RECOLLECTION OF A JOURNEY - Book review

R.C. Hutchinson’s novel Recollection of a Journey was published in 1952; this edition 1983.

Several of Hutchinson’s novels are about a journey – the human journey through life, with its entire vicissitudes, and this book is no exception. It’s narrated by Stefanie Kolbeck, looking back as an old woman to a time in 1940 when Poland was invaded by the German Army and then by the Soviets. ‘One’s memories of childhood are seldom clear visually’ (p9).

In 1940 Stefanie is pregnant. She has a young daughter Annette with her as she boarded a train to escape bombardment, accompanied by her father-in-law, Julius; they’re returning to the Kolbeck family home, Setory. Her ex-husband Casimir had absconded and she had since wed his brother Victor who was in the Polish army.

History tells us that the contest was uneven, though the Poles fought valiantly. ‘These Prussians, and those barbarians on the other side, they suppose they can make an end of Poland by seizing our people and crushing their bodies; they think they can bury the whole history of our nationhood, make us forget our own tongue...’ (p29). ‘We get our greatness from suffering’ (p227).

When the Germans fled and the Russians took over, life didn’t improve for the Kolbecks and the villagers nearby. ‘All the official guidance we had came from the area propagandist, one much lower in intelligence than most of his kind’ (p224) who extolled the superiority of freedoms enjoyed in the Soviet Union...

The descriptions of the family’s constant upheaval, the privations, the move from one labour camp to another, are thoroughly immersive; the reader is there, sharing this first-person narrative. We view scenes in detail through her eyes. ‘... the image of that session remains upon a separate page of my memory, like a photograph in a family album; blurred at the edges now...’ (p55).

Julius’s ageing father was with the family for a while. ‘... even if he was in physical pain his clouded eyes would be faintly lit with amusement over something scratched from his mind’s vast field...’ (p109). ‘... but in their pinched and cheese-white faces I saw the settled apathy of those to whom life is only death’s postponement’ (p109).

When the family and the villagers are herded towards the train and its cattle trucks the imagery seems totally real: ‘It was light too feeble to reach ourselves. In the darkness where we stood we were only spectators of a shadow play that was at once unreal and oddly sinister, where a waving arm would suddenly protrude from the black sierra, where the glint from a bayonet showed like a falling star’ (230).

Amidst hardship, loss, brutality, ignorance, and death, Stefanie learns compassion and perseverance. ‘The heart, I think, which may be convulsed by lesser griefs, is an instrument too finely made to respond at once to the highest charge of sorrow; it will vibrate a little, and that vibration must continue through the years before the charge is absorbed’ (p121).

Throughout, the novel reads like Stefanie’s autobiography, revealing the suffering of innocent casualties of war, displaced, traumatised and exploited, with great observation, imagery and prose:

‘He did pause for a few moments, as if some breeze had brought to his mind a dust which had to settle’ (p181)

‘He drank it slowly, making little grimaces, as children do with medicine; and this reminded me how much the contentment of the cold depends on the precise observance of their simple routines’ (p211).

‘... that Siberian morning light which gives a stone-like quality to the earth and to every object that it finds...’ (p286).

‘... it began to rain, and soon, at a petulant shout from our commander, the prostrate figures, like the dead summoned to judgement, were struggling all together to their feet’ (p287)

‘... behind the stygian hills the sky had become a furnace in the sunrise; ahead, where the river turned, a soft-fleshed shoulder of the farther heights had caught from this fire an unearthly, roseate glow, and in the thorny scrub which lined the river’s edge that fluorescence was broken into shimmering gold by a million particles of ice’ (p298).

For Stefanie, the journey ends on the Caspian, though we know she eventually moved to the west. It’s a remarkable book by an excellent writer, neglected for too long.

Hutchinson (1907 – 1975) wrote seventeen novels, many of them best-sellers and book club choices in their day.  I’ve previously read his A Child Possessed and March the Ninth which didn’t disappoint.

KOLYMSKY HEIGHTS - Book review

 

Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights was published in 1994 and garnered great praise as a thriller of over 450 pages. It was his last novel. It’s a spy story with a difference.

A mysterious message is sent out from a secret Russian research station situated in Siberia. Whoever works there cannot leave, ever. A French Canadian Indian, Jean-Baptiste Porteur – renamed Johnny Porter – has had contact with the source of the message. He is recruited by MI6 and CIA to investigate and sneak into the secret complex to find out what is happening there.

Despite its page-count, I found it a fast read.

Davidson provides layer upon layer of detail to make the Indian’s quest believable, and it works very well. Along the way we get to know Porter who manages on his wits to get what he wants. He is good at making friends and enlisting unthinking help. He is good at disguising himself as a man of several nationalities, and employs his vast linguistic knowledge.

Whether it’s the journey from Japan by sea or penetrating the permafrost wasteland of Siberia, you feel the place, feel the cold, smell the engine oil. There are several maps which prove useful.

There is an element of science fiction in the guise of the McGuffin Porter seeks.

It is also a love story.

The final pages are tense, fast-paced and immersive.

I thoroughly enjoyed the journey.

Davidson died in 2009, aged 87.

SHOELESS JOE - Book review

W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe was filmed as Field of Dreams (1989).

