Werewolves in their Youth - Michael Chabon

 A collection of nine decent-length short stories by Michael Chabon, Werewolves in their Youth distills the charactersistics that make Chabon one of the best US writers of recent times - wit, elegance, the eye for the telling detail, the nuances of speech, etc.  Oddly, the title story was my least favourite; no particular reason, just that Stephen King does these things better.   On the other hand I loved 'The Harris Fetko Story', a skewed take on the Great American sports hero, and 'In the Black Mill', a Lovecraftain pastiche which Chabon cleverly links to perhaps his bestknown novel Wonder Boys.   I single out these two and have given my reservations about 'Werewolves', but I enjoyed all the stories here and recommend the collection wholeheartedly.

SOE: Special Operations Executive, 1940-46 - M R D Foot

You have to remember that this work was originally published in 1984 and updated in 1990.   The SOE story was still subject to the Official Secrets Acr and many people still did not know that such an organisation had ever existed.

What Foot provides, therefore, is a comprehensive overview of the background of SOE and a much more general summary of their activity.   Given that they operated in every theatre of war, there were limits to what Foot could say in 1984, given that the Cold War was still raging and many of the countries who had hosted SOE operatives were behind the Iron Curtain.   I guess that the 1990 update was because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino effect on Balkan and Baltic nations.

This book is therefore a solid account for the generalist.   If you want specialist detail, you will need to go elsewhere.

The York Realist - Peter Gill

 Another playscript, this time by writer-director Peter Gill, perhaps best known for staging the plays of D H Lawrence in the Seventies.   The play, originally mounted in 2001 and revived inb 2018, is about a farm worker, George, who is put forward for and gets a part in an amateur production of the York Mystery plays.   He falls for the assistant director, John, who wants George to try turning professional, but George won't leave his mother and family and the farm.   So they continue a secret relationship for several years until John returns to attend Mother's funeral.

It is all expertly done.   The supporting characters are vividly drawn, as is the harsh reality of life on the lowest rung of the agricultural ladder.   The trap George finds himself in is evoked particularly in the character of his brother-in-law Arthur, who has escaped it.   The relationship between George and John is delicately done, but what makes the play stand out is Gill's technique for handling time and memory.   The audience - or in my case the reader - has to pay that bit of extra attention which inevitably makes engagement to a deeper level.

Gill uses the same technique in the two linked plays, The Look Across the Eyes and Lovely Evening, which accompany The York Realist in this 2018 edition.   These are set in Cardiff, where Gill was brought up, in the late Forties and early Fifties (Gill was born in 1939).   They focus on the household of May and Harry, before and after May's death.   In the first play their oldest son Laurence, who is also our narrator, is sixteen.   Laurence the narrator, though, is in his thirties; in both plays, therefore, he is looking back.   In The Look Across the Eyes, May's single brother Jimmy - a docker like Harry - is invited to move in.   He is still there, a permanent fixture with the widower Harry and the adult Laurence.   In Lovely Evening Laurence has taken on May;s household duties, looking after the two ageing brothers-in-law who go about their mysterious and separate evening activities.

So that's three slice-of-life working class dramas in a style I find increasingly appealing.   Gill is a very fine playwright and I'm keen to get hold of more of his published scripts.

The Breaking of Bumbo - Andrew Sinclair

 Andrew Sinclair may well be my new literary obsession.   In The Breaking of Bumbo (1959) a coming-of-age story meets the roman a clef.   Young Bumbo Bailey passes from Eton to National Service in the Guards.   He is a hopeless soldier, a good officer and an amiable chap.   Posted to Wellington Barracks in the Mall, Bumbo does Public Duties at the Tower and Palace and on Horseguards Parade, and in his spare time becomes embroiled in London Society both High and extremely Low.   It all takes place against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis about which Bumbo has scuples, which lead to his breaking.

It is all done with tremendous brio.   Sinclair has an experimental style which still reads fresh and lively more than sixty years on.   The training sector is laugh out loud hilarious.   The mood then becomes gradually darker.   Despite the light surface there are considerable depths here and I was surprised at how long it took me to read such a short novel.   Yet I absolutely adored it.   I'm off now to track down more of Sinclair's work.

The Governor's Lady - David Mercer

 

A Methuen Playscript from my youth is always a fun find.   This is extra special in that it's a one-acter from 1965, originally staged by the RSC at the Aldwych as part of a programme called Expeditions Two.

