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.

The Four Gospels - translated by E V Rieu

 

I am an atheist.  I don't believe in any religion.  That doesn't stop me being interested in all religions.  I am keen to know what the founders actually said and did; who they were and how they impacted on their world.  This is a Penguin Classic edition from 1952, translated by E V Rieu who also translated Homer for the series.  Rieu was a believer, yet he translates the Gospels like any other ancient text.  He also provides an essential introduction, summarising scholarly opinion of his time.  He presents the four accounts in the order it is believed they were written, starting with Mark.  This is a brilliant move.  Matthew is the most popular because it comes first in the Authorised Version.  Because it contains everything most people know - the divine conception, the boyhood etc - most readers feel no need to go further.  But Matthew is only a compiler, working from a multitude of texts.  Mark, as well as being one of the key texts for Matthew, may actually have been there, in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus was betrayed by Judas.  He may have been the boy whose lioncloth was stripped away by the arresting party leaving him naked.  In any event he is held to have been Peter's assistant when he travelled to Rome.  When Peter was martyred Mark went to Egypt where he too was martyred.  His account is Peter's account, and Peter was definitely an eye witness.  Luke was Paul's assistant, probably also the author of the Acts of the Apostles.  Luke witnessed many of the Acts but his Gospel is Paul's take on the life and teaching of Jesus, and neither Luke nor Paul was a witness.  Indeed, Paul was in many ways the antagonist of the original disciples.  John is the only Gospel author who saw with his own eyes, who was there throughout Jesus's ministry, who was almost certainly the beloved disciple who even attended the crucifixion.  His account is very different from Matthew's -= yet it comes across as very real.  He speaks of miracles.  He claims to have seen Jesus many times after his death.  John and Mark are very credible.

The fascinating thing about reading the Gospels in plain English is twofold: what is there, in terms of the miracles, the infuriatingly metaphorical parables (which John in particular finds intolerable), and, across all four, the assertion that those who see Jesus in resurrected form do not recognise him yet somehow know it is him; and, secondly, what isn't there.  Mark, for example, ends with the women finding the tomb empty and this, compelling cliffhanger of a sentence: "They said not a word to anyone, because they feared..."

I never had any doubt that Jesus was a real historical figure.  I lost faith around the age of 18 and was a complete atheist by 30.  Reading the Four Gospels hasn't changed that.  I don't believe that Jesus was any more the Son of God than I am.  That is not how I read these accounts of what he actually said.  One key omission from these accounts, even Matthew, is any mention by Jesus of life after death.  He does speak of resurrection after an incoming Day of Judgement.  He is also very clear that those he is speaking to, including John, will see the End of Days in their lifetime.

In summary, then, my faith is not restored.  But I am enthralled.

Vine Street - Dominic Nolan

 An absolute stunner!  One of The Times' Crime Books of the Year and no wonder.  I was unfamiliar with Dominic Nolan but now I am mad keen to read his two earlier books Past Life and After Dark.

Vine Street has everything we could want in contemporary British noir - metropolitan vice, gangsters, dodgy coppers, serial sex murders - and a truly jaw-dropping plot twist about three-quarters of the way through.  Vine Street spans seventy years, from 1935 to 2005, mostly concentrating on the Fascist ascendancy before WWII and the war itself.  The lead characters are Leon Geats, a copper born to police the mean streets of Soho, his assistant Constable Billie Massie (female) and Mark Cassar, formerly of Vice, now risen to the Flying Squad and dreaming of greater things.  The three of them come together over the death of a whore which leads to a crew of French gangsters.  The trail runs cold but the bodies keep coming, into the Blitz and even after the war.  It is in the mid-Sixties that they finally uncover a suspect and even then there are secrets to be kept.

Six hundred plus pages of tense narrative, beautiful prose, staggering plot.  A work of pure genre genius.

Blackwood - Michael Farris Smith

 

Michael Farris Smith has just released Nick, a prequel to The Great Gatsby.  This, however, is original fiction in his personal strand of Southern Noir or Southern Gothic.  His setting is not Rust Belt America but something far older, which has been declining for a much longer time.

It starts in 1956, when young Colburn is coming up twelve and finds something really nasty in the woodshed.  Twenty years later Colburn is back in the unnamed town looking for answers.  It is  1976 and wherever it is has become so godforsaken that artists can have shopfronts for free - which is what Colburn does.  He makes sculptures out of scrap.  Also foraging for scrap is a drifter family, so debased that they don't even have names.  Celia has a bar from which she befriends the young buy of the family.  She also starts an affair with Colburn.

In Colburn's absence the valley has been taken over by the invasive kudzu vine.  It has swallowed up the house where Colburn used to live, swamped everything, hidden secrets.

People start disappearing without trace.  First the woman who might have been the feral boy's mother.  Then twin brothers.  Then Celia.  The town sheriff has never had so much work to do.  He makes no headway at all.  But when Celia goes, Colburn kicks in.  He finds out...

