THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER - Book review

Tom Clancy’s debut thriller The Hunt for Red October was published in 1984 and surprisingly I’ve just got round to reading it 41 years later! It’s obvious why it became a best-seller – the amassed technical and logistic and intelligence detail reeks of authenticity.

This review will be short, since it’s likely that most readers here have seen the film starring Sean Connery (1990). The story covers eighteen days from December 3.

Soviet Captain Ramius is taking the new ballistic missile submarine Red October to sea for an tactical and equipment validation exercise. By page 6 it is clear that Ramius intends to kill the political officer Putin. From that moment the suspense builds and does not let up.

Both the US monitoring ships and the Soviets in the exercise area lose all trace of Red October.

CIA Analyst Jack Ryan gleans information which leads him to the incredible conclusion that the Red October is sailing towards North America to defect.

So begins a chase, involving the real USS Dallas, HMS Invincible, other US vessels and a number of Soviet craft. Open conflict is a real threat – by accident or by design. Geopolitics are involved; obviously, if it is known that the Red October is being held by the Americans, the USSR will demand its return by international law, since neither was at war.

The various personalities on October and Dallas are drawn very well. The politics are sketched out by the President, the head of CIA and others believably. All in all, the 477 pages flew by.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER - Book review

Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter was published in 1948. It became an instant best-seller and has been reprinted many times and won awards and high praise.

In 1926 Greene was received into the Roman Catholic Church and, not surprisingly, several novels of his deal with characters bound by that faith. Major Scobie, the police chief of a flyblown West African colony during the Second World War, is one such.

Inspector Wilson is a new arrival: ‘He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy’ (p11). Wilson shares accommodation with Harris and there’s an amusing episode where the pair start a cockroach hunt – The Cockroach Championship – to alleviate boredom (p70).

Scobie has been here for fifteen years and feels comfortably bound to the place. ‘Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself?’ (p35).

Unfortunately, his rather faded wife Louise wants to have a break, to go away on holiday. Scobie feels guilty that Louise is not happy. The bank won’t lend Scobie the money as his salary is not generous and, indeed, he has just been passed over for the post of Commissioner. In a moment of weakness, he accepts a loan from a local Syrian merchant, Yusef, who is a known black marketeer though no proof has ever been found. ‘He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation’ (p60).

While Louise is away in South Africa Scobie begins a clandestine affair with a refugee from a sunken transport ship, a young widow, Helen. He is aware he is committing the grave sin of adultery. He argues it is not a sin, it is love. And doomed.

There are several themes: guilt, sin, avarice, blackmail, deceit, love and trust. ‘Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar’ (p264).

As the book blurb indicates, ‘inexorably, his conscience and his love of God lead him to disaster’.

There are too many examples of Greene’s prose imagery to note here, but the following are examples:

‘There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term’ (p55).

These two, among many other insights in the book, suggest he drew upon his time as an Intelligence Officer in Freetown, British Sierra Leone:

‘The mosquitoes whirred steadily around them like sewing machines’ (p112). ‘... a mosquito immediately droned towards his ear. The skirring went on all the time, but when they drove to the attack they had the deeper drone of dive-bombers’ (p122).

‘Only the vultures were about – gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men’s necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that’ (p230).

Editorial comment:

I’ve brought this up before; something that editors don’t spot: the tendency for writers to state a character thought to himself or herself. This really is tautological.  ‘He thought’ is adequate; ‘to himself/herself’ is superfluous.

‘He thought to himself, poor Louise’ (p17). Also on p53...

A PIECE OF RESISTANCE - Book review

I suspect the title of Clive Egleton’s 1970 speculative novel A Piece of Resistance is a play on words – pièce de la résistance. It concerns the Russian invasion of Britain, published ten years after Fitz Gibbon’s alternate history novel When the Kissing had to Stop. It’s a third person narrative almost entirely from the point of view of Daniel Garnett who is an escaped prisoner working under an assumed name for the Resistance. ‘Four years ago I had a wife, a small son and a house in Keynsham until a SCRAGG Missile with a ten Megaton warhead hit Bristol, and then there was no wife, no son, and no house. Maybe there are people around who can accept the Armistice, but I’m not among their number’ (p23).

