THE DARK FRONTIER - Book review

Eric Ambler’s debut novel The Dark Frontier was published in 1936, when the master was still learning his craft.

It’s an unusual treatment, beginning with a statement by Henry Barstow, physicist, in which he claims that he has no recollection of being involved in certain events April 17^th and May 26^th of 193-. Apparently the American journalist William Casey believes he can fill in the blanks.

Then we’re into Part One – ‘The man who changed his mind’; third-person narrative. An arms manufacturer called Simon Groom approaches Barstow, asking him to travel to the eastern city of Zovgorod in the small country of Ixania (both fictionalised ‘for security reasons’), where they can locate a certain scientist, Kassen, who has invented an atomic bomb. Groom wants the weapon’s blueprints for his firm and needs Barstow to verify their accuracy. Initially, Barstow declines. However, some time later, Barstow is involved in a motoring accident and he sustains a head injury. From the moment of his recovery he believes he is Conway Carruthers, a British secret agent: ‘he was of that illustrious company which numbers Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, Arséne Lupin, Bulldog Drummond and Sexton Blake among its members’ (p31). Interesting that Ambler does not refer to Simon Templar, the Saint: Charteris’s first Saint novel (Meet the Tiger) was published in 1928 and by 1936 had established a best-selling reputation. Maybe the style Ambler adopted was similar to Charteris’s at this point, especially the dry humour: ‘It also boasted the dubious honour of being  the best hotel in the place, a distinction reflected more in the magnitude of its charges than in the comfort of its accommodation’ (p79).

Then, roughly half-way in, we come to Part Two – ‘Revolution’ which is narrated in the first person by Casey. To complicate matters, there is the beautiful and alluring Countess Magda Schverzinski: ‘She desires power and glory for Ixania. The peasants ask no more than food for their bellies’ (p161).

The transformation of Barstow into Carruthers is amusing and well done. There are sufficient bad guys wielding guns to inject tension, and escapes and car chases – all the ingredients of thrillers that would follow over the years.

Ambler’s use of the atomic bomb as an Alfred Hitchcock MacGuffin was quite prescient, and would be replicated by subsequent thriller writers.

An enjoyable adventure, worth reading.

Editorial comment:

There are a number of typos which presumably have survived since the original publication. (Agreed, we all suffer from them – but you’d think that some editor would pick them up eventually).

In addition, Casey went for his usual walk on May 3^rd – yet this is related in the chapter that covers 11-21 May... (p176).

One annoying trait of some writers is to tell us something happened before it has happened, thus destroying any suspense. In this case Casey reveals on p184 the deaths of three characters who do finally die later (p209 or thereabouts).

The editor should have corrected this: ‘I saw the flash of a shot in the grounds and a shout’ (p140). You can’t see a shout. The insertion of ‘and heard’ would fix it.

GALLOWS THIEF - Book review

Bernard Cornwell’s 2001 historical novel Gallows Thief is yet another rip-roaring fast-paced enjoyable read.

Set in England a short while after Waterloo we find retired Captain of the 52^nd Regiment, Rider Sandman, in need of work for his late father left his family with massive debts. Another problem for Sandman is his proneness to quick temper: ‘His soldiers had known there was a devil in Captain Sandman... he was not a man to cross because he had the temper as sudden and as fierce as a summer storm of lightning and thunder’ (p54).

The Countess of Avebury, previously an opera dancer, was killed while having her portrait painted. The artist, Charles Corday, was accused and found guilty of the murder. However, his mother has the ear of the Queen and the Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, is tasked with ascertaining without a doubt that the guilty verdict is sound. Sidmouth hires Sandman to investigate. Sandman was a man of principle and, after an interview with the condemned man, he came away not liking him but believed in his plea of innocence.

Sandman is an excellent cricketer, but he is reluctant to play as the game is spoiled by gambling and cheating. ‘He refused to share a carriage with men who had accepted bribes to lose a match’ (p27). The early – underarm bowling – history of cricket is one of many fascinating snippets Cornwell provides: with even a discussion on adopting overarm bowling (p270).

There are several characters – Sally Hood and her brother the highwayman Jack, Sergeant Sam Berrigan, Eleanor Forrest, Sandman’s ex-fiancée, and the Reverend Lord Alexander; the latter has been studying the flash language – for example the many words for a pickpockets, from cly-fakers to buzz-coves. Flash language for a gallows thief is someone who deprives the hangman of his victim (p195).