It's a great read.  I especially enjoyed the vagueness of it all.  I'm not even sure what state it's supposed to be.  I wondered why it should be mainly set in 1976 - I mean, it's not as if these forgotten corners of America have recovered in the years since.  But all is explained in the last couple of short chapters.  For once, continuing the story after the denouement really pays off.  I am very keen to read more of Michael Farris Smith.

To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway

 

This is a strange concoction - a couple of short stories bodged together into a novel with heavy padding for at least a third of it.  And yet it works - works as well as the two major novels I have previously reviewed on this blog, and a sight better than The Old Man and the Sea which I have repeatedly tried and failed to read.

The short stories tell of Harry Morgan, a 'Conch' or societal dropout in Key West, a former rum runner turned arms and people smuggler.  The padding, in an utterly different tone, revolves around the bringing home of Harry's body after his last attempt to raise some cash and the effect this has on the drunken wastrels and society homosexuals who are drawn to spend time in the lawless fleshpots of the Florida Keys.  It is a testament to Hemingway's inimitable style that you keep on reading, no matter how reprehensible Harry's actions, no matter how sordidly the rich folk behave.  Between this and the previous blog post on T C Boyle I started on a well-known modernist classic written perhaps six or seven years before To Have and Have Not, and it was so childish, so full of itself, that I gave up and reached for Hemingway.  That is how good he was and remains. 

A Friend of the Earth - T C Boyle

 

Boyle was the hero of my reading back in the Naughties.  Water Music, Drop City, East is East, Riven Rock - I read them and I loved them.  I wasn't so keen on The Inner Circle and Talk Talk, but even so I"m amazed that I haven't posted any Boyle reviews on this blog, which means I haven't read any Boyle in the last ten years.

A Friend of the Earth dates back to the turn of the century, though this paperback was only published in 2019.  It is set at the end of the Eighties and into the Nineties, and in 2025.  Our hero Ty Tierwater starts off as a widower raising his daughter and tending to the dilapidated shopping mall bequeathed by his developer father.  His midlife crisis comes when he meets Andrea, ecology radical and future wife, who transforms Ty and daughter Sierra into eco-warriors and, in Sierra's case, eco-martyr.

Forty years later seventy-five year-old Ty is tending endangered ugly animals on the estate of rock legend Maclovio Pulchris.  His warrior days are done.  His back aches. Then Andrea reappears with news that someone wants to write about Sierra.  Ty's passions are roused - for Andrea, anyway.  But in the post-Millennium years the climate has gone to hell in a handcart.  Even California is blasted by seemingly never=ending storms.  The eco-hippies were right all along, but it's surely too late to do anything about it now.

That's the premise with which Boyle works his characteristic anarchic carnage.  His prose is fabulous, his exploration of his characters as extensive as the stage he has set for himself.  His technique - using first person for Ty now and third person Tierwater for Ty then - is so seamlessly done that we barely notice.  Nobody, but nobody does this kind of novel better.  Boyle is of his time yet stands squarely in the ultimate literary tradition of cowed nobodies oppressed by greater towers who nevertheless find the strength within themselves to rise up and howl.

Absolutely magnificent - and disconcertingly prescient.

Moonglow - Michael Chabon

Such a beautiful book.  I have read Michael Chabon before - Kavalier & Clay, I think - but it didn't prepare me for Moonglow.  I now understand that Chabon is a Jewish John Irving.  His richly textured narratives twist and turn over decades, seasoned with what seems to be autobiographical content but which probably isn't.

In this case it is the story of Mike's grandfather.  I'm not sure we ever get his name; he is the maternal step-grandfather, so it's not Chabon, and he is referred to throughout as simply 'my grandfather'.  He is an engineer in World War II, ultimately tasked with tracking down Werner von Braun before the Russians get him.  Along the way he discovers an abandoned V2 rocket, a discovery which changes his life, and von Braun's cache of documents.

Postwar, he marries a beautiful French emigree who already has a daughter, Mike's mother.  The wife has suffered horribly in the war (she is Jewish but was saved by nuns).  She is slightly zany - an actress - and is a late night hostess on Baltimore TV.  But she suffers from visions of a skinless horse and spends time in a mental asylum.  This coincides with her husband's brief burst of midlife madness.  He assaults his boss and is sent to jail.  This turns out to be another seminal event.  Whilst inside he works on homemade rocketry and once released earns a small fortune in partnership with Mike's uncle making models for the Space Race.

Then his wife dies - killed by HRT which restored her sanity.  The grandfather sells up and moves to a Jewish retirement community in Florida where he has one last sexual fling and tries to hunt down a snake that has eaten his partner's late husband's cat - a parallel to his hunt for Werner von Braun, which is also resolved.

Ultimately he dies in his stepdaughter's home.  At the end grandson Mike helps nurse him, prizing out the taciturn old man's story bit by bit.

As I said at the top, it is all beautifully done.  Chabon switches past and present and inbetween, all seemlessly.  We meet Mike's mother as a precocious child, uppity teen and successful career woman.  Mike's father, long estranged, appears fleetingly from time to time.  Far more real is the grandfather's younger brother Ray, rabbit, pool hall hustler, entrepreneur, lothario and huckster.  In later appearances he sports an eyepatch; apparently Mike's mother shot him but the grandfather wasn't there so it isn't in the book - in itself, a prime example of Chabon's mastery.

