Kim - Rudyard Kipling

I encountered Kipling as a child, which was clearly a great mistake.  I didn't get it.  I hated it.  Thick end of half a century later this amazing cover image stared at me out of the library window.  I considered overnight whether I should risk associating myself with a work of Kipling. Thought what the hey, borrowed it, and had my eyes well and truly opened.

There is a view that for Kim, and for Kim alone, Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize, this of course being before Baden Powell fetishized the Jungle Books.  I can well believe it.  Kim is an astonishing tour de force, literature which transcends mere narrative.  There's something of the Pilgrim's Progress at work here, but with a total immersion in the multi-coloured world of Raj India.  Kim is only a child but he has two distinct identities, Sahib and native guttersnipe, which he switches between at will.  For this reason he is subsumed into the Great Game (British Intelligence) whilst at the same time being the devoted chela of the Tishoo Lama.  How any novelist can make an interesting character out of a lama with no personal identity, engaged on a hopeless quest, beats me.  That Kipling can make him so attractive and compelling defies belief.  The other characters likewise: the Afghan horse dealer Mahbub Ali, the healer of pearls Lurgan Sahib, the garrulous widow, the all-powerful Woman of Srinagar, and the Babu doctor - a magnificent gallery, all richly realised, several without even a name to distinguish them.

Apart from the cover, this Penguin classic is a horrible edition.  There are far too many endnotes, sometimes three or four a line, which interferes with reading pleasure.  It would have been much better to include an appendix dealing with Kipling's use of local colour.  To my mind, he uses Indian names like a conjurer uses abracadabra - it really doesn't matter what they mean, they are there to add zing to the experience.  The introduction by Edward W Said is unforgiveable.  Why commission a critic who doesn't like Kipling?

For one thing, it is far too long.  Introduce it, for Pete's sake, don't append a scholarly paper.  As a piece of criticism it is very old fashioned, the sort of stuff that was de rigeur in the seventies and eighties but has long since passed its sell-by date.  Said seems to have convinced himself that Kipling is a racist.  Nonsense, as all those wonderful characters I have just listed demonstrate.  Kipling is not patronising his Indians, he clearly adores them.  Kipling evidently considered the Raj to be a good thing, but that doesn't make him racist, it makes him imperialist - a man of his era.

Said is a Conrad specialist, so he compares Conrad and Kipling.  There is no connection or parallel.  Conrad was a Pole who turned himself into an Englishman.  Kipling was an Englishman born and raised in India.  Conrad was pretty much a nobody when he arrived in England; Kipling couldn't have been more Establishment - he was Stanley Baldwin's cousin for one thing.  If the Conrad comparison is not sufficiently spurious, Said goes on to compare Kipling's Kim with Thomas Hardy's Jude.  Why?  Again, no sensible comparison is either possible or conceivable.  Kim is a happy-go-lucky youth devoid of all ties, Jude a depressive stonemason weighed down by family. Ridiculous.

Back to the main issue, though.  This is a staggeringly brilliant novel.  Read it - re-read it if need be.  But skip the intro and don't waste time on the notes.

Truth Lies Bleeding - Tony Black

Black is the latest star of Tartan Noir, albeit he was born in Australia.  Truth Lies Bleeding is the first of his procedural strand featuring DI Rob Brennan.  You'd never guess it given the huge amount of backstory that is implied here.  I for one checked that the publisher hadn't somehow made a mistake but no, that story (which is solved here) was never written, and that is a mark of the quality of Black's writing.  He may knock them out at a rate of knots but this novel at least is a finely crafted work of art.

The procedural stuff is front and centre and eminently credible.  Black does not resort to the crude device of having his protagonist taken off the case a.s.a.p. so he can charge about like a private detective.  Brennan's battle is pretty much to stay on the case.  He has flaws but is not a drunk - again, Black inverts the stereotype and has Brennan declare that he never drinks more than one with the lads.

In fact, life at Edinburgh police HQ was so carefully evoked with murder squad members all behaving like proper, trained professionals, that I wondered if Truth Lies Bleeding was really noir at all.  The page one murder was bleak and gruesome but where does gritty become midnight black?  Answer: when Black unveils the twist that indicates the motive for the murder.  Oh yes, this is noir all right, better than most and as good as any I have read recently.

Black's first four novels featuring Gus Drury seem more traditionally noir.  It makes no odds to me.  I plan to read the lot.  Black has an excellent website and an interesting take on the use of ebooks to amplify the canon.  For that reason I am going to break with my own convention and add a second image.

The Knox Brothers - Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald was the daughter of the eldest Knox brother and therefore niece of the other three.  This fourfold biography was her first book, published in 1977 when she was sixty years old.

The writing is elegant, the elegiac tone maintained throughout.  The problem is, for all their widely touted brilliance, the brothers were peripheral players.  Fitzgerald's father Edmund rose be to editor of Punch, Wilfred and Ronald were noted but not spectacularly distinguished churchmen.  Ronald, the youngest, famously turned Catholic as a young man (newsworthy at the time because his father was Anglican bishop of Manchester) whereas Wilfred was extremely left wing politically
 and absolutely conservative in (Anglican) religion.  The only brother who contributed significantly to wider society was the academic Dillwyn, whose abstruse talents as a classicist were turned to code-breaking in both World Wars.  He is credited with the insight that finally broke the German Enigma code.