As Sandman is attempting to prevent a hanging, there is considerable detail about the capital punishment of the time, much in graphic imagery. Needless to say, many innocent individuals ended up on the gallows; however, the majority of those condemned had their sentences commuted to transportation to Australia.

A hero of Waterloo, Sandman recalls his time in Spain, notably when he was saved from French cavalry by a Greenjacket officer and his half-dozen riflemen – clearly, an allusion to Sharpe and his chosen men (p338).

Can Sandman obtain proof of Corday’s innocence before the fateful hour? It’s a race against time and powerful adversaries who prefer the artist to hang.

As ever, Cornwell has created a believable sordid benighted world of that period, complete with crisp dialogue, humour both dark and ribald, and with strong characters. Highly recommended.

Note:

Bernard Cornwell acknowledges a debt to Donald Rumbelow and his book The Triple Tree (1982). I met Mr Rumbelow, previously a London policeman, in the 1970s at Swanwick, where he gave a talk about his book The Complete Jack the Ripper. 

THE SECOND SLEEP - Book review

Robert Harris’s 2019 novel The Second Sleep is most intriguing and certainly kept me reading.

It is set in 1468 when we meet the young priest Christopher Fairfax on his way to the remote Exmoor village of Addicott St George. The local vicar, Father Lacy has recently died and Fairfax is to conduct the funeral rites and sort out the dead clergyman’s possessions.

‘(Fairfax) was always hungry, yet he remained as thin as a stray dog. His body seemed determined to make up for all the food it had missed during the years when he was at the seminary’ (p41).

Fairfax is disturbed to find that Lacy was not only an amateur archaeologist investigating fragments from the pre-Apocalypse time, which is deemed heresy by the powerful Church, but also harbours a large collection of forbidden antiquarian books.

Worse, in the dead vicar’s display cabinet were examples from his unearthings: ‘coins and plastic banknotes from the Elizabethan era... a plate commemorating a royal wedding, a bundle of plastic straws... toy plastic bricks all fitted together of vibrant yellows and reds... one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate...He turned it over. On the back was the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it’ (p23).

‘Centuries earlier, as part of its rejection of scientism, the Church had rooted out the heretical modernised texts of the time before the Apocalypse’ (p32).

Fairfax discovers a letter written by a Nobel laureate, Morgenstern, written in 2022 – a pre-Apocalypse date. In this missive he warns that civilisation and science-based life could collapse if any one or more six catastrophic events occurred, among them climate change, a nuclear exchange, a pandemic... ‘All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is’ (p58).

By now, Fairfax is sorely troubled. ‘He wished he could unsee what he had read, but knowledge alters everything, and he knew that was impossible’ (p62).

It’s clear that Fairfax is in our future, following an apocalyptic event that destroyed most of science as we know it. The calendar was reset after the Apocalypse so that it started in the year 666, the number assigned to the Beast of Revelation. Eight hundred years in our future.

There is a standing army, in conflict with the Northern Caliphate, an Islamist enclave; but this is not really touched upon in any detail...

‘The drive was a track, no better than the lane. Waterlogged potholes, smooth as mirrors, held blue fragments of sky, and curved in a glittering archipelago for a hundred yards until they disappeared behind a pair of ancient cedars’ (p92).

‘As it opened, (the door) dragged in tendrils of ivy that clutched at the doorposts as if the house was reluctant to allow these rare visitors to escape’ (p114).

Fairfax teams up with Lady Sarah Durston, a widow. Her husband, Colonel Durston, had also been interested in excavating items owned by the ancients, notably near the mystical Devil’s Chair on a nearby hill. Sarah has an unwelcome suitor, the gruff mill-owner Hancock.

These three hook up with a heretic, Shadwell, who provides his version of the past: ‘these devices were small enough to be carried in the palm of one’s hand; that they gave instant access to all the knowledge and music and opinions and writings in the world; and that in due course they displaced human memory and reasoning and even normal social intercourse – an enfeebling and narcotic power that some say drove their possessors mad...’ (p158)

Perhaps the message here is that, despite human hubris, no matter what the calamity that befalls, humanity will survive.