The police hunt resistance members. Yet some police are informers for the Resistance. A few resistance cells resort to bank robbery to finance arms purchases. One raid goes wrong and those who get away are being hunted. The Russian authorities have taken 200 hostages as two of their soldiers were slain.

Garnett reluctantly attempts to find the culprits. He’s torn – and very probably deceived too.

There are insights into how Britain has changed.

‘We had an arsenal of terrifying weapons which we couldn’t and didn’t dare to use. But they did. Just the one, to show us that it was all over, and that’s the way our world ended, not with a whimper but with a bang’ (p81).

‘A car for every Russian made in Birmingham. They’ll have all of us walking before long. My car’s been off the road for three weeks waiting for two new tyres, and I’m supposed to have priority’ (p33).

Egleton was a leading thriller writer for forty years with inside knowledge of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. His style is very readable and quite thrilling.

‘For a few paces his stride remained unchecked even though the blood was spurting from the hole in his throat, and then, quite suddenly, he collapsed like a rag doll’ (p47).

This is the first Garnett book in a trilogy; the others are Last Post for a Partisan and The Judas Mandate.

Clive Egleton died in 2006, aged 79. His novel Seven Days to a Killing was filmed as The Black Windmill starring Michael Caine. 

DEMIAN - Book review

 

Hermann Hesse’s first person narrative Demian was published in 1919 (although the Prologue was only added in 1960). Hesse died in 1962.

Emil Sinclair belongs to a respectable middle class family. He idolises his two sisters, mother and father – to begin with. But as he questions himself and his part in life, he is drawn to rebel. ‘... the frightened heart flees timidly back to the charmed valleys of childish virtues; unable to believe that this break too must be made, this bond also be severed’ (p116). He was encouraged in this break from his family by a school friend Kromer who then begins to bully and blackmail him. Emil is ultimately protected by an older boy, Max Demian, who becomes Emil’s mentor. In his quest to discover his self, Emil latches on to several individuals who help him on his journey of self-realisation and who have mentoring tendencies.

Instead of living his life, Emil is inclined to dwell unhealthily upon ‘self’ and ‘purpose’. As this is Hesse, there are inferences from Jung, Gnosticism, Leonardo da Vinci, and the psychological and moral growth of the main character. ‘There was only one true vocation for everybody – to find the way to himself’ (p120).

Demian is a mysterious young man. ‘I often try out an art which is known as thought-reading (p37): a technique that impels someone under scrutiny – the power of the stare – to do something unplanned, perhaps.  Demian questioned God as the supreme being: ‘it threatened the solid beliefs in me to which I felt I must cling’ (p58).

Eva is Demian’s very attractive mother, her visage haunting Emil. ‘If she could only be a mother to me, a lover, a goddess – if she could just be here! (p132).

Interesting insights. Too much me-me, perhaps; there’s a beautiful world out there that needs no psychoanalysis, just appreciation. Deep.

CONCLAVE - Book review

Robert Harris’s novel Conclave was published in 2016 and became a ‘major motion picture’ in 2024. 

I haven’t seen the film yet but certainly enjoyed the book. Harris has a writing style which draws the reader in, no matter what the subject – and, let’s be honest his subjects have been remarkably varied over many novels.

When not employing the omniscient viewpoint we get 75-year-old Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli’s. He’s the Dean of the College of Cardinals in the Vatican and is responsible for organising the upcoming conclave following the recent death of the Pope.

There are 118 cardinals allowed to vote – that is, those who are under eighty years of age.  As is the case today following the demise of Pope Francis, there is a handful of front-runners who are likely to figure in the final voting.

Besides the concerns for the imminent conclave, there were worries about the reporting of the Holy Father’s death. ‘Once, God explained all mysteries. Now He has been usurped by conspiracy theorists. They are the heretics of the age.’ (p16).

Lomeli’s ‘guilty recreation was detective fiction.’ (p40). Certainly there are mysteries for Lomeli to tackle before the final vote and the white smoke is released to announce a new Holy Father has been selected. Lomeli is feeling his age, too. ‘Once, in his youth, Lomeli had enjoyed a modest fame for the richness of his baritone. But it had become thin with age, like a fine wine left too long.’ (p115).

