HEROES AND VILLAINS - Book review

Angela Carter’s novel Heroes and Villains was published in 1969; my paperback copy was published in 1981.

We’re in post-apocalypse territory, where remnants of rational civilisation reside in steel and concrete enclaves, administered by Professors. Beyond are tribes of marauding Barbarians; while in the surrounding jungles, forests and derelict cityscapes roam the mutilated Out People.

Marianne is a Professor’s daughter, somewhat pampered and spoiled. During a raid by Barbarians, she witnesses the murder of her brother and later, perhaps bored with her predictable existence in her white tower, she is content to escape the strict confines of her ‘home’ and join a handsome Barbarian, Jewel. Perhaps she is partly drawn by the mystery of ‘outside’ – ‘Around the edges of the horizon spread the unguessable forest’ (p4).

Gradually she is accepted by Jewel’s people, especially when their leader, the enigmatic ex-Professor Dr Donally takes her under his wing. They’re nomadic but presently staying in some ruins: ‘This house was a gigantic memory of rotten stone, a compilation of innumerable forgotten styles now given some green unity by the devouring web of creeper, fur of moss and fungoid growth of rot’ (p31).

There are several reasons to read a book by Angela Carter; one of them is her lush prose. ‘She looked out of her window and, in autumn, she saw a blazing hill of corn and orchards where the trees creaked with crimson apples; in spring, the fields unfurled like various flags, first brown, then green’ (p1).

Now exposed to the filthy, coarse and brutal reality of the Barbarian tribe, Marianne realises her romantic attraction to the unknown ‘outside’ has evaporated. ‘When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don’t know which is which anymore’ (p125).

Some (mostly literary) writers destroy suspense and tension by telling the reader in a bald sentence or two what is going to happen and then go into detail to show it happening. Carter does this when Marianne attempts to escape the tribe: ‘but Jewel found her, raped her and brought her back with him’ (p52) Then for a number of pages we work up to witnessing that traumatic event...

It is a well realised hell on earth, with very little room for compassion, and there is no happy ending – how could there be?

Doubtless the book would benefit from re-reading. But I felt the ending was rushed.

Even so, I came away feeling that Marianne had persevered through hardship and was made stronger and life of a sort would go on.

THE GREEN ODYSSEY - Book review

Philip José Farmer’s 1957 debut novel The Green Odyssey is a classic space opera of the period. Astronaut Alan Green (‘Greed conquered more frontiers than curiosity’ (p74) is stranded on a primitive unknown planet and after some minor adventures ends up becoming a gigolo of a duchess and when he’s not busy with her he’s married to a beautiful slave woman, Amra. At court he learns about two other stranded astronauts at a distant city; his hope was that he could get them to take him off-planet. Guiltily he fretted about leaving his wife and two children (one of them being his).

He escapes, hiding on a ship. These vessels are on wheels and driven by sail-power across a vast plain of Xurdimur. His family have stowed away onboard too!

Getting to the city that holds the two astronauts prisoner isn’t easy; Green has to contend with mysterious floating islands, cannibals (‘these painted people were cannibals and made no bones about it’ (p84)) and pirates, the latter involving a battle on the plain reminiscent of two galleons at sea exchanging broadsides. It’s quite an odyssey.

Maybe the start is slow, but it soon livens up, and there’s humour along the way too; stick with it. It is possible that Farmer was attempting a pastiche of science fiction adventure of the period. Certainly he uses too many unpronounceable names (it’s as if he hit the typewriter keys at random):  Jugkaxtr and Zaxropatr (p9), Grizquetr (p20), Inzax and Anddonanarga (p21), iquogr and Zaceffucanquanr (p24), Booxotr (p69).

Farmer is quite inventive, however. This earthman ‘carried in his body a surgically implanted protoplasmic entity (Green dubbed it his Vigilante) which automatically analysed any invading microscopic organisms and/or viruses and manufactured antibodies to combat them. It lived in the space created by the removal of his appendix’ (p32) – an updated variant of the human white blood cells. Like cancerous white cells, however, ‘deprived of food, it would survive by living upon Green’s tissue. A Vigilante wasn’t all advantage; it had its dangers’ (p150).