As ever, Harris’s prose is a delight to read, and, for me, his characters came alive, especially with regard to the relationship of Sarah, Fairfax and Hancock. There are other individuals in the tale, all finely drawn, perhaps with a nod or two to Thomas Hardy. And there is a twist or two in the plot.

Sadly, I found the ending disappointing. But that cannot detract from the pleasure of meeting the characters and of the actual journey the book took me on.

Editorial comment:

Visually, we should have been aware of Fairfax’s beard on the first page, rather than the third.

CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK - Book review

The first Amelia Peabody novel, Crocodile on the Sandbank, was published in 1975.  I read her third and sixth adventures (The Mummy Case and The Last Camel Died at Noon, respectively) in 2001, and enjoyed them immensely. Thereafter I collected four more adventures over the years but have only now got round to reading them. There are twenty books in the series.

Narrated in the first person by Amelia, it is a light-hearted period piece beginning in 1880: her father has died, leaving her a wealthy woman – she was ‘visited by streams of attentive nieces and nephews assuring me of their devotion – which had been demonstrated, over the past years, by their absence... A middle-aged spinster – for I was at that time thirty-two years of age, and I scorned to disguise the fact – who has never received a proposal of marriage must be a simpleton if she fails to recognise the sudden acquisition of a fortune as a factor in her new popularity. I was not a simpleton. I had always known myself to be plain’ (p4).

Elizabeth Peters gets the tone just right – an emancipated and forthright woman in a man’s world.

She was keen to travel, her ultimate destination being Egypt. While en route, in Rome her chaperone, Miss Pritchett fell ill and returned to England. By chance, Amelia helps a destitute young woman in the street; Evelyn Barton-Forbes has been ruined and abandoned by her callous lover Alberto: ‘She was English, surely; that flawless white skin and pale-golden hair could belong to no other nation... The features might have been those of an antique Venus or young Diana’ (p10). Evelyn becomes Amelia’s companion and they travel to Egypt. Evelyn ‘was too kind, and too truthful. Both, I have found, are inconvenient character traits’ (p77).

Amelia needed to obtain certain supplies to sail on the Nile. ‘If I had not been a woman, I might have studied medicine; I have a natural aptitude for the subject, possessing steady hands and far less squeamishness about blood and wounds than many males of my acquaintance. I planned to buy a few small surgical knives also; I fancied I could amputate a limb – or at least a toe or finger – rather neatly if called upon to do so’ (p44).

Before long the pair encounter two archaeologists – the Emerson brothers: gruff, bearded irascible giant Radcliffe and the amiable Walter. Radcliffe Emerson reminded me of Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger.

It is obvious that Amelia and Radcliffe spark off each other, two strong wills competing: ‘Peabody had better retire to her bed; she is clearly in need of recuperative sleep; she has not made a sarcastic remark for fully ten minutes’ (p242).

Her nursing skills are needed more than once. ‘I tore up my petticoat in order to fasten his arm to his body so that it would not be jarred unnecessarily. He had his wicked temper back by then, and made a rude remark. “As you would say, my lord, it is just like one of Mr Haggard’s romances. The heroine always sacrifices a petticoat at some point in the proceedings. No doubt that is why females wear such ridiculous garments; they do come in useful in emergencies’ (p168).

The Emerson dig is sabotaged, there are strange, possibly supernatural, things going on, and Evelyn seems at great risk... An enjoyable historical romance and mystery.

Elizabeth Peters is the pen-name of Barbara Mertz and also wrote as Barbara Michaels; she received her PhD in Egyptology in 1952. She died in 2013, aged 85.

CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS FROM MALTA - Book review

 

Clandestine operations from Malta and the French Resistance connection in Tunisia is a fascinating book by Frederick Galea, Platon Alexiades and Adrien Abraham, published by Wise Owl Publications in 2023.

It does what it says in the title, complete with many black and white photographs, and covers the period 1938 to 1943 in considerable detail.

In the Second World War Malta was vital to the Allied effort, serving as a staging post for espionage and submarines against the Axis forces in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. That was why, at great cost in lives, convoys were sent to bolster the islands during the terrible air onslaught by the Italian and German forces.

