The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri

When Silvio Luparello, a respected local politician is found dead in his car from a heart attack with his trousers down at a local dogging site, Inspector Montalbano is given just 48 hours to investigate the case and hush up any scandal for the sake of his family and the party. On the face of it this is just a sad and sordid tragedy, but as our hero starts pulling at the various threads he suspects that there is more here than meets the eye.

He starts by interviewing the two garbage collectors who discovered the body, finding out that one of them had discovered a distinctive and valuable gold necklace near the scene. They also remember calling Luparello’s personal attorney and political crony Rizzo to ask what should be done and finding him curiously unbothered by the death of his friend and the potential fallout. 

Other things about the case just don’t seem to add up - who was the tall, blonde woman seen leaving the scene and being picked up by a convenient passing car? Why is Rizzo now supporting Luparello’s chief party rival? Why would an apparently cautious married man suddenly decide to risk everything for a sexual liaison in a public place instead of his secluded beach house where he would usually conduct his affairs in private? Are the clues at the scene just too convenient?

‘And Luparello’s case is one of those where things were set up to appear simple.’ ‘When in fact they are complicated?’ ‘Very complicated.’

This novel is set in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata and the author Camilleri does an excellent job of capturing the atmosphere of small town corruption and decay, with run down factories, prostitution, warring mafia gangs and political croneyism. Inspector Montalbano is the archetypal dogged detective, digging into a case that other people would rather be closed quickly. He calls on friends, fellow officers and sympathetic officials that owe him a favour as the need arises before explaining the denouement twice - the official story, and the sadder and more tragic truth of the matter that Montalbano keeps out of the public record.

‘So you gave yourself a promotion, eh?’ asked Livia after a long silence. ‘From inspector to god – a fourth-rate god, but still a god.’

I enjoyed this, especially the sardonic humour of the inspector himself, as he deals with a very human tragedy.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Inspector Alan Grant is stuck in hospital with a broken leg, so his friend Marta, knowing his interest in physiognomy, brings him a some pictures of historical characters to see if any of them suggest a mystery for him to unravel. The picture of King Richard III catches his eye - everyone knows that Richard III was a BAD KING who murdered the princes in the tower? It's there in the history books that we all studied at school, in black and white.

He starts his investigation with a school textbook, helpfully provided by one of the nurses looking after him, which confirms his memory, before moving on to more scholarly tomes including the supposedly definitive History of King Richard III written by the saintly Thomas More which all seem to support the accepted narrative. Case closed, until he realises that More was writing during the reign of Henry VII and had only been a child during the brief period that Richard was on the throne. His account could therefore not have been first hand, and was certainly written with the approval of the current monarch in mind, who would have been flattered to have his claim to the throne strengthened and his predecessor rubbished.

Everything in that history had been hearsay. And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than another it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Grant enlists the help of Brent Carradine, an American researcher at the British museum, to uncover contemporary accounts and references. Grant approaches the case as a policeman, asking the crucial question - who benefits from the crime? He examines the means, motives and opportunities to see how they stand up to the evidence, such as it is, before making his conclusion.

This was was an interesting book, digging into an area of history that I had only dimly been aware of. It contrasts the case of Richard III with more recent historical events such as the Tonypandy riot in 1910 where the commonly accepted narrative - in that case that Winston Churchill had ordered the army to open fire on striking Welsh miners - does not match the actual historical record. As the title of the book paraphrases the quote, "Truth is the daughter of time, not authority"

It is a truism that history is written by the victors, even more so in our current era of fake news and alternative facts, so being able to look beyond clickbait headlines and AI summaries is more important than ever. I wonder if this book might have been better as a straightforward non-fiction documentary account (or even a contemporary true crime style podcast) given that some of the sources that our fictional detective calls on (including a romantic historical novel called The Rose of Raby) are themselves fictional. It does allow the author to present her case at one remove. The theory that Richard III was innocent was not original, even in 1951 when this was written, but still controversial enough to earn a slap down from Winston Churchill (him again) in his History of the English Speaking Peoples.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson was an artist and writer, best known for her Moomin stories concerning charming creatures living in an idyllic valley. Unusually for books written for children they frequently deal with darker themes - floods, apocalyptic comets, loneliness and death, although always faced with a brisk, no-nonsense honesty. The series has a uniquely nordic air of melancholy that deepens as it progresses, until the final book Moominvalley in November where the Moomin family are distant figures, only glimpsed from a distance.

As well as the Moomin books, Jansson also wrote more adult novels, often with autobiographical elements. Of these, The Summer Book is probably the best regarded and contains many themes and ideas also found in the Moomins.

The book has two principle characters - six year old Sophia whose mother has died, and her elderly Grandmother, who spend an extended summer living on a small island in the Gulf of Finland with Sophie's papa. The book was written in 1972 in the same year that Jansson's own mother died, and the young girl was inspired by her niece Sophia.

The book does not have a conventional narrative - each chapter is a small vignette of life on the island as Sophie explores both her physical environment and her emotions that often spill out in unexpected ways. Her grandmother is also all too aware of her own physical limitations - she relies on a walking stick and takes tablets - but the pair climb over slippery rocks and crawl though tangled thickets. Sophie's many questions are answered candidly.

“When are you going to die?” the child asked. And Grandmother answered, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.” “Why?” her grandchild asked.

The relationship between Sophia and her Grandmother is one of equals, one at the start of her life looking forward, and one approaching her end, reflecting on her experiences. They have much in common - a love of mischief, desire for independence and stubbornness. They are both fierce advocates for questioning authority, especially of the religious kind.

“You can believe what you like, but you must learn to be tolerant.”