‘Everywhere that space travelling Earthmen had gone, they had found that about every fourth inhabitable planet was populated by men of their species’ (p34) suggesting that mankind had seeded planets but in many instances had reverted to less technological cultures.

Green is sometimes overconfident and not beyond false modesty, but you can’t help but root for him.

The so-called ‘roaming islands’ (p73) are believed to be mythical – but Green and Amra soon find out that they are real – and to my mind reminded me of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books (2001-2006) which feature mobile steampunk cities – and in a neat twist prove their salvation.

FANTOMAS - Book review

The character Fantômas by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre is a twentieth century literary phenomenon. Published in 1911 it spawned thirty-one sequels. Fantômas, a masked man in impeccable evening clothes is amoral and deadly, a scourge of France and elsewhere.

The book’s co-writers produced twenty sequels in four years; then Souvestre died suddenly of Spanish influenza in 1914. Shortly after the war erupted and Allain fought in the trenches, but survived to produce eleven more Fantômas novels (indeed some six hundred novels and many stories and articles) and married his co-writer’s widow. Besides being a successful pulp writer, he was a compulsive driver of the cars he collected; he died in 1969.

This translation (of 1986) is a modernized version of one published in 1915.

At the beginning of the book Fantômas comes to us fully formed, already notorious and feared by rich and poor alike. ‘... very extraordinary that such mysterious characters as Fantômas can exist nowadays. Is it really possible that one man can commit so many crimes, and that any human being could escape discovery...’ (p19)

It would seem so. The Marquise de Langrune is viciously stabbed in her own home while a number of guests were staying there... and the blame seems to rest on him.

Inspector Juve is pressed to drop all his other cases and investigate the murder of the Marquise. He is a master of disguise, which enables him to go places where a detective would be suspicious. Yet, to compound matters, Fantômas is also proficient at concealing his identity and taking upon himself more than one as it suits his purpose. And so the manhunt begins!

In common with most potboilers, the pace quickens and there’s an urge to keep turning the pages.

There are a number of twists – in identity and revelations and the intelligent and persistent Juve nearly gets his man more than once. Yet ultimately, he must fail – as have so many other senior detectives on the trail of fictional villains. The difference here is that there is no Poirot, Holmes or Templar to bring the miscreant to justice.

The final pages of the book are intense and grim, which is to be expected, since the introduction tells us, ‘Fantômas has no redeeming traits; greed and vengeance are his chief motivations...' (p5). Whatever the reason, his appeal still seems strong after so many years.

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY - Book review

G K Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, subtitled ‘A Nightmare’ was published in 1908. It’s a strange beast, part thriller and part ‘melodramatic moonshine’ as Chesterton called it shortly before he died in 1936. It’s amusing and frustrating and is known to have influenced a number of authors.

Poets Gabriel Syme and Lucian Gregory squabble about the relevance of poetry and the prevailing scourge of anarchism – perhaps influenced by Conrad’s The Secret Agent published a year earlier.

Gregory takes Syme to a secret underground meeting place of anarchists. Here they meet five members of the London branch of the Central Council of New Anarchists – each member is given a codename of a day of the week. There is a vacancy for Thursday: ‘he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow’ (p31). Gregory is hoping to be elected as Thursday; however, Syme is appointed instead. The President of the Council is not present; he is called Sunday. Each individual is distinctive with often amusing descriptions.

The attendees are unaware that Syme has been recruited to the New Detective Corps ‘for the frustration of the great conspiracy [anarchy]’ and given a small blue card on which was written ‘The Last Crusade’ (p49).

For much of the book there lingers an air of sinister mystery. ‘The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight’ (p49). Sometime later Syme – now Thursday – is to meet the President. ‘Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the headquarters of hell’ (p56).

Friday – a very old man, Professor de Worms, was decrepit – ‘in the last dissolution of senile decay (p59). ‘Another hateful fancy crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off’ (p60).

Chesterton has a good descriptive style, and employs telling phrases from time to time. ‘His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision’ (p63). ‘Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming lamps irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and fallen world’ (p87).