I never considered David Mercer to be either experimental or absurdist, but The Governor's Lady is both.  Lady Harriet Boscoe is the widow of Sir Gilbert, governor of an unnamed African territory on the verge of seeking independence.   Unexpectedly, Gilbert returns.   His manners have deteriorated somewhat.   He now feasts on bananas, smashes crockery for fun, and demands sex.   He has, indeed, reverted to being a gorilla.

It is a one-acter, lasting perhaps half an hour.   But it is in seven scenes with quite complex changes in between.   Yet Mercer, an emerging playwright at the time, handles the stagecraft with astonishing flair.   That is all very well, but what stood out for me was the way he can evoke emotion in such a crowded format, whilst juggling issues of colonial racism which (we should remember) were still controversial in 1965.

In it's small way, The Governor's Lady is a mini masterpiece that would still be worth putting on today - though I doubt we could find two such perfect characters for the leads as Patience Collier and Timothy West.

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man - Thomas Mann

 A disappointment, I'm sorry to say, this final, unfinished work, published in 1954, a few months before Mann's death.   The idea is fair enough - the impoverished son of a failed champagne-maker hauls himself from the lowest level of employment (unpaid lift-boy in a Paris hotel) by virtue of his good looks, educated manners, and total lack of principles.   It purports to be a comic novel and there are parts that reminded me of Royal Highness (reviewed on this blog).   There are genuinely comic moments - the examination for military service which Felix must at all costs fail - but the writing has the common failing of new and relatively new comic writers.   It is hugely, disastrously overwritten, as if Mann is hoping that endless wordplay equates somehow to humour.   On the plus side there is an excellent sex scene in Paris (something else Mann was still experimenting with as he closed in on turning eighty) and the final twist in what we must remember was only meant to be part one of the Krull confessions, is a good one.

Occult London - Merlin Coverley

 A well-written and entertaining survey of some of London's premier occult landmarks.   I was however surprised by the sites left out - Cock Lane, for example, scene of the first sensational poltergeist infestation (though not the first incidence, which is about 100 yards down the road from me in South Leicestershire).   That said, Merlin Coverley's other work helps set his field of interest.   He is a psychogeographer in the footsteps of Iain Sinclair.   His sources are Peter Ackroyd, William Blake and Geoffrey of Monmouth.   He is interested in the mythic London lying behind and beneath the facade we see today.

Though Mortlake is a bit off-piste for Coverley, he covers Dr John Dee briefly and accurately.   Again, there is much more to be said about Dee but Coverley only claims to be an introduction.   In that sense, his guide to other, more comprehensive studies is invaluable.   I have been researching these subjects for more than fifty years and there were sources here that were completely new to me.

Like Covereley's companion volume Psychogeography, Occult London is a small, short book, but it is well worth a slow and careful read.   Lack of space has required Covereley to weigh every word, carefully consider what to include and what to refer the reader on to elsewhere.   Like his concept of London, the result is multi-layered and endlessly fascinating.

The Fleshpots of Sansato - William F Temple

 Great title - but a novelette only likely to interest the literary acheaologists amongst us.  Temple was a pioneer of British sci fi from the war period until the Seventies.   He mixed with the best but never really rose above the level of supporting player.   His best-known novel was Four-Sided Triangle, which I reveiwed earlier on this blog.

To me, Temple is interesting purely because he is a bystander, observer of what the better-known were up to.   Fleshpots is basically a take on Psychedelic sci fi of, most notably, Michael Moorcock.   Temple has ingenuity but a distinctly prosaic imagination, so the result is basically pulp detective noir in space.   Ray Garner of the Sidereal Intelligence Service is ordered to the distant planet of Montefore to find SIS source Dr Lowry who has disappeared into the titular fleshpots.

A classic example of period sci fi - the galaxy has intergalactic travel but still uses telephone landlines.   Interestingly, Temple's take on the travel element is that it has been made available to earthlings by the otensibly friendly Dorians of a far distant planet.   Temple is a bureaucracy man and, typically, the Dorians retain a measure of control: earth travellers can only go one way on the instant relocator; the other half of a round trip has to be by conventional spaceship.   Dr Lowry, a prominent scientist, was sent into space to try and figure out how the quick version works.