The cardinals are locked in during the day to cast their votes. After which they are transported to accommodation where they can eat and sleep, abiding by the injunction not to discuss the vote in the hearing of outsiders such as drivers. The food is served by nuns. ‘If anything forces this Conclave to a swift conclusion, thought Lomeli, it will be the food’ (p100).

The Sistine Chapel is taken over for the Conclave.  ‘The freshly laid carpet smelled sweet, like barley in a threshing room.’ (p32).

Lomeli does not wish to be Pope yet he appears to be a good contender. ‘Once we succumb to “the dictatorship of relativism” as it has been properly called, and attempt to survive by accommodating ourselves to every passing sect and fad of modernism, our ship is lost. We do not need a Church that will move with the world but a Church that will move the world.’ (p152).

(I always use a bookmark when reading and in this case it proved useful. At a glance I could see the tabulated vote score for a half-dozen cardinals on the page but before actually reading it I covered it up with the bookmark until reaching that point in the narrative.)

There is a poignant interlude when a nun is holding a precious photograph of a boy: ‘The creases where she had folded and refolded it over the past quarter-century had cracked the glossy surface so deeply it looked as if he were staring out from behind a latticework of bars.’ (p218).

As certain revelations surface, the voting alters and it is obvious that it will take several days to reach a ‘winner’. ‘If it drags on much longer, I wonder what the actuarial odds are that one of us will die before we find a new Pope’ (p237).

Inevitably, there is intrigue and squabbling and a few skeletons emerge from the past. The final vote does indeed come as a surprise.

Dan Brown’s thriller Angels & Demons (2000) relates some of the aspects of a conclave; however, Harris goes much further – and depicts it more accurately. On the face of it, writing a mystery/suspense novel about the selection of a pope shouldn’t be riveting, and yet it proves to be so.

If you’ve seen the film then I suspect that the surprise ending (if it’s the same!) won’t work; however, the narration itself is a pleasure and doubtless the reader can superimpose the actors on characters while reading.

Recommended.

DOWNTON ABBEY - THE COMPLETE SCRIPTS - SEASON THREE - Book review

Julian Fellowes script for Season Three of Downton Abbey was published in 2014.  The ITV series was broadcast in 2012. There are eight episodes plus the controversial Christmas Special. Dotted lines alongside the script text indicate sections of text that were cut or partially cut from the original script to make the final edited version; however, in some cases it appears that some ‘cut’ scenes did make it into the DVD version.

The format follows that of the first two season books, with many pages containing illuminating and interesting footnotes on the scene, the characters or the reasoning behind the text; sometimes with humorous asides and personal anecdotes. There are eight pages of black-and-white photos from this season, and lists of cast and crew.

Episode one begins with Robert losing a lot of money on an investment in the Grand Canadian Trunk Line railway, a real event. Sadly, the genius behind the line died on the Titanic – a disaster which neatly creates fresh repercussions for Lord Grantham, echoing episode one of the first season.

Alfred, a new Downton footman, was 6ft6ins tall. Apparently, before the period of the drama, footmen were paid by height; the tall six-footers commanding a higher salary; essentially status symbols (p21).

Besides a great deal of social commentary and history (including ‘the Troubles’ in Ireland), there are insights on constructing the drama – which apply to fiction-writing in general. Mr Fellowes makes a comment about avoiding repeating information the viewer (or reader) already knows. ‘You structure a scene so that it finishes just as they’re about to get the information you already know, or you start the scene when they’ve just got it. Sometimes you can’t avoid a slight repeat, but you do work against it’ (p56).

There’s an interesting and even topical aside when Bates is in prison, accused of murder. ‘If you want a country to accept the end of the death penalty (which I am sure is right), then people need to feel confident that a murderer in cold blood is going to have a very tough time of it. The more who come out after six years and then immediately murder someone else, the more damage is done. One of the main arguments against the death penalty used to be that there was a risk of wrongful conviction, but the trouble is, far more innocent people have died at the hands of released murderers than were ever hanged wrongly, so it doesn’t really hold water. The point being that too many today do not have faith in the legal system’ (p209/210).

I wasn’t aware of the fact that unlike in America (and elsewhere) an English agent will not allow a client to sign for more than three years for anything (p254). This explains why at least three main characters had to be written out at some stage. Sometimes, it may be some way through the season before an actor or actress announces they don’t wish to go on further. This creates problems for the script writer: for instance the first five episodes of this season had been written and cast before Dan Stevens made his intentions known.

