THE HERRENHAUS FORFEIT - Book review

 

Paul Phillips’s second book in the ‘Chasing Mercury’ series, The Herrenhaus Forfeit was published in 2024 and continues the story begun in The Borodino Sacrifice. Certainly, the books can be read independently, though it’s preferable they’re read in sequence.

Former US Army sniper Sam Bradley is being recruited by the shadowy character Doyle to chase down the Mercury outfit headed by Mila to discover what they were seeking. ‘Bradley’s sense of nausea increased. It was the motion sickness you got from the long, inescapable slide to inevitability... The thing about the long slide, the thing that let you cope with the dread of its inescapable outcome, was that wrapped up in the motion sickness was something else. Exhilaration’ (pp36/37).

Again, we tour the detritus of post-war Germany as we follow Bradley who has infiltrated a gangster group involved in smuggling whatever brought profit in the black market, while also dodging Nazis and Soviets. ‘There had been a serious lack of accommodation in Hamburg since the night the world had learned a new term: firestorm’ (p88).

As before there are many instances where Phillips conveys a scene with a minimum of description:

‘... a heavy vehicle had recently ploughed the neglected crust of mouldered mud and frozen leaves’ (p116).

The plot is convoluted, involving competing groups in a maelstrom of geo-political upheaval. There are double-crosses, betrayals and heroism, and death stalks nearby most of the time. Friendships are forged as are identity papers. There’s a sly name-change from Pfeffer to Salzen and a couple of fascinating character descriptions of middle-aged Marjorie Jessop and conniving Jack Penny. It’s not without humour; for example, when Bradley attempts to help some associates pretend to be Americans, ‘Most importantly, he handed out the Wrigley’s.’ (p159).

The blurb – and the previous book – indicate that Mila is searching for a lost child, which is not easy considering the mortality of children in the war-torn continent. ‘Before adoption, all Aryanised children were renamed, to bury their old identities, and welcome them as lifelong members of the race’ (p126). Though slight of stature, Mila is tough and determined – an irresistible force (p180).

Without telegraphing any spoilers, the forfeit of the title is referred to on p139 – it’s a kind of deal between Mila and some gangsters, where neither party actually trusts the other.

I felt the involvement of the criminal underground was inspired and realistic, the kind of thing that Len Deighton would have attempted. A number of chapter-endings reminded me of Adam Hall’s Quiller books where the protagonist would face a serious predicament at the end of a chapter and then in the next chapter he/she is Scott-free and the reasons are divulged after the event; it works well.

Mila and Sam are a great team.

Needless to say, in due course I shall be reading the third book in the trilogy, The Safehaven Complex.

Editorial comment for the benefit of writers:

‘... bring the leather doctor’s bag...’ (p95). This should read ‘bring the doctor’s leather bag’ or ‘bring the leather doctor’s-bag’ to avoid the perception that the doctor was made of leather.

‘She hissed “Now!”’(p174)  – there’s no susurration here, which is necessary for a hiss. Maybe whispered harshly or grated would be better?

HARVEST OF THE SUN - Book review

E.V. Thompson’s third book in the Retallick Saga Harvest of the Sun was published in 1978. It’s a direct sequel of Chase the Wind. 

Josh Retallick and Miriam Thackeray with their young son Daniel are sailing to Australia when their ship is wrecked off the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa.

Their small party encounter the Bushmen who have survived in the harsh land and climate for thousands of years. At times of prolonged drought the Bushpeople would abandon newborn babies in order that the mother would survive. (p59).

Next they befriend the Herero tribesmen where they find a German missionary, Hugo Walder, whose ‘capacity for loving his fellow-men was as large as the frame that held his great heart’ (p98).                   

Josh, Miriam and Daniel live with the missionary and the Herero. They become hardened to the land and its people, treading with care where the neighbouring chief Jonker is concerned. And there is the chief’s vicious ally, the Boer Jacobus Albrecht to contend with as well. ‘Africa is a restless continent, ever changing and shifting in moods – a vast rumbling pot-pourri where fortunes swirl this way and that, like the sand shifting before the four winds’ (p133).

As this is a saga, the narrative – third-person omniscient – spans the period from the early 1840s to 1858. The family also befriends a Jewish trader Aaron and his daughter Hannah. By the time Daniel is seventeen he is an experienced tracker and good shot with a rifle. There are mining opportunities for Josh here too. Inevitably there are clashes between Jonker’s people and the Herero and Josh and his family are caught in between. The reader soon cares about these characters as they overcome a succession of travails, not least the neighbouring Zulu tribesmen, successors to the mighty Shaka. Sadly, good people succumb. Also, past events in their saga have a tendency to rear up and bite. There’s tension, suspense, humility, humanity, physical and geographical conflict, and great insights of the period and place. Indeed, Thompson repeatedly puts the reader in the scene and does not shirk from revealing the unpleasant gruesome aspects of the time along with the raw beauty of the land. This is history and as such needs no trigger warnings.

Any fans of H Rider Haggard or Wilbur Smith would appreciate this saga. The next instalment is Singing Spears (which I read out of order in 1990 and was the first Thompson book I’d read – and clearly not the last).