‘The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood they had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool. The inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows. They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the dizziness of a cinematograph... this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the daylight outside) seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days...’ (p116/117) Indeed, a Kafkaesque world.

Syme is determined to prevent an anarchist outrage on the Continent and thus is pitted against other members of the Council of Seven Days. This is the best part, the thrill of the chase. There are several twists (which become somewhat laboured and silly) and then there is the ending – an ending signposted by the subtitle, an ending all tyro writers are warned to avoid.

This arguably surreal book has been widely praised – Kingsley Amis said he read it every year – and is categorised as fantasy in more than one respected fantasy encyclopaedia.

EARTHWIND - Book review

Robert Holdstock’s followed his science fiction novel Eye Among the Blind (which I read in 1982) with Earthwind which was published a year later in 1977.

The main character is Elspeth Mueller, a lone black Earthwoman who is presently living and studying with the Stone Age natives of Aeran, an alien planet. She is sharing a low-roofed cawl with the young native Darren; all the natives are fur-clad save for their faces above the jawline.

Holdstock is inventive. The natives are naked, as is Elspeth – except for her leather mocks (moccasins); their village is a crog; ‘... her calves were covered with white blisters where yellowspins had fed on her during her light sleep. The blisters were not the result of the bites but her body’s immune reaction to the whip-like parasites that the yellowspins had injected into her’ (p7); she regarded like a nue – hairless humans of either sex (p8) who dwell in the snowlands; blackwings which are huge leathery avians who provide food, bone weapons and decorative garments. Elspeth joins Darren in an exhilarating hunt of blackwings – employing tangleweed as whip-cum-lasso and finally celebrate their success by ‘hanging’ – ‘she didn’t know whether or not she liked the idea of having sex whilst dangling from two whips’ [suspended in trees] (p21). Indeed, she considered that the Aerani ‘communicated, cooperated with and utilised nature without precipitating some drastic ecological change’ (p66).

Elspeth spent her childhood in ‘the sprawling metropolis of New Anzar on Pliedase IV...’ and suffered ‘the ritual mastectomy...’ (p25) which involved sewing two red jewels on her in place of breasts! (This brutalisation is not adequately explained; yes, it’s a ritual, but why?) Later, at some point she volunteered to join a team going to Earth for an archaeological restoration programme in Western Europe. ‘After a three hour war of some centuries before, much that was of historical interest was still buried beneath dust, sand and rubble...’ (p72).

There’s a lot of theorising about the Aerani culture. ‘But imagination is reason’s worst enemy’ (p23).

Another protagonist is shipMeister Karl Gorstein who is on a mission for the Electra, the invaders who have taken over Earth. His ship is the Gilbert Ryle (named after the British philosopher (1900-1976) who coined the phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’. Gorstein is tasked with studying the colony on Aeran and reporting back. He is aided by the ship-board rationalist, Peter Ashka, who uses the oracle to guide the entire crew. The oracle was in effect the tao: ‘Everything is related to everything else, overlapping, intertwining, matter and time as products of the structure of the great tao, each man a fragmentary side effect of that same structure...’ (p37).

It’s probable that Holdstock was influenced by Fritjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics (1975) which I read in 1980 when studying Psychology: Capra contended that “Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.”

In her studies of rock-markings made by the Aerani culture, Elspeth encountered a rare triple spiral which Darren said it identified the Earthwind (p51). Now she had an absolute goal, to locate the source, the Earthwind... Elspeth’s several discussions with Ashka are almost mind-blowing: to paraphrase one chat, the special triple spiral appears on many ancient taoist works of art – one spiral = ching or change, the second is the shen, the luminous inner spirit, and the third is the ch’i, the moving vitality – which is in us all (p78).

The leader of the Aerani consults their oracle – the Earthwind – and while there are surprising similarities, they ultimately are destined to conflict, especially when Elspeth discovers the distinct nature of Aeran and its effect on the humans on its surface.