Sophia's grief for her mother is alluded to. It's only mentioned once, a few pages in, but it represented by things like dreaming about losing things or a severe storm battering the island. Grief is not a problem to be solved, but something to be lived with - one scene has Sophia wondering what will happen to a worm that has been cut in half, concluding that both halves simply have to go on living, even though their lives would now be quite different.

The island is also a metaphor for self determination, separate from the "normality" of the mainland. In her life, Jansson would spend many happy summers on such an island with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, at a time when same sex relationships were still illegal in Finland. The island is a self contained eco-system but at the same time it is fragile and must be treated with careful respect.

Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don’t know – and it cannot be repeated too often – is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies.

One poignant chapter concerns a cat, growing from a kitten into a lean and wild little animal, refusing to show affection other than by leaving the occasional bloody carcass on the floor. Eventually the cat is traded for another one that was happy to purr and sleep on Sophia's lap, but she soon realises which cat was the right one for her

“‘What’s wrong now?’ Grandmother said. ‘I want Moppy back!’ Sophia screamed. ‘But you know how it’ll be,’ Grandmother said. ‘It’ll be awful,’ said Sophia gravely. ‘But it’s Moppy I love.’ And so they traded cats again.”

The book ends with the family preparing to leave the island at the end of the summer, with Grandmother carefully packing things away and tidying the house, with a feeling of setting her affairs in order in preparation for her eventual demise. She thinks that she can hear a herring boat in the distance but realises that the slow thumping is something else

“Isn’t that funny,” Grandmother said. “It’s only my heart, it’s not a herring boat at all.” For a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She thought that she would stay for a while.

 

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

A classic Nordic noir thriller, featuring the archetypal hangdog detective. Kurt Wallander is middle aged, recently divorced, overweight and suffering from an irritable bowel exacerbated by a diet of greasy junk food. He is called on to take charge of investigating a brutal and apparently motiveless crime - an elderly couple in a remote farmhouse have been attacked, with the husband slaughtered and the wife in a critical condition with a noose around her neck. She dies a few days later after saying just one word "foreign"

The book is set in the late 80s in Sweden, which was a time of much social and political upheaval, with an asylum seeker crisis stoked by far right parties and lurking neo-nazi groups. The fateful final words are leaked to the press, leading to racially motivated attacks, including the shocking random murder of an innocent Somali refugee.

The investigation is a painstaking one, with Wallander having to tread a tricky line in establishing the identity of the killer or killers. There are several lines of investigation into why the farmer was a target for murder, but each one peters out in a frustrating dead end. He struggles with self doubt as he tries to understand what has happened and why.

Maybe the times require another kind of policeman, he thought. Policemen who aren’t distressed when they’re forced to go into a human slaughterhouse in the Swedish countryside early on a January morning. Policemen who don’t suffer from my uncertainty and anguish.

As this is happening, Wallender must deal with his elderly father who is suffering from the onset of dementia, as well as trying to rebuild his relationship with his daughter who is now a university student in Stockholm. He also has something of an obsession with the new Public Prosecutor Annette Brolin who will decide when to bring charges, and he makes a clumsy and boorish pass at her when drunk one night. His drinking also nearly sees him being arrested for driving under the influence, but he somehow gets away it, although shamefully embarrassed by what could have happened.

The secondary case of the racist murder is concluded with some almost farcical moments with Wallander almost falling to his doom from scaffolding whilst trying to surveil a suspect followed by a risky high speed pursuit in a horse box.

Just when it seems that the original case has gone cold, Wallander is struck with an idea whilst waiting in a queue at the bank, leading to a breakthrough and a breathless conclusion. I'll definitely be reading more of these.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I watched the 1946 adaptation of this a few weeks ago and finished the original novel after getting somewhat bogged down in the plot about halfway through.

The film turns out to be pretty faithful to the book, albeit with some changes of emphasis. In the book Marlowe does not really have a romance with Vivian, other than to try to get to the truth of what happened to her estranged husband Rusty Regan (a deliberate change from the original). I suspect that the screenplay was skewed to give more time to the Bogart and Bacall pairing.

Other elements of the story have somewhat more bite too. The bookseller Geiger turns out to be running a pornography lending library out of the back room of his shop, and it also turns out he was in a same sex relationship with a young man (giving them more of a reason for them to shoot Brody in a mistaken act of revenge). The compromising photos of Carmen are definitely much more explicit here - Marlowe discovers her naked and heavily drugged in Geiger’s house - something that would never have made it past the 1946 film censors.

She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.

The plot is even more complicated, with several convincing theories of the case being proposed and reworked as the story progresses. As mentioned above, the story seems to come to a grinding halt half way through, with the photos recovered and the mystery of Geiger’s death solved. Case closed, right?

I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar cheque coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess.

However, Marlowe seems determined to keep digging into the case of the missing Rusty and how that ties in with gangster Eddie Mars, his missing wife and the libidinous Carmen. Reading the wiki page, it seems that Chandler stitched together elements of this story from two other short stories with similar set ups (distressed fathers and wayward children).

The final conclusion is a satisfying explanation, but the real joy is in Chandler’s laconic and evocative prose, with Marlowe being the cynical and dogged anti-hero determined to get to the truth, for his own satisfaction if no one else’s.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.

 

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons began her writing career as a journalist in the late 1920s with spells at the Evening Standard and The Lady, reviewing books for the latter and getting something of a reputation as a snarky reviewer. One genre that seemed to particularly irritate her were the then fashionable rural romances, known as 'loam and lovechild' stories, featuring purple prose and overblown plots about love amidst the harsh lives of the simple working folk down on the farm.

For her first (and best known) novel, she created the character of Flora Poste, an infuriatingly chipper young gel from London, recently orphaned and wondering what to do with her life given that she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She writes to all of her various relatives, before settling on visiting the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, who seem to have owed an unspecified obligation to her late father.