CHASE THE WIND - Book review

E.V. Thompson’s second book in his Retallick saga, Chase the Wind, was published in 1977 and won the Best Historical Novelist Award. In the chronological story sense it’s the sequel to Ben Retallick (1980) though clearly the first book in the series was published three years later!

The story is written in the omniscient viewpoint in order to provide the thoughts and actions of assorted characters, and works well, pulling the reader into the saga.

Set mainly in 1840s Cornwall, it begins with young Josh Retallick down the copper mine of Wheal Sharptor – the same mine his father worked in. Ben, aged 35, was reckoned an “old man” by mining standards. ‘It was an era when a miner who had seen his fortieth birthday below ground was something of a rarity’ (p8). They worked hard, digging ‘deep into the bowels of the earth, raising mountains of rubble around their shafts’ (p65).

Josh is being taught to read and write by the local preacher, William Thackeray, a good man who ‘was concerned for the souls of his people... he saw no reason why they should suffer unnecessary hardships in this life in order to enter the same heaven to which their far more comfortable employers were bound’ (p61).

It’s the time of the Corn Laws that created a cost-of-living crisis for the working men and women, a time when unionism was being advocated at great risk to those who espoused it. ‘The shortage of corn had been growing steadily worse throughout England. It had not been helped by the government laws which prevented corn being imported, in a misguided attempt to protect the interests of the farmers’ (p64).

For many years as youngsters, Josh had been a play friend of Miriam Trago, a wild child. But Josh had to put childish play aside as he was going away on an apprenticeship to become a mine-engineer. While on his apprenticeship he befriends Francis Trevithick and is not slow to grasp the nettle of new inventions, always seeking greater efficiency and increased safety.

Miriam is given some advice by the preacher: ‘You must find a man who recognises that a woman is capable of thinking for herself – a rarity in these parts, I’m afraid’ (p130). Before long Miriam was thinking for herself all right – vociferously saddened and angry at the lot of a miner’s wife. If her husband died in a mine, she was cast out of her cottage within a month. Her future might be the poor house or selling herself to drunken miners to feed her children. ‘That’s the system her husband gave his life for’ (p155).

Not all the mine owners are despots; some are considerate with a conscience, and it’s Josh’s fortunate lot that he works for such men. But the odds are still stacked against him and tragedy strikes more than once to contrive the separation of Josh and Miriam before they can truly be together. The preacher becomes a zealot for unionism, though ‘He’s the spoon as does the stirring, not the pot as sits on the fire’ (p349). Betrayal, conflict with the armed forces of the law, love and death, trial and retribution create tension for the reader. The pages fly by as the denouement closes in.

A very satisfying historical novel that puts you there, with believable characters, which impelled me to pick up the next book in the series to find out what happens – Harvest of the Sun.

Ernest Victor Thompson died in 2012, aged 81.

Editorial comment (for the benefit of writers):

‘Where are we?’ he asked as he swung his legs to the ground (p104). This scene is indoors so the ‘ground’ should read the ‘floor’. A common error to be found in a number of books.

‘(Josh and John) galloped past the bridge...’ (p353). Having written several westerns, I have tussled with this ambiguity. Of course the rider isn’t doing the galloping, but the horse is; maybe instead it could read ‘They led their horses in a gallop past the bridge’. A quibble, really; we know what is meant.

LOVE - Book review

Angela Carter’s slim novel Love was published in 1971 and revised in 1987. In her new Afterword she states that the three main characters are ‘the pure perfect products of those days of social mobility and sexual licence’ (p113). Sadly, the characters themselves are not perfect – far from it.

 Annabel is psychologically unstable: ‘a sparse, grotesquely elegant, attenuated girl with a narrow face and hair so straight it fell helplessly down around her as a mute tribute to gravity. She had prehensile toes that could pick up a pencil and sign her name. She stole’ (p27).

Her husband is Lee: ‘Annabel was quite incomprehensible to him and he already knew she was unbalanced; yet his puritanism demanded he should be publicly responsible for her. He was overcome with conflicting apprehensions’ (p30).

Lee’s brother Buzz ‘had been grievously exposed to his mother’s madness’ (p13) and lived with the married couple. ‘Their mother’s madness, their orphaned state, their aunt’s politics and their arbitrary identify formed in both a savage detachment’ (p11).

It’s a distinctly destructive love triangle tainted with infidelity, self-loathing, suicide, jealousy and a split from reality for impaired souls. The kind of fractured relationships Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine indulged in most effectively.

At one point Lee is interviewed by Annabel’s psychiatrist, ‘She was dressed entirely in black and lavishly hung about with hair of metallic yellow. Her eyes were concealed behind tinted glasses and her voice was as if smoked also, dark-toned and husky’ (p55).

With few pen-strokes Carter effectively inhabits the damaged trio. And of course her prose is always readable, the writing of an astute and acute observer:

‘... and old men sit outside in shirtsleeves on kitchen chairs, as if put out to air upon the pavement. On the low window ledges, one might find, here, a pie set out to cool or a jelly to set, there, a dreaming cat’ (p11).

‘the peeling walls, bare and lopsided staircase, fissured linoleum underfoot, foetid accumulated reek of years of greasy cookery’ (p91).

‘He felt nothing but the absence of feeling which is despair’ (p100).

Indeed, it won’t end well.