Despite mixing with aliens (and doing more exotic things to alien females in Sansato) human intelligence agents still favour racial stereotypes.   Thus Garner's contact on Montefore is the very Italian Arnoldo (Arnie) Monicelli, who drinks Italian wine and favours long lunches.   Garner is American and therefore a whisky man.

So Garner plunges into the fleshpots and meets the Satos, the Montefore version of geishas.   Their sexual specialities are various: one is invisible, another is literally electric, a third a humanoid cat complete with claws.   The one who leads Garner to the truth is Vygynia, an autistic waif whom both Lowry and Monicelli have taken under their wing, the Italian in a paternalistic, protective way, the not-so-good doctor probably not.

It's all good fun with plenty of betrayals and red herrings.   I've no idea why this NEL edition is 'specially abridged' but having done my research on Four-Sided Triangle I'm betting there is another, very different version out there somewhere.

A Shadow Intelligence - Oliver Harris

 I picked up A Shadow Intelligence by chance.   It seemed like the sort of thing I'd be interested in.   I certainly was.   I was fascinated.   Oliver Harris is more than a continuation of English spy fiction; he is the next generation.   The cyber warfare being waged in A Shadow Intelligence is so deep and complex that much of the time I didn't have a clue what was happening - yet Harris's writing skill and the compelling voice of his protagonist Elliot Kane, kept me hooked for all 438 pages of the ebook.

Kane is MI6 but has wandered somewhat off from the mainstream.   He has spent his career under cover in exotic countries far afield.   He is back in England when he learns that his colleague and lover Joanna Lake has disappeared in Kazakhstan.   Immediately before vanishing she sent Kane a video in which he was in a hotel room with a dubious man.   The thing is, it wasn't him, he doesn't recognise the room or know the man.   He notices the date on a newspaper in the clip is a couple of weeks hence.

Naturally Kane gives his official spook surveillance the slip and heads off to Kazakhstan, the ninth largest country by area with one of the smallest populations per hectare.   A massive oil field has been discovered.   International corporations are flooding in - on the heels of their various official and non-official (or 'shadow') intelligence agencies.   Kane signs up with one of these and contacts the others.   He also brings his own resources to bear.   It all comes together in a spectacular climax.

Harris has clearly done his homework.   Whether what he describes is feasible or not doesn't matter a hoot.   It soon will be and Harris has plugged in to the contemporary AI paranoia.   He writes exceptionally well.   His pacing is both relentless and extraordinary.   A Shadow Intelligence is the first of his spy novels.   I shall certainly look out for the next, Ascension (2021).   I am also keen to try Harris's Nick Belsey crime novels.

Saturday - Ian McEwan

 I read Atonement when the book and movie were big news and thought very little of it.   It struck me as trivial, a little bit seedy, and overly judgmental.   It put me off reading any more McEwen until I came across Saturday, which is a wholly different kettle of fish.

Saturday is very simply a day in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, who lives in some style in a London square close by the Post Office Tower.   His day begins with sleeplessness.   He looks out of the bedroom window and sees a plane, its engine on fire, heading towards Heathrow.   This is February 2003, eighteen months after the attack on New York's Twin Towers and on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.   Indeed, an anti-war demonstration is due to take place not far from Henry's square later in the day.   So when Henry sees the burning plane his thoughts inevitably turn to Terror.   Should he phone the emergency services?   Surely they already know....?   Henry goes downstairs to watch the news on TV.   Ultimately the plane lands, no one dies, it's something and nothing and Henry considers himself justified.

He goes off to his Saturday morning squash game and gets involved in a road rage incident which does have considerable consequences later in the day.

What makes this a brilliant book is the depth which Atonement so patently lacked.   Here we become immersed in the Perowne family who, as it happens, will be gathered together on this special Saturday.   They are elite (the house is inherited from Mrs Perowne's late mother, who also owned the French chateau in which the widower, the famous poet John Grammaticus usually resides) but they are also made interesting.   Where McEwen ventures into the extraordinary is in his descriptions of Henry's work - McEwen gives detailed acknowledgement of the help he received from actual neurosurgeons.  Without this level of detail I wonder if the final story twist would be believeable.   I suspect we have to be convinced that only Henry can do what he is called upon to do.   In my case I was already stunned and sold because Henry met his wife Rosalind when she went blind as I did and had an earlier version of the same neurosurgery I had twelve years ago.   With the same positive result, I'm pleased to say.