The initial impressions are not promising - the farmhouse is as bleak as the name and the labour is back breaking and barely profitable. The Starkadders are an eccentric family, to say the least, from Judith (Flora's cousin) and husband Amos (a hellfire preacher), their sons Seth and Reuben (who one imagines spend their live striding around shirtless), Elfine (who lives up to her name) and various other half-brothers, distant relatives and aged farm hands. Most ominous of all is the rarely seen family matriarch Ada Doom, who spends most of her time hidden away in her room complaining of once having seen 'something nasty in the woodshed' that has evidently left her scarred for life. All of them seem to relish the misery of living on the farm scratching a living by scranletting two hundred furrows or clettering the dirty dishes with a twig.

Flora soon settles in and briskly sets about interfering in their lives with a view to improving their respective lots and maybe finding out what the debt incurred to her father might have been. This ranges from offering unsolicited advice on contraception to fecund farm maids, buying a dish mop to make washing up easier than using twigs, attending a hellfire sermon, to arranging a suitable wedding match for Elfine instead of the unpromising sounding cousin Urk. It becomes clear that she is doing this out of a kind hearted nature rather than any ulterior motive, without any thought for her own gain.

Gibbons writes in a nicely observed parody of the florid style of writers like DH Lawrence with scarcely hidden sexual undertones - to quote a passage:

The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his …

She also invents many fictitious terms for rural matters - scranletting, clettering (with a clettering stick), the ubiquitous weed sukebind and the salacious sounding activity of mollocking which usually results in the unplanned pregnancy of some or other unfortunate maiden. Most of the rural characters speak in the sort of accent described by Archers script writers as 'Mummerset' and I imagine that such comedy stalwarts as Joe Grundy and Walter Gabriel would have felt right at home down on Cold Comfort Farm.

The overall effect is generally very funny, albeit occasionally hard going to read involving checking odd looking words with the kindle dictionary to see if they are real or not. Oddly enough this book is technically science fiction - written in 1932 but set some years in the future from that point with personal planes and video phones. 

Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot

This story picks up twenty or so years after the previous volume. The main protagonist is Victoria, the Princess Royal, daughter of Queen Anne and Luther Arkwright. Her mother is now Empress of most of the world and is depicted as a grasping octopus in scurrilous pamphlets being distributed by revolutionary suffragists calling for (gasp!) a system of democracy. Victoria makes a habit of walking amongst the common folk and evidently is keen to understand what their grievances are, unlike her mother appearing at court in grand Elizabethan style regalia to issue her decrees whilst hiding a ghastly secret.

As well as the revolutionary forces, other factions are at play - an assassin sent by a dying pope, a cabal of Neo-puritan fascists led by the head of Anne's secret police, an American journalist and his younger companion who seems to be remarkably adept at fighting, and various other characters drawn from the real world including Princess Diana and Kenny Baker. Of Luther Arkwright himself, there is no sign other than a memorial statue and a young revolutionary who bears a startling resemblance to him (and to Victoria). 

The action plays out over an ominous countdown of five days to an unspecified cataclysm. Preparations are under way for a grand victory day celebration at a newly constructed Crystal Palace, mysterious sigils keep appearing, psychic forces are building and the mystery deepens page by page.

The art style in this story is closer to a traditional comic book, and it's gorgeously coloured rather than the previous monochrome. It's still phenomenally detailed though, with some stunning sequences of hallucinations and dreams, switching between multiple silent panels and splash pages. The story is more linear than before, but Talbot is happy to take his time in the narrative unlike the traditional comic style that demands that everything be wrapped up in a 23 page issue including an obligatory fight scene. 

In retrospect, it was the right move to take a different approach with this volume both in style and tone, although there are many callbacks and references to it, and the theme contrasts the tyranny of monarchy with its mirror self of the puritan fascism. It would be nice to think (as Talbot concludes) that non-violent resistance will lead to democratic socialism, but, well, that idea is left as an exercise for the reader.

In conclusion, an excellent piece of work, not quite on the same level as the first story, but it really would have been difficult to top that. It's certainly made me want to revisit Alice in Sunderland as well as buying some of Talbot's other books.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright

Graphic novels written and drawn by a single author/artist are perhaps the truest vision of what the form can be. Brian Talbot is certainly one of the best creators working in this medium and this is an excellent example of what is possible.

The book was originally published as a 9 issue limited series between 1978 and 1989, and the slow pace is probably due to the phenomenal amount of detail on each page. The artwork is black ink over pencils in a variety of styles, with a substantial amount of text included, ranging from multiple panels slowing time to a crawl up to large splash pages with surreal and sometimes disturbing imagery. The overall effect is stunning, although occasionally difficult to read. I had the kindle edition which allowed me to zoom in on individual panels and pieces of text as needed.

The story is complex, dealing with parallel universes branching off from a prime original. Luther Arkwright is agent from universe Zero-Zero with powers to move between worlds at will. He has psychic powers and high tech weapons at his disposal to aid his fight against the mysterious Disruptors who are seeking an artefact called Firefrost with the power to destroy the entire multiverse. 

The opening chapters start with an assassination attempt on Arkwright and Rose Wylde, his constant companion across many realities, in a Neo-Victorian London by a Crystal Palace that hadn't been destroyed by fire in 1936. Flashback scenes establish more about Arkwright and his origins, as well as the unfolding plot, before the action moves to an Earth where Cromwell and his descendants had held power since the English Civil War opposed by a band of monarchist rebels.