Many vital clandestine missions were undertaken, among them beach reconnaissance of Italy and Sicily – the latter for Operation Husky (a secret protected by Operation Mincemeat no less), sabotage of railways and bridges and factories, intelligence gathering, anti-shipping with underwater chariots, commando raids, extraction of agents, and diversions. These efforts, notably by the agents in Tunisia (who were in contact with Malta) aided the detection and destruction of Axis shipping, thus denying important replenishment supplies for Rommel et al.

The beach reconnaissance efforts impressed Lord Mountbatten and led to the creation of Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPP) – they trained at a secret base on Hayling Island, Portsmouth. They used chariots and folding boats (folbots) that could be easily transported by submarine and get through the boats’ forward hatches.

Agents were flown from Malta to Tunisia to set up a French Resistance network. Every flight was fraught with tension and suspense.

Remarkably, planes took off from Mildenhall in Suffolk, flying through the night and, after covering nearly 1,600 miles, much of it over occupied France – to deliver sabotage units, such as X Troop to Malta. For example, in February 1941 X Troop flew from Malta in six Whitworth Whitleys and parachuted into the Genestra area and seriously damaged an aqueduct; inconveniencing the Italian troops and locals and affecting morale.

The authors quote witnesses to many of the events; sources are provided at the back of the book.

Many of the agents and other personnel involved in transporting them received honours post-war – some posthumously.

SECRETS OF MALTA - Book review

 

Cecily Blench’s second historical novel Secrets of Malta was published in 2024. It is set in 1943, primarily in Malta but also in London, Tunisia and Egypt; there are flashbacks to Syria in 1926.

The dreadful plague of air-raids on Malta has lessened by now.

As the title suggests, the story involves intelligence activities of the Allies against the Axis forces. Dennis Pratchett is sent to Malta to root out a suspected mole in the intelligence community of Malta. ‘Chap called Morton runs our networks in North Africa and he’s got several operatives who go back and forth’ (p20). Pratchett’s senior, Sir Harold informs him the suspected agent was active in the last war and used the code-name Nero; and the man was believed to be responsible for a couple of murders in Europe before the war. The presence of Nero in Malta at this critical time is most serious – for reasons that will be explained in the book much later...

Margarita is a cabaret singer in Valletta; she has just ended an affair with Henry Dunn. Mrs Vera Dunn accosts Margarita in the night club and reveals that Henry has gone missing. There is no animosity between them; indeed, they seem sympathetic towards each other.

In 1926 Vera was one of four young archaeology students working on a dig in Syria for Professor Curzon. The relevance of these flashbacks only becomes significant as the book progresses.

Now, Margarita is courting a submarine officer, Arthur. Several submarines are involved in covert missions, landing spies in Tunisia, which was recently occupied by Axis forces.

The two women conduct their own investigations, and secrets are revealed...

Vera is a pragmatist: ‘Nothing does more to stimulate one’s sex drive than a war’ (p131).

The author has captured the period and the situation both in Malta, Tunisia and in Syria. Her characters provoke interest throughout. There were some clever misdirections, too; which only seems appropriate in a book about spying and deception!

Perhaps more could have been made of the awful destruction from the almost continuous bombing of 1942, and the stoic response of the inhabitants; but that’s a minor quibble.

I kept turning the pages; it was a quick read, made enjoyable because the setting was familiar.

Editorial comments:

‘Arthur had complained that Malta had no beaches, but Margarita had taken him to one of her swimming spots, where they swam off warm rocks...’ (p59). I’ve heard this nonsense before. There are plenty of sandy beaches on Malta!

There are a lot of ‘sighs’ and ‘sighing heavily’ – which do not detract from the reading pleasure; but perhaps the editor could have addressed some of them.

‘Her eyes brushed past and then returned to settle on him’ (p366). To avoid the surreal image, it would read better if ‘gaze’ was used instead of ‘eyes’!

NOBODY TRUE - Book review

James Herbert’s 2003 novel Nobody True is another excursion into ‘life after death’ with a similar dark tone to his earlier book, Others (1999).

It begins intriguingly with the sentence ‘I wasn’t there when I died’ – which echoes his epigraph at the front of the book: ‘It’s not that I’m afraid to die. It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens – Woody Allen’.

As he grows up the narrator, James True, realises that he can induce an ‘out-of-body experience’. This is akin to remote viewing. Apparently, he was absent from his body when he was murdered in a hotel. He now finds himself a floating soul, able to fly and view but not able to touch or feel anything in a physical sense.