I was wholly involved at every stage.  The book couldn't go on long enough - and yet somehow it did.  The ending was timely, right, perfect in every way.  Contemporary American picaresque at its very best.

Robert B Parker's Payback - Mike Lupica

 Lupica has continued Parker's series about Boston PI Sunny Randall. Parker himself only wrote six of these and what was impressive to me was the depth of the backstory here.  Sunny Randall is connected to the Boston Irish mob through her ex-husband, the Boston Irish cops through her father.  Her wingman Spike is a gay restauranteur.  And the current man in her life is - yes, it's Jesse Stone, perhaps because by the time Payback came out in 2021 Mike Lupica was also writing the Jesse Stone continuation series.

I admit female PIs are not always my first choice for recreational reading, but I took to Sunny straight away.  Lupica has a way with characterisation through dialogue and internal monologue that is very persuasive.

The story here is international money-laundering, Russian mobsters, high stakes poker and frat boy hedge funds - all set against a background of the Covid 19 pandemic.  And, just in passing, while others write novels about the pandemic, Lupica has the skills to make it simply the background.  Because of the pandemic, chancers and gamblers are running out of money and have to take risks, robbing Peter to pay Paul - or, more appropriate in this case, Pyotr and Sergei.

There is bags of action, three interconnected lines of investigation and lots of vivid images of the Boston setting.  I enjoyed it hugely.

Ungentlemanly Warfare - Howard Linskey

 

When I reviewed my first Linskey, The Dead, in the middle of last year, I noted how careful he was in crafting his prose and how I really must read more of his work.  Not so much now, I'm afraid.  Ungentlemanly Warfare is a pretty standard SOE yarn, though to be fair Linskey does plough relatively fresh ground by incorporating the Milice, the Vichy brownshirts, as the direct opposition to the Maquis underground resistors Harry Walsh is sent to France to organise.  His principle mission is to kill the scientist developing the Me 163 jet fighter plane which, if made operational, will threaten the upcoming D-Day landings.  So far so good - and I should also add in the plus column the nice way Linskey plays the class war within SOE.  Guerrilla warfare is ungentlemanly, therefore those who fight guerrilla wars are not gentlemen; Harry Walsh is only middle middleclass and therefore perfect to aid and abet the guerrillas, but he can never rise above the rank of captain which he earned in the field - thus by default, really - at Dunkirk.

Now for the less good.  The writing at the start of the book is really poor - overdone, unsubtle, unconsidered, unrefined.  There are some appalling proof reading failures: Scott's Guards will live with me forever.  Things certainly improved as the story progressed, either because Linskey gets more involved with the action sequences or perhaps because the first couple of chapters came from an old draft which Linskey managed to restart with an improved skill set.  Certainly I stopped thinking 'This needs editing' and ceased to notice any bloopers, and that's good enough for me.  But then--- Oh god, clever little cameos for Ian Fleming and Kim Philby.  Showing off your research.  Only your research wasn't quite deep enough, Howard.  A level deeper and you'd have found that the first hero of ungentlemanly warfare was Peter Fleming, Ian's brother, who was in charge of proposed guerrilla warfare in Kent when, as seemed certain in 1939 and 1940, Hitler invaded Britain.  See Giles Minton, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The story itself is predictable - Harry has to risk his girlfriend to get to the target.  I don't want to give the game away but the point of a successful adventure story is that the hero has to personally bring down the anti-hero, and that doesn't happen here, so the story doesn't quite succeed.  And I will no longer be quite so keen to read more Linskey.

Baby Doll - Tennessee Williams

Williams wrote several of the movie adaptations of his plays but Baby Doll is an original script for Elia Kazan and produced in 1956 with Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker and Karl Malden.  This published version followed in 1957 and proudly proclaims on the inside front cover, "We believe that the publication of Baby Doll marks the first occasion on which an original film-script has been published in book form to coincide with the showing of the film.  This in fact really is 'the book of the film'."

Cool.  I wonder how many it sold?

Anyway...  I haven't seen the film.  I was put off Tennessee Williams by the movie of Night of the Iguana and the playscripts of his late works.  But Baby Doll was the Fifties when Tennessee was in full pomp.  I was spellbound by its power.

The setting is cotton country.  Baby Doll, imminently about to turn twenty, is married to the much older Archie Lee.  She was clearly looking for a surrogate father and provider, but Archie Lee's cotton gin has been virtually put out of business by the local plantation building its own.  So all the credit-funded furniture has to go from the marital home. This threatens the long-promised consummation of the marriage when Baby Doll turns twenty tomorrow.

Archie Lee drowns his sorrow and that very night the plantation gin burns down.  Italian operator Silva Vacarro turns up at the Meighan home with dozens of trucks for Archie to gin.  But Archie needs a part and has to go out of town to get it.  Meanwhile Vacarro's men install their own in Archie's mill and take over the mill.  Vacarro stays with Baby Doll and attempts to take over Archie's wife.

The sexual game-play is off the scale.  Racist undertones are fully explored.  The ending is left wide open.  I really have to see the film.