This fantasy story is preceded by a quotation from Bobby Kennedy: ‘Some men see things as they are, and say why, I dream of things that never were, and say why not’.

Ray Kinsella runs a corn farm in Iowa with his wife Annie; they have a five-year-old daughter Karin. Three years ago, ‘when the sky was a robin’s-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick’ (p3), Ray heard a voice state ‘If you build it, he will come.’

For most of his life Ray has been obsessed with the history and game of baseball, and notably the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 World Series. Eight players, including Ray’s hero Shoeless Joe Jackson, were blamed for throwing the game. Ray stopped playing baseball with his father when they fell out some years ago, and now his father was dead... Another of the players is Moonlight Graham – ‘Nicknames are funny, they just land on you, like waking up one morning with a tattoo. You don’t know how you got it, but you know it’s gonna be with you forever’ (p159).

Ray is drawn by the voice to build a baseball field in the midst of the corn crop and surprisingly Annie agrees – ‘If it makes you happy, do it’ (p4).

So the field is built – at financial risk to the already precarious state of their funds. And, eerily, one night a figure appears on that field – Shoeless Joe Jackson, a young man dressed in his old-time baseball outfit. Ray, Annie and Karin see him and speak to him. Shoeless Joe admires the field: ‘This must be heaven,’ he says. ‘No,’ Ray replies. ‘It’s Iowa’ (p19).

A fan of the writer J.D. Salinger, Ray notes some coincidences in the famous author’s books – even naming characters Kinsella. He is drawn to meet Salinger, who he believes has an interest in baseball. (Salinger was not pleased to feature in the book and the film-makers prudently decided to rename the character for the film). The Salinger character says ‘Other people get into occupations by accident or design, but writers are born. We have to write. I have to write...’ (p109) ‘I dream of things that never were’ (p253) Salinger says, echoing Bobby Kennedy.

Despite Ray’s enthusiasm – ‘I’ll pierce a vein and feed him the sounds, smells, and sights of baseball until he tingles with the same magic that enchants me’(p39) – Salinger is dubious about Ray’s ‘field of dreams’ but gradually comes round to joining him on his return journey home.

Annie’s brother Mark is big in land-deals and presses to buy the farm, even threatening to foreclose. So we have conflict as well as ghosts.

Of course this is more than a story about baseball – and indeed much of that aspect went over my head. It’s about redemption, realising dreams, love, and the poetry of the natural world. ‘The cornstalks are now toast brown in the orangeade sunshine of October, and ball-park smells of burning leaves and frost. The ever-listening corn rustles like crumpling paper in the Indian-summer breeze’ (p28).

As can be seen in these few excerpts from the text, Kinsella has a way with words. ‘You’re terrible,’ says Annie, mischief crackling like static electricity in her eyes’ (p41). ‘I lean my head against the window and look up, noticing a few lamblike clouds in a chrome-blue sky (p94).

Both the book and the film are poignant and never mawkish. Kinsella’s writing style reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s – another Ray! – in the way the author perceives the world.

I recommend you enter this ‘baseball park for a rendezvous with stalled time’ (p221).

A HERITAGE OF SHADOWS - Book review

Madeleine Brent’s historical first-person novel A Heritage of Shadows was published in 1983. 

It’s 1891 in Paris and eighteen-year-old Hannah McLeod is a waitress in La Coquille restaurant. She’s bilingual and is especially useful to the owner when English patrons dine there. She lives in a modest garret and conceals her real past and has invented an alternative which she doesn’t volunteer but which is available if pressed. She gets on well with the other staff but her only true friend seems to be a neighbour across the landing, Toby Kent, an Irish artist, for whom she occasionally poses (fully clothed).

One night on returning from her stint in La Coquille, she rescues a stranger who was being attacked by thieves. This leads to some complicated relationships which entail her taking up employment as a French teacher for two children of Mr Sebastian Ryder in England. ‘As soon as we were seated Mr Ryder said briskly, ‘Grace’. We all bowed our heads and he thanked the Lord for what we were about to receive, but in a manner which seemed to hint that he would have managed very well without the Lord’s help’ (p88).

Gradually, we learn about Hannah’s tragic past, some of it quite salacious though never graphic. ‘I have a heritage of shadows, long dark shadows thrown by my past. They are not of my making, yet I must walk in those shadows all my life’ (p197).

Hannah is a well-drawn, likeable and believable character, made of stern stuff; bold, forthright and honest – a marvellous heroine. There are several other characters of interest, too who come into her orbit – for good and ill. There is a reason why Mr Ryder had employed her. There is a betrayal, a kidnapping, and a confrontation with Mexican bandits – plenty to keep those pages turning.

Well-written, well-visualised, this is a most satisfying read. I’d previously read three Brent novels (in bold below) and enjoyed every one.

Madeleine Brent was one of the best-kept secrets of the publishing world. She was the pseudonym of Peter O’Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise which he scripted for a comic strip, and which then became the first of a series of 13 best-selling thrillers. His Madeleine Brent books are Tregaron's Daughter (1971), Moonraker's Bride (1973), Kirkby's Changeling (1975), Merlin's Keep (1977), The Capricorn Stone (1979), The Long Masquerade (1981), A Heritage of Shadows (1983), Stormswift (1984), Golden Urchin (1986). He died in 2010.

 

 

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.