There are many obvious references to the power of puritan religious fanaticism, but the cult like devotion to the royal cause is scarcely much better. There are many powerful images contrasting the Neo-Fascist Cromwellian rallies with the flag waving iconography of the royals, who evoke images of Boudica sweeping the Romans aside in a bloody swathe. Talbot also draws on multiple mythologies and symbols as Arkwright dies and is reborn with even greater powers before the breathless finale.

Comparisons have been drawn between Arkwright and Michael Moorcock's Champion Eternal character of Jerry Cornelius, and Moorcock himself provides an introduction to this edition where he explains the common roots of both their characters in their shared experience of England in the 60s and 70s. Talbot's work is very much grounded in the England that struggled to come to terms with the loss of Empire and the rise of the Thatcherite right in the 70s and 80s, with the inherent dangers of drifting into the incipient fascism that we see today. 

As well as a deep, metaphysical piece of art, this book also stands as a cracking bit of sci-fi adventure in the best traditions of 2000AD although of a considerably more adult nature (both sexual and violent content) than could have been published in those pages.

Highly recommended!

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I wasn't impressed by the Princess Bride when I first saw clips of it. It looked like a cheap and corny fantasy film, on a par with something like Hawk the Slayer. I was much too sophisticated for family friendly schmaltz like that - I wanted proper fantasy, like Conan the Destroyer! Needless to say, past me was an idiot. 

I think I finally got around to watching it on VHS a few years after its release and it slowly dawned on me that there was a lot more going on here than met the eye. Sure, it was at heart a cheesy fairy tale story of a beautiful girl, a handsome farm boy, a villainous prince and a black hearted nobleman, with pirates, dashing swordsmen, mighty giants and criminal geniuses thrown in. However, it is also very funny, completely aware of its own cheesiness and with an extra layer of meta text added where it turns out the story is being narrated by a grandfather to his poorly grandson, picking out the 'good parts' from a weighty original story with a further twist at the end too.

The original novel by William Goldman, and this 25th anniversary expanded edition in particular, take the meta narrative a step further, with the author explaining how he discovered the original work by 'S Morgenstern' that had been read to him by his father and the realisation that the bed time story had skipped all of the dull bits with kissing and boring stuff. He describes his process of producing the 'good parts' abridged version with interjections in the text to explain what he has left out and why. Why also hear of his many travails in writing the book, the screenplay for the movie, the details of Hollywood life (lawyers! actors! dames!) and his own efforts to share the story with his own son.

Goldman gleefully mixes fictional anecdotes into the story with just enough veritas to make you think that maybe there really were countries called Florin and Guilder with Cliffs of Insanity and Fire Swamps that could be visited today. There's a lovely section where Goldman considers adding an additional scene to the book to cover a crucial chapter left out by Morgenstern, but is forced to remove it by his publisher and then says that any interested reader could write in and request a copy of the missing piece. There was an actual address that you could write to, and in return you would receive instead a letter concerning Goldman's legal wrangles with the Morgenstern estate and their rapacious lawyer Kermit Shog.

The actual story part of the book is hugely entertaining and very funny in places, with many quotable lines and memorable scenes. I particularly enjoyed the famous clifftop duel between master swordsman Inigo Montoya and the mysterious masked Dread Pirate Roberts which happily name checks various Renaissance sword maestros and was one of the reasons that I took up historical swordsmanship so that I could truthfully say that I had studied my Agrippa.

A delicious coda regarding the abridgement of the sequel Buttercup's Baby concludes the book with a line that had me literally crying with laughter on reading it. This is a book that I can heartily recommend, particularly if you have only ever seen the film.

Transition by Iain Banks

There's a tradition with Iain Banks that his sci fi novels are credited using his middle initial as part of his name, whereas his more grounded and literary works are published as by plain old Iain Banks. This book from 2009 is something of a bait and switch then, even though there's a enigmatic line about 'being based on a false story' and the opening paragraph admits to being from an unreliable narrator, being based in the concept of multiple parallel worlds and certain gifted individuals who can transition (or flit) between them by taking control of unwitting hosts for a time.

The rules for the setting are explained in the prologue, much as a stage magician shows that there is nothing up his sleeves as he sets his cards out on the table. We start in our world, sometime between the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the twin towers in 2001, looking forward to a third metaphorical fall in the financial crash of 2008. Our unreliable narrator tells us how the story will end with his death in a hospital bed being smothered by a black clad assailant (or will it?).

We are introduced to other characters and settings - a train on a plateau so high the passengers must wear oxygen masks, an arch capitalist city trader wide boy, someone pitching an idea of finding aliens by looking for strangers at total eclipses (a vanishingly rare phenomenon in our galaxy), a baroque magical university, a torturer and someone sat at a pavement cafe in Paris.

The narrative then splits to follow different (apparently unrelated) characters - a familiar Banksian trick -

• Patient 8262 - a man confined to a hospital bed in a strange asylum where he is hiding from something
• The Transitionary - an individual with the ability to flit between the worlds using a unique drug, taking control of another body for a while to alter the course of history in those worlds in various ways, ranging from subtle changes to brutal (and imaginative) assassinations
• Adrian - an Alan Sugar style East End barrow boy, now on his way up as a rapacious city trader, dealing a bit of coke on the side and very much enjoying the fruits of his labours
• Madame d'Ortolan - the head of a mysterious organisation known as The Concern directing matters across the multiverse, but seemingly concerned more with the byzantine intrigues between different factions in said organisation, notably her arch rival Mrs Mulverhill
• The Philosopher - an operative who uses precisely calculated methods of torture to extract information from his victims

The parallel narratives then play out in alternating sections in each chapter with the links between them slowly starting to become apparent. The final chapter sees Banks weave them all together in a breathless finale with his traditional flourish and a nod towards the opening teaser to keep an element of ambiguity.