His back-story is interesting. He studied graphic art and went into advertising. In one of several footnotes he mentions those adverts which are so clever yet the brand name goes unnoticed. Herbert was writing from experience as he studied at Hornsey College of Art and went into advertising.  Eventually, True starts his own agency with his friend Oliver and marries Oliver’s ex-girlfriend Andrea, and they have a daughter Primrose. The firm and their marriage seem successful.

After about seven years of marriage, the city is alarmed by a vicious serial killer who, when we encounter him, proves quite terrifying. The killer is blamed for James True’s murder, apparently.

True has to take time to adjust to his new life as an invisible non-physical entity. Gradually, he gets on the trail of the killer. Along the way in this page-turning book there are many twists and turns, littered with broken trust, guilt and greed.

Herbert brings to the fore much of his esoteric knowledge about the supernatural, including Kirlian auras. Long before the end, James True is belaboured with dreadful and hurtful revelations, to the point where he asks, ‘Was nobody true to me?’ (p482).

Classic Herbert and with an ending as poignant yet strangely as uplifting as that of Others.

Editorial comment:

‘Andrea kept her voice low, only the gravity of its tone reaching Prim and I on the sofa’ (p158). Of course that should read ‘Prim and me’.

AFTER THE ACT - Book review

 

Winston Graham’s suspense novel After the Act was published in 1965.

Playwright Morris Scott has been married for seven years to Harriet, a rich older woman, his muse, who suffers from ill health. Over those years she supported and encouraged him: ‘You ought to be relentless, Morris. Relentless to writing it down. Once the bones are there you can drape them and undrape them at will’ (p63) And now he is successful and planning for one of his plays to appear in Paris.

It had not been planned. ‘I was a man going to meet a girl, surrounded only by the anticipation, tautened like a bow-string with pleasure’ (p17). Inevitably, he has an affair with Alexandra Wilshere, a secretary to a rich couple in France. Passion, obsession... ‘We walked on the quay and walked together through the little town, which was murmurous with people. Cars probed the narrow streets like medical isotopes in a bloodstream...’ (p67)

A budding writer could learn from some of Morris’s observations:

‘Half of writing is gestation’ (p26).

‘You have to be tough to reach the top in any profession these days. Stamina’s an essential part of genius, whether you’re a four-minute miler or a composer of symphonies’ (p27).

‘How easy it is for a writer to lie, the inventions spring to his lips’ (p47).

The suspense deepens when Harriet falls to her death from a Paris hotel balcony. Was it an accident, or murder, or carelessness? ‘We all make mistakes; the error is in trying to hide them’ (p197). That phrase could well be the epitaph of many a politician’s career! The fact is that now Morris is free to wed Alexandra. If his conscience will permit it. ‘To be honest around a central lie is like building a house with the foundations unlevel’ (p135).

Graham the craftsman has delved into life, death and guilt. ‘The sun set. Dusk crept in like the beginning of death’ (p191).

Editorial note:

‘a passionate unsophisticated fumbling in the dark... among the heather and the bickering cicadas’ (p75). Long ago I was corrected: cicadas make their noise in the hot day, crickets make their noise at night, and this seems borne out by my time in Spain.

TO HAVE AND TO HOLD - Book review

 

Mary Johnston’s classic novel To Have and To Hold about love and intrigue in seventeenth century Virginia was published in 1899.

Beginning in 1621, it’s a first-person narrative by Captain Ralph Percy; his cousin is the Lord of Northumberland (which happens to be my home county, where I now live!)

Johnston’s prose is of its time, naturally, but easy to read, and her descriptions are excellent, such as that for preacher, Jeremy Sparrow, a giant of a man: ‘his face, which was of a cast most martial, flashed into a smile, like sunshine on a scarred cliff’ (p16). Another example: ‘Each twig had its row of diamonds, and the wet leaves we pushed aside spilled gems upon us. The horses set their hoofs daintily upon fern and moss and lush grass. In the purple distances deer stood at gaze, the air rang with innumerable bird notes, clear and sweet, squirrels chattered, bees hummed, and through the thick leafy roof of the forest the sun showered gold dust’ (p48).

A ship from England has brought a number of women for betrothal to boost the numbers in Jamestown; the usual purchase price is a quantity of tobacco, to pay for the passage. Ralph Percy is not particularly keen but finds himself defending the honour of one of the women and then determines to wed her there and then. Her name is Jocelyn. Impulse purchase, perhaps.