Holdstock tinkers with memory, time-displacement, and psychic energies. When a character states ‘it began to make sense’ (p73) that depends on several factors, not least the reader’s attention!

He clearly hadn’t finished with the conundrum of time; he tackled it with his 1977 novel Where Time Winds Blow.

Robert Holdstock died in 2009, aged 61, leaving behind an incredible output of fiction and non-fiction.

Editorial comment:

Always a problem, this: ‘What was happening to him, she wondered?’ (p155) Of course, it should read What was happening to him? she wondered. The word-processor automatically capitalises ‘she’ so it needs changing. Or alternatively, leave it as: What was happening to him? (The context should show who is doing the wondering.

 

NO LESS THAN THE JOURNEY - Book review

E.V. Thompson’s novel No Less Than the Journey was published in 2008. To all intents and purposes it’s a western

The epigraph is ‘I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars’ from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: ‘the poet implied in the scheme of things a blade of grass is no less important in its way than the stars in the heavens’ (p331).

The tale primarily concerns young Cornish miner Wesley Curnow who has arrived in the United States in order to seek out his uncle who is working in the mines in Missouri and find work. On his way he befriends US Marshal Aaron Berryman. While sailing on the riverboat Missouri Belle the pair get to know two Mexican women working at the casino tables – Anabelita and Lola – and become close...

Wes’s journey takes him to the mountains where he learns to handle a sixgun with the help of mountainman Old Charlie, and then travels to a number of towns where he puts the guns to use helping the innocent.

The geographical and political background sound solid – some ten years after the end of the Civil War, and the characters are interesting but I wasn’t invested enough in Wes or Aaron. The writing is not as involving or as descriptive as his earlier works, the people are not as fleshed-out as others he has created. Still a worthwhile read, but having enjoyed several of his books, this one didn’t grab me nearly so much.

Sadly, the novel pales in comparison to Thompson’s other book set in the West, Cry Once Alone (which I read in 2012). I felt that there was too much repetitive explication. The ending seemed rushed – and while it may have given a nod to the stark realism of those days, I found it was unsatisfactory. Four more of his books were published after this; two of them in the year he died (2012) aged 81.  

(The cover, while well-painted, seems slightly off; the saddle doesn’t appear to have a cantle; Wes wore a gunbelt with two holsters, none of which is in evidence; the cowboy is wearing chaps but at no time was this apparel worn by Wes...)

Editorial comment:

Thompson relates how the Missouri Belle sailed the river at night. Yet as a rule riverboats didn’t attempt passage at night, it was too dangerous – hidden snags and rocks had claimed too many boats over the years.  (Explained in my book Death for a Dove...)

PHANTOM - Book review

Susan Kay’s second book, Phantom, was published in 1990 and reprinted twice in 1991. It’s the tragic retelling of Erik, the Phantom of the Opera, from birth until death. It was inspired by Lloyd Webber’s musical of 1986, the source novel by Gaston Leroux (1910) which I read in 1987, and an animated cartoon of 1967.

The book is a first-person narrative by several people: Madeleine (1831-1840), Erik’s mother; Erik (1840-1843);  Giovanni (1844-1846), an Italian stonemason; Nadir (1850-1853), the mysterious Persian; Erik (1856-1881); Erik and Christine (1881); and Raoul (1897).

Erik was born in France and was severely disfigured – possibly Lon Chaney’s makeup has come closest to the true depiction. His mother made him wear a mask at all times and yet she still struggles to love him. Strangely, he exhibits uncanny intelligence with a facility for music, languages, architecture and creative art. The boy’s singing voice is almost otherworldly, yet his mother is affected adversely: ‘His voice is a sin... No woman who hears it will ever die in a state of grace’ (p36).

At about eight years of age he runs away and eventually joins a circus where he is treated abysmally for three years until finally he escapes to wander the rest of Europe. He falls in with the aging stonemason Giovanni who takes him on as an apprentice. Disaster follows and we next find him in Persia, being employed by the Shah as an architect and magician. (Yes, he has mastered prestidigitation too). Here, he is embroiled in court intrigue – ‘the Persian court was not a place where a wise man took his eyes off an enemy for a single careless moment’ (p198). Finally, he was drawn to Paris: a public competition had been held for the plans of a new Opera House. He befriends the competition winner and is involved in the construction so that he not only knows intimately the place they build but also the special secret access doors he has engineered as well. The stage is set for Erik to meet Christine and vie for her affections with her rich fiancé Raoul.