Parts of this book are uncomfortable reading. Banks always had a reputation as an 'Enfant Terrible' of the literary world from his very first novel The Wasp Factory. There are sections that deal with sexual assault, loss of bodily autonomy, terrorism and torture, often in gruesome detail. There are also more than a few scenes of 'sexposition' with various characters narrating the plot whilst shagging.

You really have to cut the author a lot of slack that these elements are going to pay off in the end, and given that this is Iain Banks they mostly do. It does get slightly frustrating when each individual vignette finishes and switches to another character though. It doesn't help that some of the characters range from the slightly irritating to deeply unpleasant, making those sections a bit of a slog, before you get back to bits that you are invested in.

There are some fantastic ideas on offer here though, which would make an intriguing setting for a role playing game. As well as the basic power to transition between worlds other powers are introduced -

• Foreseers can predict future timelines
• Trackers can pursue other transitionaries between the worlds
• Blockers can stop someone else from transitioning
• Exorcisers can cast a transitioner out of their host body
• Inhibitors who can dampen other powers
• Randomisers with wild card superpowers

Ideas such as transitioning into a younger body to gain effective immortality and co-transitioning through physical (or sexual, hem, hem) touch are also introduced.

Probably not among the best Banks novels - those would be The Crow Road and Player of Games for me, but an enjoyable read nonetheless.

What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe

Another entry in the humour strand of our book club and one that I'm a bit ambivalent about to be honest. 

The story starts with a potted history of the Winshaws of Yorkshire, an extended family with a crumbling stately home, secrets and more money than they know what to do with. There's a helpful family tree in the prologue showing who is related to who, which serves a similar purpose to those maps in the front of fantasy novels. After an account of one of the family being shot down as an RAF pilot during World War II and the disturbing events of a family gathering in 1961, the story takes an unexpected turn with the introduction of Michael Owen who was taken to see an old black and white horror comedy called What A Carve Up as a treat for his 9th birthday on a rainy trip to the seaside. However, the film (and one memorable scene in particular) proved to be unsuitable viewing for a child and he was taken out of the cinema before the end in tears.

The main part of the book then moves forward to the 80s and 90s, skipping around in time as the lives of each of the deplorable Winshaws is examined. Michael now has access to a video recorder and a copy of the film that evidently had a profound effect on him as a child, and he can now pause and rewind *that* scene to his heart's,  or other parts of his anatomy's, content. He gets to know his neighbour Fiona and forms a bond with her as she tries to understand what is driving him.

It transpires that he was employed to write a family history of the Winshaws some years previously, after an apparently chance encounter on a train with a literary agent. He gets to know the various branches of the family tree, who are all of course doing very nicely out of the Thatcherite 80s. By turns there's Hilary - a sneering newspaper columnist,  a backstabbing politician called Henry, Dorothy - a brutal factory farmer, Roderick - a predatory art gallery owner,  investment banker Thomas and Mark, happily dealing arms to Saddam Hussein and anticipating the gulf war as a business opportunity. 

Michael struggles to form any sort of narrative sense from the despicable behaviour of this family, and it looks like his project is doomed to flounder with him just sending half finished chapters to Tabitha Winshaw who it turns out was responsible for commissioning the book. However, a private detective called Findlay Onyx gets in contact with him with vital clues that start to draw everything together before the final section of the book where Michael is summoned to Winshaw Towers for the reading of a will and a series of events that bear an uncanny similarity to the plot of What a Carve Up.

This book is billed as a satire of the Thatcher years, but the humour is a bit hit and miss. Some sections are nicely done, but other bits feel very forced and not at all funny - there's a tragic twist in the story dealing with the effects of deliberate NHS underfunding by the tories, and the actions of arms dealer Mark are similarly stomach churning. The various strands of the mystery do come together but this feels at odds with the farcical finale. I think my main problem is that we now know that there were much worse people than the Winshaws during that time and up to now, and by and large they are still getting away with their crimes against humanity. Maybe when this was written in 1994 it seemed that we would see the rich being held to account, but I don't think it's ever going to happen.

Pavane by Keith Roberts

This book takes the premise that Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated in July 1588, triggering a civil war between protestants and catholics, allowing the Spanish Armada to land unopposed. Phillip II thus becomes the ruler of England, the protestant Netherlands and German city states were suppressed and the Reformation never happened. The Catholic Church with the Pope at its head then ruled supreme over Europe and much of the rest of the world for the next 400 years

After the prologue setting out the premise, the narrative starts in 1968 in the county of Dorset, very different from our own. Dorchester is still known by its Roman name of Durnovaria, technology hasn't advanced much beyond the Industrial Revolution age of steam and society is still feudal in nature with the great castle at Corfe guarding the gateway to the South West. There are whispers of rebellion in the air as the all powerful Inquisition inflicts brutal punishment on anyone suspected of heresy, and even older legends of things dead and best forgotten are stirring in the shadows.

The story is told through six short stories, originally published separately, with a final coda that adds a twist:

The Lady Margaret

In the world of Pavane the church has strict rules against the use of petrol and diesel, so freight is transported by lumbering steam traction engines hauling road trains through the English countryside. The central figure of this story is Jesse Strange, a haulier driving his engine through a chilly winter landscape. He has had an unrequited love for a landlord's daughter called Margaret for as long as he can remember, and she was the inspiration for the name of his engine. She gently rebuffs his advances and so he takes solace in drowning his sorrows with an old friend who offers to accompany him on the road warning of the dangers of attacks from Norman 'routier' bandits. Of course, this leads to a thrilling Mad Max style chase through a dark and frosty night and an explosive conclusion.

