator Beaumont, or the omnipresent Middleton. All of them had longer careers than Shakespeare. All had the occasional hit. All effectively vanished without trace. Nor is it a credible argument that Oxford or Bacon wrote the plays under pseudonyms. There was absolutely no reason to - Queen Elizabeth and King James both loved the theatre and any aspiring favourite could win big kudos by being theatrical, hence so many patronised acting companies. Bacon was a decent writer of factual prose, Oxford's surviving fragments are amateurish in the extreme.

Having got that off my chest, what of The Shakespeare Conspiracy? Well, Phillips and Keatman get my attention because they accept that the merchant of Stratford wrote the plays. They tackle the other question, why is so little known? They conclude it's because he was a spy. Well, Marlowe certainly was, Jonson might have been (personally I think he just grassed up his peers) and Anthony Munday, a playwright of almost zero merit, probably was. To support their theory they revert to the game of literary clues. Ingeniously they take the frontispiece of the Sonnets and the mysterious Mr WH. How is WH the 'onlie begetter' of poems that the title credits to Shakespeare? They spot that there are superfluous full stops everywhere. Take one out and you get Mr W Hall, who they have traced in the records of the spymasters. Was this Shakespeare's alias when working undercover? They say yes, obviously, ignoring the quibble that everyone Hall was associated with in the archives did not use an alias. They then go on to try and link Shakespeare with the Gunpowder Plot, which is silly but no more so than the Bacon or Oxford theories. They argue that Shakespeare ended up related by marriage to several of the plotters - an argument so complex that I couldn't make head nor tail of it.

Great fun. The best of its type that I have come across lately. To be read for sheer amusement and to learn more about conspiracy than  about Shakespeare the man.

The Butchers of Berlin - Chris Petit

Having read Petit's 'Troubles' novel, The Psalm Killer, and rating it highly on this blog, I looked forward to reading his latest, especially given it was set in Nazi Germany, which I always find fascinating and repulsive. I am a big fan of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, particularly the ones set during the war.


I finished the book, which says something, but I did not love it. The level of research is impressive. The characterisation is hugely disappointing. I think Petit realised it during the writing, because in a sense we have two protagonists, the mummy's boy cop August and lesbian Jewish seamstress Sybil. The former is a nobody whose only distinguishing characteristic is prematurely white hair, only peremptorily explained, and the latter is a doormat, pushed hither and yon by all and sundry. The most interesting character by far is Morgen, seconded from the SS to investigate a series of murders. Morgen is enigmatic, eccentric and, plotwise, a deus ex machina, dropping in from nowhere to save the day when the boy August finds himself in trouble. Morgen is so thinly sketched that I only found out his first name when I Googled the book. The book's most memorable scene is when Morgen gets together, all too briefly, with his equally eccentric brother. They should have been the odd couple through whose eyes we explore the book. Sadly, they aren't.


The plot itself is a conspiracy of which the murders are only the surface. I should have guessed this when I saw David Peace's gushing blurb on the cover. As with Peace, the conspiracy is so abstruse that I have no idea what it is, save that it involves far too many walk-on characters. Telling us that the Third Reich was dark and depraved is not news. Making us feel the effect of this on ordinary people (as Hans Fallada does) would have been impressive. Petit doesn't, therefore The Butchers of Berlin isn't. Sorry.

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.

Zero History - William Gibson

I say it so often, I'm probably making an idiot of myself: I DON'T LIKE SCIENCE FICTION!  I also don't like the exaggeratedly hip contemporary novel and I especially don't like conspiracy novels with nothing world-shattering at their core.  Zero History is all these things.  AND I LOVED IT.

Why?  Well, it turns out William Gibson is a genius.  He writes like a dream and his embellishments to 21st century reality are casually dropped into the narrative rather than the other way round, which is so often the case with less skilled visioneers. His realistic world is ever so slightly augmented.  Secondly, this is not some po-faced conspiracy about the bleeding obvious (yes, Dan Brown, I mean you, not that you need to care).  This is satire.  Gibson is filleting the sort of worthless wonk for whom insider knowledge is all that matters.  I won't reveal what the maguffin actually is but be assured, it is scarcely possible to conceive of anything less important to human life, yet Gibson's characters are prepared to risk life and limb to control it.  And then, when they can't, they just move on to the next fad.

In one way, the characters are cyphers, as then tend to be in the sci fi genre.  Mercifully, though, Gibson gives them just enough personality to hold our attention without slowing down the narrative.  One key character, whose name says it all, doesn't even appear.

I am now, officially, a Gibson fan.  Zero History is one of those books that, once started, I would have been happy to read for weeks or even months.  Of it's type, inarguably a masterwork.