The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann

 It's a long way from Death in Venice to The Holy Sinner, nearly forty years in fact, so you'd expect them to be different.  They are very different.  There are similarities, of course, and contrasts.  Instead of suppressed homosexual paedophilia, here we have fraternal incest in no way suppressed.  Instead of extreme contemporary realism, here we have a magical medieval world in which the bells of Rome ring out without human agency and a penitent endures seventeen years chained to a rock in the middle of a lake by turning himself into a hairy hedgehog.  Magical realism twenty years before its time, perhaps.

Mann took his story from the 12th century Minnesinger Hartmann von Aue.  The twins Wiligis and Sibylla, only children of Duke Grimald of Flanders, are brought up together to the extent that they share sleeping quarters.  After inheriting the dukedom, Wiligis crosses the bedroom and has sex with his sister.  She becomes pregnant.  Wiligis, not essentially a bad man and still very young, immediately heads off on crusade, leaving Sibylla to govern in his place.  She secludes herself in the fortress of the wise knight Eisengrein.  She gives birth to a beautiful healthy son but can take no joy in it because news arrives of Wiligis's death.  Sibylla is beyond distraught and submits to Eisengrein's advice.  Leave the child's fate to God.  The baby is sealed in a barrel and cast into the North Sea along with a tablet explaining that he is a child of sin but his parents are noble; if he is found, raise him accordingly; there is money in the barrel with which to do so.

Poor fishermen find the barrel and take it back to their base on the island of St Dunstan.  Abbot Gregory opens the barrel and finds the child.  He entrusts him to one of the fishermen whose wife has just given birth.  He gives the child his own name.  Ultimately the child is raised as a novice monk - until he discovers the secret of his birth.  At seventeen he sets off as a knight errant with the aim of finding his parents.  Instead he marries Sibylla, becomes Duke of Flanders de jure uxoris and father's two daughters by her.

Then he finds out the truth a second time.  He immediately renounces his dukedom and becomes a beggar, ending up on the rock.  The Lamb of God (literally) tells wise men in Rome that their next pope is tethered to a rock in a lake in the north - it is their God-given mission to go and find him.  Thus Gregory the child of sin becomes a very good pope.  He is reunited with Sibylla whom he prudently decides to refer to as his sister.

It is actually very entertaining.  Mann writes in a cod medieval style using the authorial voice of the Irish monk Cormac, who is visiting the monastery of St Gall (where so many ancient manuscripts were later found), who provides us with much commentary.  I raced through The Holy Sinner, which is absolutely my cup of tea.  I'm no Mann scholar - indeed, I had never heard of The Holy Sinner - and the only novel by him I had previously read was the aforementioned Death in Venice (reviewed on this blog).  That didn't inspire me to discover more.  The Holy Sinner definitely has.

Every Dead Thing - John Connolly

 Every Dead Thing  (1999) is the first Charlie Parker thriller and Connolly's first book.  Parker is a former NYPD detective who let the job get to him.  He took to drink and neglected his wife and daughter.  Then, one night, he staggered home to find his wife and daughter monstrously butchered.

Two years on, having left the force, Parker is completely sober and 100% forcused on capturing the killer.  He contacts his old partner and gets an informal gig hunting for a missing woman.  This leads him to a philanthropist widow, a local mobster, and the person responsible for a chain of serial murders - but not his serial murders.  So Parker moves on to New Orleans and hooks up with FBI contacts and local NOPD in another chain of murders.

The problem, ostensibly, is that Every Dead Thing is actually two novels, one set and solved in New York, the other likewise in New Orleans.  Even more problematic, they are in many ways the same novel done twice - mob links, serial killers, Parker allowed more access to police and FBI than would ever be allowed.  It is also very long.  And yet, for all that, it works.  It works very well indeed.  The overarching story of Parker's quest links the two main storylines sufficiently to keep us going.  The characters, especially Parker, are deeply drawn and engaging.  The narrative tone - first person Parker - is pitch perfect.  He is never a man in control, always a man in recovery.  Side characters, the New York killer couple Angel and Louis, the voodoo momma in deepest Louisiana, even the mobsters and their lead assassins, draw us in.  I didn't work out who the killer was in either North or South, and especially not both, which is always a good thing.