The Signaller

How do you send messages when electricity is prohibited and any form of radio communication is heretical? The solution is a network of semaphore towers, as employed across France during the Napoleonic era, using coded signals to transmit messages as far as the eye can see. Knowledge of the signalling codes is restricted to a guild of semaphore operators and this story follows a young boy as he is inducted into the prestigious company and what happens when he is given his first solo watch at a remote tower. There are more hints of the idea of fairies and "old ones" in remote places here.

The White Boat

A young fisher girl sees a mysterious white boat coming and going in a remote cove near her home, and becomes determined to learn its secrets, even though they may reveal things forbidden by the Church. She sails with the boat for a while and returns to face the wrath of her father and the local priest Father Anthony. This story was a later addition to earlier versions of the book and stands alone, but is beautifully written with layers of metaphor.

Brother John

A talented but free thinking monk, who spends his days as a lithographer designing labels for the beer brewed by his monastery, is seconded to illustrate the practices of the inquisition. He is horrified by what he sees, but he faithfully records the tortures and executions in brutal detail before returning to his monastery as a broken man. He becomes the focus of a religious uprising, with his visions of a new age of technology and reason, but he now has a price on his head and army chasing him down.

Lords and Ladies

The niece of Jesse Strange from the first story sits by his death bed, recalling memories of his life and hers, with the events that led to her being courted by Robert, the boorish Lord of Wessex who practically kidnaps her to his residence of Corfe Castle trying to dazzle her with the luxurious life on offer there. At one point she calls on the Old Ones with unexpected results.

Corfe Gate

The narrative skips on by another generation, this time focussing on Eleanor the daughter of Margaret from the previous story and also calls back to the very first story as well. Eleanor is now the lady of the castle and triggers a rebellion that will shake the region, the country and the church to its very roots. 

 Coda

The final story is set many years on, as a descendant of Eleanor's seneschal visits the ruins of Corfe castle, in a world where technology now exceeds our own. He carries an oddly disturbing message about the reasons for which the church held back technology, which undercuts some of the previous narrative. Some reviewers have said that this part is unnecessary but I think it's keeping with Roberts theme of matters not always reaching easy or neat conclusions. I must admit that I'm looking forward to discussing at our next book club!

This is pure science fiction (with a touch of fantasy), examining the effects of technology on society. In this case the technology is suppressed (for reasons that are only referenced in the coda), but steam and semaphore are still significant drivers, and I suspect that Terry Pratchett had this book in mind when he introduced those things into his Discworld novels.

 

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Sam Vimes is one of Terry Pratchett's most enduring characters in the Discworld series. First appearing in Guards! Guards! as a washed up Captain of the ineffectual night watch, he has risen to be commander of the whole city watch, forming it into an efficient and modern police force, as well as being granted the title of Duke.

As this book opens, Vimes is anxiously waiting for the birth of his first child and chaffing against the irksome ceremonial responsibilities of his elevated position, so when news comes in that a psychopathic murderer called Carcer (already responsible for the deaths of several watchmen) has been cornered on the roof of the Unseen University. Vimes nobly takes personal responsibility for arresting the villain and through a combination of a sudden thunderstorm and high energy magic is somehow transported back in time.

He quickly realises that he is in the Ankh-Morpork of some thirty years previously, shortly after his younger self had joined the Night Watch, and also that he still has a killer to catch. He assumes the identity of John Keel - the man who mentored him as a young watchman - and who has now been murdered. Time is slowly unravelling and bad things are about to happen.

The theme of this book is revolution, with a mad ruler in charge, a secret police force kidnapping people off the streets and a populace about to take to the barricades. What will happen if the events that Vimes remembers from his past don't play out in the same way?

This is an excellent read, with many enjoyable details about everyday police work in a quasi-medieval city. It's also noticeably darker than some of the other Discworld books with fewer groansome puns and outright comedy characters, and the themes of resistance to tyranny being as depressingly relevant as ever.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

 It's a standard trope of alt-history to imagine what might have happened if the Nazis had won the second world war. In this book, the point of divergence is that Franklin D Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933 leading to the Great Depression lasting for longer and ensuring the US remained isolated and ill prepared for war while the Nazis consolidated their hold on Europe. Eventually the Axis powers turned their attention to America with the Nazis conquering the east coast while Imperial Japan took the west, leaving a neutral buffer zone in the Rocky Mountain states. By 1962 the former Axis powers find themselves in an uneasy Cold War with the political situation in Germany uncertain.

Most of this book takes place in San Francisco under Japanese control, with an antique shop owner called Robert Childan selling relics of American history to curious Japanese settlers and a bigwig called Tagomi who wants something to impress an important visiting trade partner. A recently fired metal worker called Frank Frink (hiding his Jewish identity) starts a jewellery business hoping to sell to the same market. Meanwhile Frank's ex-wife Juliana who teaches judo in Canon City, Colorado starts a relationship with a sleazy Italian truck driver who clearly has bad motives. There are Nazi spies at work and events will shake the fragile detente between Japan and Germany.

What really surprised me about this book was the role of the I Ching, where yarrow sticks are scattered randomly to tell the future. Most of the characters use it at critical points for guidance and insight, and its significance only becomes clear at the very end of the book. Another twist is the presence of the book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, banned in most places, with the radical idea that the Nazi victory had not been inevitable and describing a very different outcome to the war. However, this is not a description of our world, but yet another possible timeline where President Rexford Tugwell wisely anticipated the attack on Pearl Harbor and moved the fleet before it could be destroyed. 

The style of the book is clipped and economical, and Dick seems to have been influenced by Japanese poetry with references to waka and haiku forms. There's not a huge amount of plot to write home about, but it's an eerie piece of scene setting with the world as portrayed seeming very plausible. The use of the I Ching also hints at events being pre-destined with alternative choices perhaps branching to different time lines that can somehow be glimpsed. The ending of the book is ambiguous and open ended, and apparently although Dick had planned a sequel he couldn't face getting back into the heads of Nazis like Heydrich again. 