The priestly brothers never married.  Edmund and Dillwyn both did but their wives are non-entities in Fitzgerald's account and the book suffers in consequence.  The only woman who figures is the stepmother, who took on the Knox brood (and the elderly, slightly dotty bishop) when the first Mrs Knox died young.  The redoubtable Ethel Knox seems to me worthy of a biography of her own.

Because the Knoxes are chiefly noteworthy for their association with greater events and greater men there is insufficient space in this four-hander joint biography to satisfy whichever interest is yours.  Ronald Knox is my particular interest, not because he translated the Bible but because he wrote Golden Age detective novels - and formulated the rules of the genre - and because he made a notorious radio broadcast just before the General Strike.  His famous friend was Evelyn Waugh, who scarcely figures here.  Waugh wrote a much better biography of Ronnie which was far more useful to me as only Waugh guides us to the actual script of the broadcast.  Father Thomas Corbishley, for those who are interested in such things, wrote a life of him from the religious standpoint, which is better than Fitzgerald on the decision to convert and his life at Oxford but, oddly, less insightful on the semi-authorised translation which occupied the Monsignor in later life.

One other point: if you are going to write a life of one who is dead, you really ought to cover the death.  Dillwyn's premature death is sketchily covered here, Wilfred and Ronnie more hinted at than described, and Edmund - Fitzgerald's father - not at all.

In summary, readable, enjoyable, but not sufficiently instructive for me.  I much prefer Fitzgerald's fiction.  There is a review of her wartime novel Human Voices over on my media and culture blog.

Prague Fatale - Philip Kerr

The latest Bernie Gunther exercise in Nazi Noir turns out to be something of a disappointment.  For all the fascination of the context, it is nothing more than a locked room mystery in the Agatha Christie mode, and once you've recognised that it's easy to guess who done it on the traditional Christie least-likely model, complete with hopelessly overwrought 'motive'.  Even the writing, normally the saving grace of any Kerr novel, stands in sore need of editing.  There is a terrible misstep somewhere near the middle when Gunther becomes a mere mouthpiece for Kerr who has decided to stray in post modern irony.  All in all, the book is far too long for what is at best a literary caprice.  I'm sorry I disliked it so much because I was delighted with the other Gunther novels I've read recently (A Quiet Flame, If the Dead Rise Not), and I will certainly look out for the next, A Man Without Breath.  On that score, a word of congratulation to Kerr and his publishers.  I really don't like the modern practice of banging a preview of the end of every book.  Kerr/Quercus have come up with a much better idea - log on to his website, sign up for his newsletter, and read it there.

Dark Blood - Stuart MacBride

First review of the New Year is our auld acquaintance Stuart MacBride, whose Dark Blood is the sixth in the Logan MacRae series.  At its dark heart is sex predator Richard Knox, released on licence and dumped on the Grampian Police because he has inherited his grandmother's house in Aberdeen.  The Press, the victims' relatives, and organised criminals from Scotland and the North of England, they all want to lay violent hands on Knox.  But is he just a docile nonce who's found God, or is he the keeper of dark and lucrative secrets?  It takes Logan the thick end of five pages to discover the truth.

The usual series characters are all present and correct - Beardie Beattie, Biohazard Bob, DI Steele (doubly on the razor's edge because her wife is about to give birth to Logan's child and because they've put locks on the office windows to enforce the smoking ban) and Logan's gangland benefactor Wee Hamish.

The plot, however, has too many elements - not all can be satisfactorily resolved without recourse to the long arm of coincidence - and I early on took against

Band of Brothers - Alexander Kent

Another late, relatively minor, addition to the Bolitho canon, this one from 2006 and harking back to 1774 with Midshipman Richard Bolitho facing his first promotion board.  Other than that, nothing much happens.  There is a trivial, somewhat muddled, skirmish with Channel Island smugglers in which our hero demonstrates the leadership skills we always knew he possessed, otherwise ... he sits his board, with results we can also see coming.

It's a novella, really, only 128 pages in big print paperback.  Pleasurable reading, but I surprise myself when I conclude that I preferred the Adam Bolitho tale I read a few weeks ago (In the King's Name, reviewed below).

Juan in America - Eric Linklater

Eric Linklater is not a name on literary lips these days, but in his prime he was enormously popular and critically highly regarded. His wartime radio plays for the BBC were seen as so important to the war effort that they were discussed in broadsheet editorials. His third novel, Juan in America, was a bestseller and whilst it may seem entirely fanciful, Linklater's own travels as a young man were even more incredible - India, China, and indeed America. This is a novelist who knows whereof he writes.

I don't know, but I suspect his work and amatory experiences were not quite so varied as Juan's, who goes from college football hero to bum to slinger of hash, bootlegger, ice cream dispenser, upside-down opera singer and movie extra, and whose conquests include an Amazonian acrobat and a gangster's daughter.