There are now twenty Parker novels.  I enjoyed Connolly's non-Parker novel He (see review below) so much that I decided to try Parker and now I'm hooked.

A Bid for Fortune - Guy Boothby

 A Bid for Fortune (1895) is the debut of the Victorian super-villain Dr Nikola, a man with worldwide interests, limitless resources and a spooky cat called Apollyon.

"Ask the Japanese, ask the Malays, the Hindoos, the Burmese, the coal porter in Port Said, the Buddhist priests of Ceylon; ask the King of Corea, the men up in Tibet, the Spanish priests in Manila or the Sultans of Borneo, the Ministers of Siam, or the French in Saigon.  They'll all know Dr Nikola and his cat, and take my word for it, they fear him."

The premise is silly - a holy relic of the Himalayan Masters promising access to the Mysteries of the Ancients.  it is of its time, the fin de siecle with its occult interests.  In physical appearance Nikola is the personification of the aesthetic decadent.  Boothby was an Australian living in London who produced more than 50 novels and yet was only 38 when he died.  Dr Nikola is perhaps his most enduring character, an obvious forerunner of Ian Fleming's Dr No.  Boothby was prolific but skillful.  His narrative never falters but the plot twists are all properly planned and his characters fully rounded.  He had travelled the world and it shows.  The locations here, of which there are many, smack of authenticity and personal knowledge.

There are four further Nikola novels and I hope to read them all. 

Silverview - John le Carre

John le Carre's final novel, which his son Nick Cornwell tells us in an afterword sat in a drawer for some time, is in some ways in line with his other late novels - for example, A Legacy of Spies - in that it involves old hands revisiting a past they have tried hard to escape.  In other ways it harks back to his very first novels such as , say, A Murder of Quality; the scale is confined, largely to a small, unspecified seaside town in East Anglia.  To this backwater Julian Lawndsley has fled from his successful City career to open a bookshop.  Here he meets (or is approached by) the amiable, slightly eccentric Edward Avon, long since retired from some sort of development role in Eastern Europe.  Edward's wife Deborah is dying.  She is, apparently, a famous Arabist who worked for some sort of think tank.  It's all very vague.  Oddly, Edward claims to have known Julian's father at public school.  Julian's father was a churchman who renounced God and went on a well-reported dive into debauchery, disgrace, and ultimately penury.  Edward claims to have got in touch with his old friend, offering assistance.  Julian still has his father's collection of letters.  There isn't one from Edward Avon, although there is one which might offer a clue.

Meanwhile Stewart Proctor, Head of Domestic Security, receives an important letter at a safe house in London.  Letters are very old school and thus are the preferred means of communication among old hands.  Edward, for example, persuades Julian to deliver one by hand to a very beautiful old lady whom he meets at the Everyman Cinema in Belsize Park.  He buys the stationery which allows her to write a sealed reply.  On his return to his bookshop he finds a written invitation to supper from Deborah Avon.

I have to say, the whole thing is wonderfully well done.  I have enjoyed several of le Carre's later novels but Silverview may well be the best of them.  I especially liked the last line, from the Avons' daughter Lily to Julian: "And that's the last secret I'll keep from you."  How classy is that?

The Revelators - Ace Atkins

 The Revelators is the continuation of The Shameless, which I read and reviewed here a month or so ago.  Quinn Colson is still recovering from being shot down at the end of The Shameless.  He has been 'temporarily' replaced as Sheriff of Tibbehah County while investigations continue into who ordered the hit.  Meanwhile J K Vardaman has been elected governor despite or maybe on account of his close association with the Watchmen militia.  The Watchmen are rearming and looking for contacts; fortunately Donnie Varner, schoolfriend of Quinn Colson and Boom Kimbaugh, and teenage crush of Quinn's sister Caddy, is fresh out of jail and looking for work.  Fannie Hathcock is expanding her sex and smuggling empire, seeking to expand her standing with the Syndicate, and itching for revenge of the frame hammer type on those who ordered the hit on her lover.  In the deep background federal agencies are quietly trying to get on top of the various criminal and seditious enterprises that currently control the town of Jericho and surrounding Tibbehah County.