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Although I’ve watched and enjoyed all of the Jeeves and Wooster tv series starring Fry and Laurie, this is my first time reading any of the original stories, and I was looking forward to it. As expected, this book deals with the various scrapes and jams that the estimable Bertie Wooster finds himself embroiled in, usually involving fearsome aunts setting him up with a suitable gel to marry or feckless friends tapping him up for ready cash. However sticky the situation, Bertie is inevitably rescued by his inimitable butler Jeeves, who is “an amazing cove … so dashed competent in every respect”

This book was originally published as a series of short stories in the Strand Magazine in 1920 and 1921, and arranged here to form a narrative with a little bit of rearrangement. Each chapter stands nicely on its own, making for an enjoyable read, mostly with a similar structure involving Bertie’s idiot chum Bingo Little falling hopelessly in love with some unsuitable girl and needing help somehow, or some convoluted scheme involving betting on the length of a Sunday sermon or a school sports day. Another recurring motif is Bertie deciding that a particular item of clothing is de rigueur (colour coded spats and jolly purple socks!) much to Jeeves unspoken dismay.

The stories are all narrated by Bertie with Jeeves remaining as a Machiavellian figure in the background who ‘pours silently’ into a room, quietly fixing things through his network of contacts with the staff of other gentlemen of leisure. I loved the breezy tone of the book and frequently laughed out loud at a particular turn of phrase or farcical plot twist. I’d certainly like to read more of these!

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59254

Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

This book is set in the Yorkshire Dales, with a young couple living in a bleak cottage by a field where nothing grows. They are both grieving for the death of their young son Ewan in different ways, Juliette is convinced that she can still feel his presence in the house while Richard buries himself in his academic work whilst searching the desolate field for ... something. He finds the roots of an ancient tree, digging up the bones of a hare in the process, and searching his late father's journals for clues as to the history of the area. At the same time, Juliette is persuaded by a family friend to engage the services of a psychic to make contact with her child. The narrative becomes fractured, with flashbacks to when Ewan was alive where we learn about his increasingly disturbed behaviour, seemingly caused by the strange voice that he says that he hears in the night time. The truth about Starve Acre is slowly uncovered with dreadful consequences.

No time period is specified for this book, but I imagined it as being set in the 1970s, and it's very much in the folk horror tradition of films like The Wicker Man and the bleak, claustrophobic feel of Hammer House of Horror. I could also imagine this working as a setting for a game like Vaesen with an investigation ongoing while events slowly start to escalate. It's a short book, but taut and effective. The conclusion requires some suspension of disbelief but it worked for me.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré

The book opens in Cold War era Berlin, in the early 60s. Spymaster Alec Leamas has just seen his network of agents systematically eradicated by his opposite number in the East German secret police, Hans Dieter Mundt, with the last one shot dead attempting to cross at a checkpoint. Leamas returns to London to report back to Control, head of the British secret service known as The Circus. However, Leamas has one last job to do, before he can 'come in from the cold' and retire from active duty.

He is reassigned to a low level desk job in the finance section, before being fired for embezzlement and losing his pension rights in the process. He ends up in a menial position shelving books in a library and even a brief fling with a co worker can't stop him spiralling into an alcoholic haze and ending up in prison after assaulting a shop worker.

On his release, he is approached by a charming man, with the offer of a substantial amount of money in return for providing some information about his time in Berlin. It all sounds too good to be true, and Leamas reluctantly allows himself to be recruited as a traitor, handing over details of what he knows about British Intelligence operations.

He is now playing a risky game of bluff and counter bluff as a double agent, in a last ditch effort to compromise the villainous Mundt, but who is pulling the strings? Could the mysterious Smiley, also retired from the Circus, have anything to do with it?

This is a great book, with an air of grubby authenticity a world away from the glamorous trappings of James Bond and his ilk. There are no heroes here, and the agents are more likely to have a cup of tea in a shabby office than a Martini in a casino. The inevitable denouement is a bleak and depressing one. 

Although Le Carré was portrayed in contemporary reviews as an ex spy, the truth is a little different. He was employed as a fairly low level intelligence officer before becoming an author, but all of the details of tradecraft and jargon are purely works of his considerable imagination. He stated publicly that if any of the book was true, MI6 would have blocked its publication. However, the true irony is that because it all seemed so believable, real spies started talking of 'moles' and other terms that he invented, in a genuine case of life imitating art. 

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson was an interesting character - he ran away from school at the age of 13 to become a sailor, developed a series of physical exercises to defend himself against older bullies and also become an accomplished photographer on his travels. He was also notable for handcuffing Harry Houdini as part of a show in Blackburn in such a way that the famed escapologist had trouble getting free. 

His writing career drew on his experiences at sea, with stories of ghost pirates and ships adrift in strange waters, and he also created the character of supernatural investigator Carnacki the Ghost Finder (a clear inspiration for Scooby Doo).

The House on the Borderland was his second published work. In a similar vein to works by Arthur Machen and Robert W Chambers, this is another example of an early weird tale that would prove to be influential on later authors such as HP Lovecraft. The book opens with a framing story of two young men on a fishing holiday in a remote part of Ireland who stumble upon the ruins of an old house and a curious manuscript. 

Said manuscript relates the tale of a reclusive narrator, who had lived in the house accompanied only by his sister and his pet dog. The story becomes dreamlike, with reality shifting and the narrator finding himself in a much larger and more alien replica of his house, under attack from weird swine like creatures. This forms a relatively action packed sequence where he is barricading the house and picking off the intruders with a selection of firearms accompanied by his trusty hound Pepper. After the attack, he investigates a mysterious pit, seemingly the source of the attackers, that then fills with water to form a strange lake.