Later he learns that she is Lady Jocelyn Leigh and was a ward of the King. But when she learned she was to be betrothed to Lord Carnal, the sovereign’s favourite, she fled the Court and embarked on the ship destined for Jamestown, one among the many women.

Nearby are friendly Indians, including the Powhatans and the Paspaheghs. ‘The Indian listened; then said, in that voice that always made me think of some cold, still, bottomless pool lying black beneath overhanging rocks...’ (p123). Yet the friendship is strained...

Yet Lord Carnal soon arrives in the settlement, hell-bent on taking Jocelyn back to England with him. He is a man who gets what he wants, even if it means killing.

There is suspense – when Lord Carnal attempts to drug Ralph – and humour with the irrepressible Preacher Sparrow. Johnston is sympathetic to the Indians, too: ‘Why did you come? Long ago, when there were none but dark men from the Chesapeake to the hunting grounds beneath the sunset, we were happy. Why did you leave your own land, in strange black ships with sails like the piled-up clouds of summer? Was it not a good land? Were not your forests broad and green, your fields fruitful, your rivers deep and filled with fish? Ill gifts have you brought us, evil have you wrought us’ (p336). And there is fighting and action aplenty, and a piratical interlude as well. Betrayal, love, humour and honour – all are here. And some of the action actually occurred – a slice of history.

Despite its age, To Have and To Hold this remarkable book of adventure is a page-turner and can rank up there with the novels of James Fennimore Cooper.

Johnston died in 1936, aged 65. The book has been adapted for film three times, most recently in 2014 featuring Aiden Turner.

MAIGRET AND THE IDLE BURGLAR - Book review

 

Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Idle Burglar was published in 1961 and translated in 1963 from Maigret and the Lazy Burglar.

It’s winter in Paris. Maigret has been called out to a murder and his wife advises him to ‘dress up warmly. It’s freezing hard’. Simenon captures the scene with a few pen-strokes: ‘Drawing back the curtain, he saw frost-flowers on the window. The street lamps had the special brightness that only comes with intense cold, and along the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir there was not a soul to be seen or a sound to be head – just one lighted window, in the house opposite; must be someone ill there’ (p3).

The call-out is unofficial as this is Inspector Fumel’s case.

Fumel’s marriage is on the rocks and he has a mistress. He ‘always had a soft spot for women, in spite of all the trouble they had brought him’ (p114)

Maigret is still fuming about how the Ministry of the Interior organisation has changed – ‘the whole bunch of college-educated law-givers who had taken it into their heads to run the world according to their own little ideas’ (p3).

The face of the dead man was bludgeoned. However, Maigret recognises a tattoo. Eventually, the man is identified as a burglar who Maigret had interviewed on several times. Maigret’s superiors are eager to dismiss the killing as an underworld vendetta, something the police should not concern themselves with: ‘Let ’em kill one another, down to the last man. That’ll save the hangman trouble and the taxpayers money’ (p52). Besides, it was not his case. They were more anxious that he track down the perpetrators of several post office robberies.

As usual, there are a number of fine turns of phrase from Simenon; here’s one: ‘Typewriters clicked like falling hailstones’ (p105).

While leading his team to track down the robbers, Maigret also spends time on finding out who was responsible for killing the burglar. In his investigations he meets a number of interesting characters, all sympathetically described.

Editorial comment:

Maybe changed in translation, but I thought that capital punishment in France at the time was not by hanging but by guillotine (two were executed by this method in 1961). The death penalty was abolished in 1981, ratified in 2007.

ON WINGS OF SONG - Book review

 

A strange book, this. Critically acclaimed yet a commercial failure, Thomas M Disch’s science fiction novel On Wings of Song won the 1980 John W Campbell memorial Award. It was published in 1979.

The first part relates Daniel Weinreb’s childhood in twenty-first century town of Amesville in Iowa, whose strict Christian Right regime of the Undergoders prohibits almost all music. ‘Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts?’ (p111).

With a friend he sneaked away and crossed the border to watch a musical movie. ‘This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh’ (p31).