It's another utterly engrossing narrative with dozens of beautifully drawn three-dimensional characters, all of them with good and bad sides.  The inciting incident is when Vardaman has the immigrant workforce at the local chicken factory rounded up.  The adults are incarcerated, the kids left to fend for themselves.  Naturally the kids are taken in at Caddy Colson's Christian refuge.  The chicken factory is restaffed with inmates from the local for-profit prison.  Not all the local Good Old Boys approve.  Not all the local wheelers and dealers are in on the action.  

I relished every minute of The Revelators.  I cannot fathom why this series isn't higher profile.

He - John Connolly

 'He' is never once named in the novel but there is never a moment's doubt who he is: Stan Laurel.  He is he because he was really Arthur Stanley Jefferson, son of a theatrical promoter in Northern England.  He is the idiot partner of Norville 'Babe' Hardy but he is really the brains and driving force in the partnership.  Babe married three times, Stan married anywhere between five and nine times, although he woman who he spent much of his early life with and who came up with the new name was never his wife.  In reality, the great love of his life was Babe.  Babe, in return, loved many people, though he probably loved Stan most of all.

Loads of Connolly's story is familiar or even well known - but then so are Laurel and Hardy's movies; it doesn't stop us loving them.  There are also things I didn't know (and it so happens I know quite a lot about the silent cinema).  I didn't know about Babe's brother.  I didn't know much about James Finlayson.  And I never had such insight into the mysterious death of Thelma Todd.

That said, the bit I enjoyed best was the filming of 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine' number from Way Out West.  A beautiful scene, beautifully done by Connolly.

An accidental find and a real treat.

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

 Some say Earthly Powers (1980) was Burgess's masterpiece, though I prefer the Enderby series and the Malay Trilogy.  A Clockwork Orange is always the book he will be best known for, though I disliked it on my most recent reading.  However, Earthly Powers was written to land Burgess the Big Book Prize, which as I recall it didn't.

It is a massive undertaking, by far Burgess's longest book.  Its size means that Burgess has to tune down experimentation and tackle the more usual novelistic tropes of character development and long story arcs.  He does this, it has to be said, remarkably well.  It was a typical Burgess clever stroke to base his protagonist, Kenneth M Toomey, on William Somerset Maugham, another very famous, extremely successful novelist and playwright whose success prevented his artistry being recognised in his lifetime.  I told a good friend I had been reading and enjoying Maugham; he suggested I should read Earthly Powers.

Toomey isn't Maugham; he is homosexual like Maugham, ex-pat, successful in books and plays and films, but he isn't just Maugham under a different name.  He is a Maugham-like character who finds himself subsumed into family and religion and, through them, dragged into significant events of the first eighty years of the twentieth century (in a way that Maugham, to the best of my recollection, wasn't).

His sister Hortense marries a young Italian composer whose brother is a priest.  Toomey has by this time rejected the Catholic church of his upbringing, which condemns him as a homosexual.  Domenico Campanati goes to Hollywood to write the score of dozens of motion pictures; Carlo Campanati becomes bishop of Milan and, ultimately, Pope Gregory XVII.  None of this is spoiler: we know Carlo is pope because the novel starts with Toomey, after Gregory's death, being approached at his house in Malta to write an account of an apparent miracle he saw Carlo Campanati perform in a US hospital.  The twist that comes from that event would absolutely be a spoiler - but I had no idea it was coming, and it really dropped my jaw.  The twist, on its own, would be worth reading Earthly Powers for.  But there is so much else.  The characters are magnificent; the literary wordplay that Burgess just cannot resist; and the sheer scope of the story.

Earthly Powers didn't win the Booker, William Goldings' Rites of Passage did.  I have now enjoyed them both.  I suspect Golding is slightly superior in purely literary terms, which explains why a Maugham-based novel came second.  As novels, though, they are equally magnificent.

Three Kings - George R R Martin

 A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel, apparently, Three Kings is the second British-based instalment in Martin's vast alternative universe series.  Essentially Queen Elizabeth II died in childbirth, her sister Margaret succeeded and ruled until 2020.  She died leaving two sons, Henry and Richard, the first a reactionary brute, the second a bisexual charmer.  Then rumours begin to circulate - that Elizabeth's newborn son survived but was hidden away on Prince Philip's orders because there was something wrong - in fact, like so many others around the world, he was born a Joker, mutated by the alien virus of 1946.