Throughout the series there are cases of ‘moments of bonding: Carson and Robert, Carson and Mary, Mary and Anna, and so on. (Showing) a chance of birth that has made Anna work for Mary and not the other way round, and these scenes underline that’ (p311).

The travails of Thomas are thoughtfully presented. ‘I’m always against judging anyone according to a type. It doesn’t matter if it is something positive. All type judgements are worthless, because they generalise the individual. Here, what happens to Carson is that eventually, although he doesn’t approve, he comes to see that it is not Thomas’s fault’ (p405). Mr Fellowes also mentions a relative Constance Lloyd who actually married Oscar Wilde. When the scandal broke and Wilde was imprisoned for ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ apparently Constance was ostracised by all who knew her. She changed her name and wandered through Europe until her early death aged 40.  

There are many reasons why some scenes/text had to be shortened or removed. One amusing excision is this:

ROBERT: Someone should invent a new kind of telegram, so you could send a whole document at once. Just like that.

ISOBEL: And if a document, why not a person? Like H.G. Wells’s Time Machine. You’d just get in, press the button, and step out in Deauville.

VIOLET: Would we be allowed to take a maid? (p423).

Certainly, Maggie Smith (Violet) tends to get most of the best lines:

EDITH: How tiny the glens make one feel.

VIOLET: That is the thing about nature. There’s so much of it. (p516).

What is impressive that the ensemble cast – about eighteen – all have a part to play and a story to tell. The casting is perfect, even when newcomers appear for one or two episodes. On reading the scripts I can hear the actors’ voices. There’s emotion, laughter, tragedy, plotting, villainy; in fact all human nature is here – what we’ve come to expect.

To date, this appears to be the last book of scripts. Certainly Mr Fellowes has been busy since, apart from three Downton films after the end of the series. He’s a workaholic, despite his uncontrollable neurological condition, essential tremor.

Minor pedantic gripe about the TV credits: it states Written and created by Julian Fellowes. However, surely it was created and then written?

THE PARADOX MEN - Book review

Charles L. Harness’s classic novel The Paradox Men was first published as a short story in 1949 and then in novel form in 1953. There’s an Introduction by Brian Aldiss – I read this after I’d finished the book.

We’re in the future – 2177 – (as viewed from the late 1940s), after the Third War. Now, there are small settlements on the Moon, Mercury and solarion stations that hover over the sun’s hot spots, the latter stations  harvesting invaluable muirium. Of the original 27 solarions only 16 now remain; ‘the average life of a station was about a year’ (p114).

It begins with a sort of prologue: ‘He had not the faintest idea who he was’ (p10). At this point we don’t know either. Then we’re straight into the action with a superior thief in the Society of Thieves, Alar, who is burgling Count Shey’s demesne. Shey is future Earth’s Imperial Psychologist. Alar is discovered but escapes. Alar is protected by a plastic invisible shell that makes him impervious to gunfire; however, sword and knife blades can penetrate the carapace. Swords and duelling have made a comeback!

Meanwhile, the Chancellor of America Imperial, Bern Haze-Gaunt is at loggerheads with his female partner, Keiris who used to be married to Kennicot Muir, who had created the Society of Thieves which was dedicated to rob from the rich and buy the freedom of slaves. Keiris is not quite what she appears.

Haze-Gaunt employs a disfigured man, the Microfilm Mind – ‘he functions on a subconscious level and uses the sum total of human knowledge on every problem given him’ (p29). In effect, he scans thousands of books and documents in order to formulate responses – much like AI today.

Imperial Police seem to be everywhere. This is a police state, after all.

There are debates and observations on time and space and gravity which threaten to be mind-boggling, and yet they’re carried off convincingly.

Alar joined the Society of Thieves five years ago and has no recollection of his life before that... So this is a quest for his identity, but also an attempt to overthrow the present administration. In his journey Alar begins to discover certain abilities he was not aware he possessed. His relationship with Keiris develops: there is a devastating revelation in Chapter 14 following an unpleasant torture...

The ending is probably not the ending but most likely the beginning...

Editorial comment:

Uses IP’s for Imperial Police; it shouldn’t have an apostrophe: IPs would do.