Kay has managed to give us the voice of each narrator with conviction. Even though knowing it will all end in tears, I could not put the book down. Kay captures Erik’s prodigious learning capacity for architecture, magic, and music: ‘Music was the secret sanctuary of my soul; music was my god, the only master I would ever serve again. I wished I could build a monument to its glory... an opera house perhaps...’ (pp320-321). The Paris Opera House opening night was on 5 January 1875, with the spectacular chandelier installed.

Erik’s relationship with Nadir, the daroga of Mazenderan is both moving and intriguing, as the Persian was fearful of Erik and yet in awe too: ‘I found that I no longer thought of him as a cold and heartless monster’ (p230).

Christine, as we know, becomes mesmerised by Erik’s voice – the Angel of Music – and falls under his spell. Thus the tragedy’s final act begins.

I too fell under the spell of Kay’s writing, living – even if briefly – the lives of the several narrators.

THE CHASE - Book review

Clive Cussler’s novel The Chase is the first in his Isaac Bell historical series. Published in 2007, it is mainly set in 1906. The prologue ‘The Ghost from the Past’ features an elderly Bell in 1950 as he witnesses the recovery of a railroad engine from a lake in Montana. The epilogue ‘Up from the Depths’ returns to this scene too. Certainly, the prologue does tend to provide us with a spoiler for the final stages of the adventure, which runs under the title of ‘The Chase Quickens’; the intermediate section is labelled ‘The Butcher Bandit’.

In January 1906, a solitary bank robber gets away not only with his loot but also with the cold-blooded murder of the bank staff. This wasn’t his first robbery, however; it happened to be the fifteenth successful robbery he had committed, actually killing thirty-eight men and women and two children (p18), and thus gaining the infamous sobriquet the Butcher Bandit.

The head of the Van Dorn Detective Agency commits his agent Isaac Bell to track down and apprehend the notorious bandit. Bell already has a solid reputation as a thief-taker: ‘... tracked down Big Foot Cussler...’ (p52). Bell is an engaging and attractive character.

Cussler not only name-drops himself. One of Bell’s new contacts in San Francisco is a young boy called Stuart Lauthner (p332); this is the name of Cussler’s biographer (though he misnames him on the next page as Warren,,,!)

Inevitably, being an enthusiast, Cussler knowledgeably writes about fast cars and trains of the period. He comes across the chief train dispatcher called Morton Gould; I don’t know why he’d want to use the composer’s name (1913-1996).

During his investigations Bell makes friends with a secretary called Marion and it seems romance might be in the air... There is also a fantastic cross-nation drive against the clock, an unfortunate death, and dollops of suspense and action too.

Cussler’s familiarity with the period shines through this fast-paced cat-and-mouse adventure, with two formidable villains and the startling backdrop of the tragic San Francisco earthquake, which is well described.

When the final page is turned, it’s nice to know that there are other adventures of Isaac Bell to enjoy! Next in the series: The Wrecker (2009). Like a number of other authors, such as Bernard Cornwell and C S Forrester, Cussler wrote his Bell books out of chronological order – in effect, filling in gaps in the hero’s earlier history. Chronologically, two later Bell books come before The Chase: The Striker (2013) and The Assassin (2015), covering the periods 1902-1912 and 1899-1908 respectively).

Editorial comment

Chapter 2 is dated September 15, 1906 and relates how Bell is tasked with tracking down the bandit. Unfortunately, it should be 1905. Since the denouement takes place in April, 1906!

‘The posse claimed there were no tracks leading out of town to follow’ (p112) – which seems odd. There must be plenty of tracks leading out of town – unless the road surface is metalled, of course. In which case, it would not be worthy of comment.

A number of full-page black-and-white illustrations have been inserted; but the artist doesn’t appear to be credited.