It is for Alan Turing - yes, the Alan Turing - to investigate, even though he is over 100 years old and made of metal.  He is assisted by his protege, the Joker super-spy Noel Matthews and the Joker king of London, the Green Man Roger Barnes.  They are all frustrated by the Celtic goddess of death Badb, dislodged from Belfast after the Good Friday Agreement and on the look out for a hero's death-blood to rejuvenate her.

It's a good enough pretext with lots of fun ideas.  Unfortunately the cast is miles too big to keep track of.  Most of the characters are well drawn (unfortunately, Noel isn't, and he gets much of the action).  The royals are not very convincing either, mainly because American lead writers always assume we Brits are as keen on our royals as they are.  I very much doubt the state would fall if the succession was altered, subverted or just plain failed.

Good enough, but not great.  I enjoyed Mississippi Roll much more.  Nevertheless I remain fascinated by the overarching concept.

Tumbledown - Charles Wood

 Tumbledown is the other controversial Falklands Play.  Ian Curteis wrote the actual Falklands Play, a hymn of praise to the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, which was commissioned by the BBC soon after the war ended but shelved indefinitely when it turned out that the British public were not quite so gung-ho about the imperialistic adventure and had rather fallen out of love with Margaret Thatcher.  In the end it wasn't produced until 2000 by which time tempers had cooled but Curteis's technique had dated badly.  It was recently reshown on BBC 4 for the fortieth anniversary of the war.  It was very old-fashioned but I was impressed by the character of Curteis's Maggie (for clarity, let it be known, my hatred for Mrs T, whose reign of terror I endured in full, is second to none, my contempt for electioneering military escapades likewise).  Some of the other acting, however (who was that as Michael Foot?) was atrocious.

I digress...  Tumbledown is the other controversial TV play about the Falklands War, produced by the BBC in May 1988, despite the screeches of protest from the Daily Mail and others.  I can't remember why the Mail considered the true story of 21 year-old Robert Lawrence, who was horribly wounded just before the end of hostilities, was somehow controversial.  Lawrence was a hero, he responded heroically to his injury, and who was hidden from the cameras at the state memorial service in case he upset the viewers.  Who, war-supporter or not, wouldn't empathise with young Robert and his family, who behaved with magnificent dignity.

Wood was famously a dramatist of war.  His stage plays, Dingo, H and so on, are military-based.  He wrote both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Dick Lester's How I Won the War.  He was an admirer of the front line soldier, an enemy of war - exactly the stance required for this story.  He does it beautifully.  There are many profoundly moving moments - so much so that I couldn't bear to watch it again when it too was shown for the anniversary.  So I read it for the fourth or fifth time again.  Superb.

Snow - John Banville

 As Benjamin Black, John Banville wrote the Quirke mystery novels and one of the Raymond Chandler continuation novels (most, if not all, reviewed elsewhere on this blog).  Under his real name Banville writes award-winning novels in the modern Irish tradition.  Here, at last, he combines his two output streams - a police procedural set in County Wexford in the Nineteen Fifties.

Quirke, now the state pathologist, is out of the country on his honeymoon no less - a beautiful touch which tells us immediately the territory we are in and who will probably not be joining us there.  Instead we have a new character, Detective Inspector St John Strafford, a mid-thirties teetotal singleton from the Protestant Ascendancy, which makes him something of an exception in the Dublin Guards.

On Christmas Eve he is called to attend the death of a priest at Ballyglass House,  This is in itself unusual: what is a Catholic priest doing at a Protestant house?  It gets worse.  Father Tom Lawless hasn't just fallen down the stairs.  He has walked down the stairs, leaking blood from a stab wound to the shoulder, across the hall into the library where he has finally collapsed and, for good measure, someone has gelded him.  This sort of thing doesn't happen to priests.  Priests don't get murdered in Ireland.  Priests definitely don't get their genitals hacked off.  Where are they, by the way?

The Osborne family are all decidedly odd.  Colonel Osborne likes to play the squire but his second wife is more than a little mad and his children, Letty and Dominic, are somewhat on the wild side.  There are also assorted staff and the villagers who congregate at the local pub.

Banville is so good at this sort of thing because he rises above genre.  Irish history permeates every character, informs every crime and demands a cover-up at the highest level.  One of the best scenes in the book is Strafford's interview with the Archbishop.  The writing, throughout, is that of a master novelist at the very top of the game.  There is another Strafford novel, April in Spain.  I look forward to reading it.