Juan is a direct descendant of Byron's Don Juan. He shares the Don's taste for adventure and the ladies without being either predatory or amoral. He is a likeable companion as we follow his picaresque travels. There are occasional affronts to modern taste - Linklater's handling of black people is not what we would wish, though it has to be remembered that he was writing in America in 1931 and in many ways reflects the attitudes of East Coast Ivy Leaguers of that era. Read closely enough and you realise that, whilst he doesn't seem to rate his impoverished black characters as individuals, he does empathise with their historical plight, "the result of forcibly transporting a people from one continent to another, using them in slavery for several generations, and then bestowing on them a nominal freedom and a position beyond the pale of society."

All in all, Juan in America is a splendid example of English picaresque from the first half of the 20th century. As such, Linklater's rivals in the field were not Huxley or Forster but Priestley and Mackenzie, neither of them particularly popular these days either. But Juan in America has never been out of print in the eighty years since it was written, and that has to be the best kind of recommendation.

Birthdays for the Dead - Stuart MacBride

Strewth, Stuart MacBride writes the blackest of Tartan Noir.  This is his latest, a stand alone outside the Logan MacRae series.  Our protagonist is a cop, like Logan, but a very different kettle of fish.  Ash Henderson is violent, in debt to gangsters and addicted to serious painkiller medication.  But none of those are the secrets that matter - oh no, Ash is keeping something much more relevant hidden from his superiors in order to stay on the Birthday Boy case.

BB is a serial killer.  He snatches young girls coming up to 13, tortures them for a while, and then kills them on their birthday.  Every year thereafter he sends a birthday card to the family - homemade, with a photo of their daughter in progressive stages of dying.  But is his target the kid or her parents?  This is the question posed by Dr Alice Macdonald, the young OCD forensic psychologist brought in to refresh the investigation.

The reason the investigation needs refreshing is that the next victim will be BB's thirteenth thirteen year-old, which has to be significant, right?

To say more would be to risk giving the game away.  Suffice it to say, Ash finds himself on a mission, a race against time.  The pace is unrelenting, the characters richly drawn with deep back-stories, and the plot twists just keep on coming.  The final twist is simply stunning.

A superb example of the genre.  MacBride is surely the next big thing in British crime writing.

AD 500 - Simon Young

Simon Young is an amazing young historian of the early dark ages.  The conceit here is that a Byzantine civil servant is ordered to write a description of the Dark Isles for his emperor, who fantasises about restoring the lost empire in the west.  This officious bureaucrat has only archives and tall tales to base his account on until he lays hands on a primary document - the log of the last embassy from Constantinople to Britain, which, to say the least, didn't end well.  Young himself purports to be the translator of the later account, thus adding another layer of irony and comment via his copious translator's notes.  The Byzantine scribe, like civil servants everywhere throughout the ages, is scornful and dismissive of anything and anyone outside bureaucratic circles, so his asides on the barbarian Brits can be laugh-out-loud hilarious.  I particularly enjoyed Young/the scribe/the imperial ambassadors' account of the making of an Irish High King at Tara.

"The ritual lasted most of the night and was thoroughly unpleasant.  The king first mounted a stool that had been specially placed and 'mated' with the white horse.  We were encouraged to see that not only our party but also many of the visiting kings politely looked in the other direction and talked of the weather during these awkward minutes or played at board games..."

The wonderful thing is that all these outrageous accounts - even the one above - are based on genuine historical documents from the period.  Young describes his sources in an appendix at the end, so it should be fairly easy to follow up for those who want to go further.

The best book I have read this year - so good, I have already bought Young's subsequent book, Farewell, Britannia.

Unknown - Mari Jungstedt

Mari Jungstedt is a Swedish writer who sets her murders on the island of Gotland.  This is, I believe, the third novel featuring dull copper Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas and unambitious TV reporter Johan Berg.  The others are called Unseen and Unspoken, but this appears to be a silly affectation on the part of her English-language publishers - as near as I can tell, the Swedish title of Unknown is something like Inner Circle, which at least has the merit of relevance.

Anyway, this is a tale of ritual murder and archaeology, which on the face of it sounds promising.  Unfortunately it isn't.  Two protagonists means Jungstedt covers all bases with no real effort in terms of plotting or deductive reasoning - if she needs to tell us something Knutas can't know, she simply switches to Berg.  The other problem is that both need to be rounded characters and thus have private lives which are not interesting enough to warrant the space devoted to them.  That said, the stuff with Johan and his new baby is decently done - but the mother of the child is just annoying.

The characters I would have liked to know more about are both spikey women - Knutas's deputy, DI Karin Jacobsson and Berg's punkish camerawoman Pia.  But they remained cyphers, Pia a tool for improbable plot elements.

The book is not without merits.  The local colour of Gotland is well done and there is quite a lot of skill in the way Jungstedt builds the tension in the final showdown.  Overall, though, not for me.  Nordic, certainly, but nowhere near noir enough.