SALT IS LEAVING - Book review

 

J.B. Priestley’s 1966 novel Salt is Leaving was first published as a Pan paperback original and attained a second printing in the same year.

From the first page, I was drawn in by the story and the writing style. The last novel of his I read was Saturn Over Water in 1980, which I found impressive. I still have five more of his books to read.

It begins in a Midlands bookshop owned by Mr Edward Culworth, Maggie’s father. Recently returned from London and a failed three-year affair, Maggie is helping at the shop. At times ‘Maggie felt she was quite attractive, but there were other times, and now more and more of them, when she was almost sure she was just a thick, dull lump’ (p9).

This particular day, however, her father doesn’t appear at the shop – and before long she realises he has ‘gone missing’, something he has never done before. Maggie lives with her parents and brother Alan, a University lecturer in physics.

Dr Lionel Humphrey Salt, a widower, is also concerned about a missing person – one of his patients, Noreen Wilks. At the last consultation he prescribed medicine for her liver problem. If she didn’t take the life-sustaining drug, she would die. Salt is about to depart from the town after seven years and has already been relieved in his GP role; however, he wants to locate Noreen before he goes.

Salt makes enquiries at various places, such as the George Pub: ‘The counter was thick with high blood pressures and potential coronaries, either shouting at one another or at the waiter and the barmaid’ (p24).

A link is made between Noreen and Dr Salt. So Maggie approaches the good doctor. ‘He seemed the oddest mixture – one minute sleepy, simple and rather sweet – the next minute hard and ruthless’ (p46).

Salt takes her to meet a local nightclub owner, Buzzy Duffield, who has contacts and owes the doctor a favour or two... Buzzy is quite a character – ‘He was wide and fat and bald, with an enormous face on which his features merely seemed to be huddled together in the middle’ (p47). He also exhibits a verbal tick, uttering Bzzz from time to time, but not often enough to become tedious.

Another contact they encounter is Jill Frinton, ‘A classy handsome piece – and about as soft and tender as a sheet of high-duty alloy’ (p51).

A daughter of a local big-wig and benefactor is Erica Donnington: ‘no hat but a lot of hair that needed washing, and was an expensive slut with a long loose face and body’ (p102).

Before long, Salt is approached in a heavy-handed manner, suggesting he should depart from the town immediately. ‘Somebody wants me to clear out of Birkden... simply because I’m asking questions about Noreen Wilks’ (p53).

Salt is well travelled, having served in Burma, then lived and worked in the New Territories, Hong Kong, in North Borneo, Penang and Singapore before returning to England. He’s forthright, persistent, brave, and a student of human nature. ‘When they’re deliberately lying, most people can’t maintain a steady tempo. When the big lie comes, either they hurry a little or slow down. There’s a change in tone too... With the early lies, when they feel they’re getting away with it, there’s a faint faint note of triumph, the impudence begins to show’ (p72).   

The interplay between Salt and Maggie is one of the book’s strengths.

Priestley throws in the occasional social comment in an amusing manner, such as: ‘There was no longer a railway connection between Hemton and Birkden, the nearest large town, apparently in order to make the road between them even more congested with buses and cars’ (p13). The town names are fictitious.

As the puzzle unfolds for the odd pair, sex, drugs and corruption figure though not too graphically for the reader.

The cover (artist unattributed) is excellent: Priestley refers to the ‘maze that finally turned into a high road’ (p5); the cinema ticket and the hotel room key are relevant, as is the rag doll.

A light quick read.

A PLACE IN THE HILLS - Book review

The novel A Place in the Hills is Michelle Paver’s second book, published in 2001.Though 523 pages, it’s a quick read. It’s a time-slip novel paralleling lives in Rome in 53 BC and in France in the 1980s.

It begins in 53BC in Rome during the festivities of the Day of Blood: ‘The air was thick with the smell of balsam and trampled roses, and the salty, metallic undertow of blood’ (p12). Among the crowds are a Roman officer, Gaius Cassius Vitalis, who is also renowned as a poet. His eye has caught the attractive figure of a young woman, Tacita, daughter of Publius Tacitus Silanus, one of the oldest clans in Rome. There is a mutual attraction, though a relationship is quite impossible due to their different stations in society. ‘One long look and I was brought down. She entered my blood.’