Daniel’s world changes when his minor rebellion – in the form of circulating a radical newspaper – condemns him to the local prison at Spirit Lake. He is fourteen. While here, he hears prisoners play music. ‘... there seemed to be this difference between the language of music and the language of words: it didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie’ (p52). The prison is without bars – for each prisoner carries an electrically controlled explosive in his stomach (after a fashion, pre-empting the Rutger Hauer 1991 movie Wedlock).

Daniel, like many people, is aware that with the help of special apparatus providing some kind of feedback, the users can fly when they sing. In essence, the singer’s body stays fixed to the apparatus but the ‘soul’ – or referred to as the ‘fairy’ – floats away, something like remote viewing which was postulated and seemingly adopted by Ingo Swann in the early 1970s.  Daniel is captivated by this idea and is determined to learn to sing and then to fly...

Released from prison, he becomes friendly with Boadicea, the daughter of local tycoon Grandison Whiting, usually referred to as Boa. Inevitably, they fall in love. ‘... and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy... the moment when he had felt needles of light piercing his and Boa’s separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer’s profusions’ (p152).

National shortages – due to many factors including terrorism – affected the people in New York and elsewhere. Chris Moor's cover illustration depicts the decadent milieu Daniel is embroiled in. There’s a poignant episode where a body builder cannot obtain his proteins either legally or on the black market: as his muscles waste, he deteriorates and ‘he blew out his brains’ (p241).

A great deal of musical knowledge is displayed, notably operas. Eventually, Daniel does learn to sing. Bearing in mind that some aspects of the novel can be construed as a bitter satire, the ending is probably apt, though I didn’t like it.

As may be gleaned from the above quotations, Disch was also a poet. The writing is very good. Sadly, Disch suffered depression after the death of his life-partner Charles Naylor and about three years, in his New York apartment, later he shot himself. He was 68.

Editorial note:

‘The table was set and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers in the living room’ (p139). Presumably there were no fertilizers in the living room. This should read: ‘The table was set in the living room and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers’.

ONE MORE SUNDAY - Book review

 

John D. MacDonald wrote many standalone novels, besides twenty-one books in his popular Travis McGee series. One More Sunday is one of them. Published in 1984, it concerns the Church of the Eternal Believer – a big fundamentalist business using all the tricks of the religious trade.

Reverend John Tinker Meadows is the leader now; Matthew, the founder, his father, is in the throes of dementia. ‘But the face was like a castle where once a king had lived, a castle proud and impregnable. But the king had left, the pennons were rags, the gates open, moat dry, and an old wind sighed through the empty corridors’ (p56). Alongside John is his sister Mary Margaret, strong and devout.

The New York Times considered the book ‘highly topical and controversial’. John’s sermon at the outset probably justifies that comment: ‘Once upon a time our nation was great. Now we sag into despair. The climate changes, the acid rains fall, the great floods and droughts impoverish millions, taking the savings of those who thought they could be provident in these times. We see all our silent factories, all the stacks without smoke, like monuments to a civilization past. Selfish owners refused to spend for modernization. Selfish unions struck for the highest wages in the world. We see rapist and murderers and armed robbers turned loose after a short exposure to that prison environment which gratifies all their hungers and teaches them new criminal arts. We see an endless tide of blacks and Hispanics entering our green land illegally, taking the bread out of the mouths of those few of us still willing to do hard manual labour’ (P11) – and so on...

Ray Owen is an investment broker taking leave from his work. He is trying to find his missing wife, Lindy, who had been writing an article on the Church of the Eternal Believer for her New York magazine Out Front.

Glinda Lopez works for the Church, using a voice synthesiser, imitating Matthew Meadows, and telephones Church members delinquent in their tithes.

Joe Deets is a computer nerd – and clever. He has programmed the computers to cream off some funds donated to the Church. He is also a sexual predator of young women. ‘There was a beast in a cage in the back of his mind, in the shadows, pacing tirelessly to and fro, showing only the glint of a savage eyeball, the shine of a predator’s fang’ (p43). He was presently indulging himself with Doreen, one of the Church’s ‘Angels’.

The Meadows family lives well, travels first class, and have their own jet planes. All thanks to the generous donations.

Within these pages you’ll find hypocrisy, greed, pathos, anger, murder, redemption and hope.

MacDonald masterfully presents a fairly large cast of characters, all individual, each with their own past and failings, their hopes and dreams.

Not much has changed in the last forty years since this was written.