The narrative shifts again, with the man imagining himself projected far into the future (in a sequence reminiscent of The Time Machine by HG Wells) with the sun wheeling overhead in a blur while everything around him turns to dust. Eventually he witnesses the death of the solar system before somehow returning to his present time (whenever that is)

The book closes with a final horrific twist, in a short but gruesome chapter where the narrator succumbs to some sort of glowing, fungal infection in an effective bit of body horror. 

I enjoyed this book, although the plot is disjointed and inconsistent, there are some remarkable bits of imagery, particularly during the future sequences. I found it slightly irksome that the only female character (the narrator's sister) is silent and plays very little part in the story. 

The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers

This is a collection of short stories written by Robert W. Chambers, published in 1895. The book is probably best known for the first four stories that share a common theme of the eponymous play, so horrific that even looking at the script will send the reader mad. There are tantalising hints of the contents of the play with short extracts of the text and poems hinting at a mysterious entity known as the King in Yellow and his associated yellow sign. The horror aspect of these stories was hugely influential on authors such as HP Lovecraft who incorporated aspects of them into his own Cthulhu Mythos. 

The remaining stories are quite different in tone, some poems, two tales with twist endings, a grim war story set during the siege of Paris in 1870, and the final two concerning the aimless lives of some bohemian American art students in Paris. It's fair to say that I wouldn't have naturally grouped these stories together with the first four, given the wildly different themes and tone of them. 

I would say that this book is worth reading, although the last three stories could easily be skipped and you wouldn't have missed much.

Here's a quick summary of each of the stories in this book

• The Repairer of Reputations

This story in set in an imagined future New York City of 1920, 25 years into the future at the time of writing, making this effectively science fiction. The world described seems a bleak one, with America operating as an Apartheid regime with Jewish people and African Americans excluded. Suicide has been legalised and encouraged through the establishment of publicly available 'Lethal Chambers' for those wishing to end their lives. The narrator of the story falls under the spell of The King in Yellow, becoming increasingly deluded and obsessed, as events progress. 

• The Mask

This one is pretty much a mad scientist story, albeit with the scientist being a sculptor experimenting with a mysterious solution capable of turning any living creature into a perfect marble replica. There is a love triangle between the artist, his friend Alec and Genevieve, the model for his most famous work. This time, Alec is the one succumbing to the deadly play, and while there's no real surprise about the denoument (can we say Checkov's transforming pool?) it's neatly done.

• In the Court of the Dragon

 By now it should be fairly clear that reading The King in Yellow isn't going to end well, and this is a short but grim tale of someone being pursued by a mysterious figure with no escape possible. There is a dream like quality to it, with an appropriately nightmarish conclusion. Probably one of my favourites out of these.

• The Yellow Sign

This is very similar to the previous story, but the nature of the pursuer is more explicitly described, with the victims this time being an artist and his nude model, who he of course is obsessed with. The book this time becomes a sort of forbidden fruit, tempting the unwary before inevitably dooming them. We also get the device of The Yellow Sign itself, a harbinger of doom.

• The Demoiselle d'Ys

This is an interesting story of an American fellow who becomes lost on a desolate moorland in France and is rescued by a beautiful young French woman, out hunting with a falcon, and speaking with an unusual accent. There is a hint of romantic attraction as she takes him back to the castle that she calls home, introducing him to the servants that work for her there. Of course, there is a twist to come, but again it works well in a short story of this length.

• The Prophet's Paradise

A series of short prose poems, that may of may not be linked to themes introduced earlier. I wasn't really sure what to make of these.

• The Street of the Four Winds

Another artist, and another romantic plot of sorts, although in this case it's with a mangy cat that turns up on the doorstep of his garret and inveigles herself into his life with feline ease. This is another short story, that does not outstay its welcome.

• The Street of the First Shell

After the horror, poetry and gothic romances, this story feels wildly different. We have artists in Paris again (check) but this time, we are in Paris in 1870 and the city is under siege, with the inhabitants starving and shells dropping at random into the streets, bringing death and destruction at random. Unexpectedly grim.

• The Street of Our Lady of the Fields / Rue Baree

The last two stories are the longest and thematically similar, dealing with bohemian American art students loafing about in Paris. These are notable mainly for some of the outrageous transliterated French accents that really wouldn't have been out of place on Allo, Allo. I would be hard pressed to say what these ones were about, to be honest.

The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton

Some time in the early years of the 20th century an anarchist and an undercover policeman discuss poetry at a party in a bohemian suburban enclave of London. The policeman inveigles his way into a branch meeting of the anarchist group and, after speaking out, is elected to the central council of seven men known only as their code names of days of the week. Syme, the policeman, is now known as Thursday and must find a way of thwarting the diabolical schemes of the anarchists who seem to be hiding in plain sight preparing to overthrow orderly society with their bombs and knives.

This is a rather odd and unexpectedly funny story, that takes some unusual turns as the policeman Syme tries to work out who he can trust on the council in order to fathom out the true identity of the leader Sunday. Chesterton deals with ideas of rationality, art, identity and of course the conflict between the social order and the chaos of anarchism. The anarchists argues that social change can only come about through throwing a bomb at the king and as this was written just 6 years before Gavrilo Princip did exactly that in Sarajevo, Chesterton seems remarkably prescient.

The final section of the book starts with a wild cross country chase and ends with a slightly ambiguous denouement that reminded me of the finale of the tv series The Prisoner crossed with Philip K Dick’s classic tale of drug fuelled paranoia A Scanner Darkly. The setup would also make for a great one shot player vs player RPG scenario in something like Paranoia with multiple secret identities and conflicting agendas.