Then we briefly shift to 1972 in the French Pyrenees where Toni, eight-year-old daughter of archaeologist Charles Hunt is being bloody awkward, unlike her sister Caroline. Charles is determined to locate clues to back up his theory that the poet-soldier Cassius lived here, at the so-called Source. A book quotes Cassius writing ‘I know a place in the hills where the gods walk the earth’ (p334). In a lucid moment Toni realises that the only way she can win her father’s devotion is by becoming an archaeologist herself.

Next, we move to 1988 and meet a poor American, Patrick McMullan, who is joining his rich university friend Myles Cantellow. Myles is with Antonia Hunt, working on an archaeological site with her father, Charles. Also on the site is eight-year-old Modge (short for Imogen) and Antonia’s half-sister Nerissa.

Myles is not a likeable character. He ‘belonged to the fast set, which took hard drugs, was far too cool to do any work...’ (p51).

Against her father’s wishes, Antonia wanted to prove that Lycaris – the woman Cassius referred to in his love poems – ‘was not some dry poetic construct, but a living woman whom he had loved with all his heart’ (p365).

The dig is claustrophobic, passions are in conflict, there’s a love triangle, a misguided Modge who has a crush on Patrick, an intransigent father, and a tragedy that changes everything, and all seems lost for almost fourteen years.

The parallels between the past and the book’s present are mainly quite subtle – whether that’s a love-bite on Cassius’s neck, a piece of broken pottery in Tacita’s hand, or the convoluted relationships of the characters.

Perhaps there was too much gratuitous swearing. Despite that, the characters’ emotions and the (admittedly all-too brief) slices of ancient Rome are well realised. The writing style is good and Paver’s descriptions put you in many a scene.

And there’s a satisfying end.

 

SINGLE & SINGLE - Book review

John le Carré’s novel Single & Single was published in 1999 and deals with the world of finance after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, though of course it’s much more than that!

It begins in the present (1998) with Mr Wisner, a lawyer who worked for the finance company the House of Single & Single, facing the gun-toting Alix Hoban in Turkey. Wisner is aware that Hoban is affiliated to the Single firm and cannot understand why he is being held at gunpoint. It’s no spoiler to record that Wisner is shot dead (since it’s in the blurb!) A bit of a mystery.

Another mystery is in the form of Oliver Hawthorne. He’s is a peripatetic magic man, a conjuror, but there seems something unusual about his identity and past. He is wanted urgently by his bank manager (they had them in 1998, apparently).

Other mysteries include a Russian freighter being arrested and boarded in the Black Sea. And the disappearance of the Head of Single & Single, ‘Tiger’ Single, father of Oliver.

Mysterious Nat Brock is called in to investigate Mr Wisner’s purported suicide. He is not what he seems, a British Customs Officer...

Four years earlier, Oliver absconded from the firm of Single & Single when he discovered that his father was involved in financial chicanery with the Russian underworld, including money laundering and the dubious sale of Russian blood transfusions to America: ‘Human Blood is a Commodity – US Federal Trade Commission, 1966’) His conscience wouldn’t permit him to continue in the business, so he, ‘the idealist, the walk-in of all time’ contacts Brock...

Brock uses Oliver undercover and debriefs him when he can. ‘He had a priestly tone for these occasions. It went with a deep-felt sense of caring. When you take on a joe, you take on his problems, he would preach to his newcomers. You’re not Machiavelli, you’re not James Bond, you’re the over-worked welfare officer who’s got to hold everybody’s life together or somebody will run amok’ (p203).

‘Wasn’t that awful for you? Discovering your own dad was a crook and all?’ (p187). Reading this, I was reminded of Le Carré’s earlier masterpiece, A Perfect Spy, whose titular character, Rick Pym, was based on Le Carré’s own father, Ronald Cornwell. There’s the same love-hate relationship between father and son, and the exposure of flawed character.

Even though married with an estranged wife, Heather, and daughter, Oliver is not averse to carrying on an affair or two. His love-life might be described as ‘complicated’. ‘How is she, darling?’ Katrina cut in, with the special concern that mistresses evince for lovers’ wives’ (p213). Judging from the most recent revelations about his own affairs, the author definitely knew what he was talking about...

Oliver has returned from hiding to discover the whereabouts of his father. Not only for himself, but also to help Brock. It's a story of betrayal and redemption.

There are plenty of telling phrases and paragraphs one comes to expect from Le Carré, such as:

‘His eyes were water-pale and empty, and it was the emptiness that scared her: the knowledge that whatever amount of kindness anyone poured into them it was wasted. He could be watching his own mother dying, he wouldn’t look any different, she thought’ (p287). And: ‘Tractors sticking like slugs to their smear-trails’ (p322). And also: ‘White stubble grew where his brown hair had been, and it had spread over his cheeks and jaw in a downy silver dust’ (p3223).

And there are many varied characters to engage the reader’s attention throughout, not least Brock himself, his wing-woman Aggie, the beautiful but fragile wife of Hoban who is attracted to Oliver, the Russian dealers Mirsky and Yevgeny.

Considerable exposition is thrown into Chapter Seven, with lengthy unrealistic speech paragraphs, which slows down the narrative and causes the eyelids to drop...

Le Carré nearly always tends to play with the tenses. For this book, the narrative is past historic when detailing what is happening ‘now; for the flashbacks, he employs the present tense to depict past events and conversations!

The ending is tense and full of suspense (though not as good as The Night Manager in that regard) but I found it a little rushed. On the whole, however, it was a satisfying read.

UNCOMMON DANGER - Book review

Eric Ambler’s second thriller Uncommon Danger was published in 1937 (though my Fontana paperback shows the copyright as 1941...). 

The story begins with a Prologue at a board meeting of the Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company in London. There are concerns about the renewal of oil concessions in Roumania. Bessarabia has been a contested area between Russia and Roumania since the Great War, mainly due its vital oil fields. ‘The party’s policy is a familiar one – anti-Semitism, a corporate state, an alliance with Germany, and the “saving of Roumania from the Jewish and Communist menace”’ (p123). The company chairman has a solution – it involved recruiting a certain Colonel Robinson to set things straight. ‘It was the power of Business, not the deliberations of statesmen that shaped the destinies of nations’ (p87).

Russian double-agent Borovansky has stolen Russian plans for a possible attack on Bessarabia, which, if made public, will generate anti-Russian feeling in Roumania and bring the Fascist Iron Guard to power who will then make an alliance with Nazi Germany. Incognito, Borovansky boards a train...

Meanwhile, Russian spies Andreas Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara are tipped off and commission a Spaniard, Ortega, to pursue Borovansky on the train, follow him to his hotel in Austria, and get the plans back.

Freelance journalist Desmond Kenton has had a bad run of luck gambling and boards the same train on his way to find a pal in Vienna who might supply him with funds. He meets a Mr Sachs. Kenton’s money troubles seem resolved when Mr Sachs asks him to deliver some papers across the Austrian border, paying handsomely – and then Kenton’s troubles begin!

An amateur hero out of his depth, Kenton discovers a dead body, is hunted as the murderer, and joins up with the two Russian spies in an attempt to obtain the incriminating plans/photos and clear his name.

In the process, Kenton is captured by Colonel Robinson (in actual fact assassin-for-hire Saridza). ‘You see, your business man desires the end, but dislikes the means... That is why Saridza is necessary... there is always dirty work to be done... and he and his kind are there to do it, with large fees in their pockets and the most evasive instructions imaginable’ (p121).

Boldly, Kenton tells Saridza, ‘It’s not just a struggle between Fascism and Communism, or between any other “-isms”. It’s between the free human spirit and the stupid, fumbling, brutish forces of the primeval swamp – and that, Colonel, means you and your kind’ (p84)

It’s a fast-paced adventure with Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara providing mystery and tension, while the villains are truly villainous.

Another excellent Fontana paperback cover