They travel to the Galastarium (p88) and yet on the same page it’s spelled Galactarium!

RADIGAN - Book review

Louis L’Amour’s novel Radigan was first published in 1958.

Tom Radigan has worked on his land at Vache Creek in New Mexico for five years with the help of half-breed John Child. He’s taken aback when a Texan woman, Angelina Foley, comes into the nearby town claiming the land is hers, not Tom’s. She backs up the claim with a Spanish grant and about thirty men, mostly hardcase gunfighters, and several hundred of cattle.

Told in third person omniscient point-of-view, the story moves along fast with L’Amour’s inimitable wry viewpoint.

Radigan’s gaze was ‘disconcertingly direct in times of trouble, and men who faced him at such times found that gaze unnerving and upsetting to sudden action. At least such reports had come from three men... two others had been in no condition to volunteer any information’ (p5).

Radigan and Child are joined by the latter’s adopted daughter, eighteen-year-old Gretchen; he traded four horses for her from the Comanche Indians.

Convinced that the Foley claim is bogus, Radigan is determined to fight for what is rightfully his.

Like many L’Amour westerns, you cross a well-described land, knowing that the author has trod and ridden here and he is familiar with the whole terrain. And there's a map of the relevant area. The various characters are neatly drawn with a few brush-strokes. The descriptions are at many times visual, so that you’re there:

‘Raindrop felt his cheeks with blind, questing fingers... the black trunks of the trees were like iron bars against the grey of gathering pools’ (p12).

‘The stage rolled to a stop and the cloud of dust that had pursued it now caught up and drifted over it, settling on the horses and around them’ (p57).

‘Firelight flickered on the flanks of the horses and reflected from polished saddle leather’ (p82).

There is a fist-fight or two, a gunfight, all leavened with suspense and action, and not forgetting humour:

‘he was thinking, working around the herd of his thoughts trying to get a rope on the one he needed...’ (p120)

‘Loma Coyote was not much as towns went, and as towns went, Loma Coyote would someday go’ (p155).

‘My name is Will Haftowate. And that’s what you’ll have to do’ (p161).

A satisfying quick read.

SHAKESPEARE'S PLANET - Book review

Clifford D. Simak’s novel Shakespeare’s Planet was published in 1976. After a thousand years in space, The Ship lands on a planet. Unfortunately, three of the four humans have died due to a malfunction in the cryogenic system, so when Horton is revived, he is alone – apart from the robot Nicodemus. Ship comprises the minds of three – a monk, a grande dame and a scientist. ‘It was only when the three were one, a one unconscious of the three, that the melding of three brains and of three personalities approached the purpose of their being’ (p1). It seems there’s a Biblical allusion here: ‘As the centuries went on, they were collectively convinced they would become, in all truth, the Ship and nothing but the Ship’ (p2). The three minds frequently ‘converse’, explaining how they became The Ship.

Horton and Nicodemus encounter a strange rather vicious creature that is named Carnivore. Not so long ago, Carnivore had shared the planet with a human who called himself Shakespeare, who was a bit of philosopher: ‘The emergence of intelligence, I am convinced, tends to unbalance the ecology. In other words, intelligence is the great polluter. It is not until a creature begins to manage its environment that nature is thrown into disorder’ (p119).

Sometimes Carnivore has an inverted way of expressing himself, much like Yoda in Star Wars: ‘You mean fix it you cannot?’ (p124).

Nicodemus is an interesting character in his own right. He is a basic robot though he can turn his hand to all manner of skills thanks to a number of transmogs that he can plug into – essentially computer apps.

Horton perceives a number of most puzzling aspects to this new planet, including the strange phenomenon of ‘the god-hour’, ancient derelict cities, a potentially sinister black pond, the mysterious arrival of the human female Elayne, and a wormhole that is blocked. ‘Just when you feel that you are ready to grasp some meaning of it, then it is all gone’ (p136).

There is not a lot of action, but there is plenty of mystery. Some of the best bits involve Nicodemus’s humour.

An imaginative excursion. 

THE FACE OF A STRANGER - Book review

 

Anne Perry’s Victorian crime novel The Face of a Stranger was published in 1990. This is the first William Monk book – there were 24 altogether. However, Perry had already had published nine books featuring her team of Thomas and Charlotte Pitt (there are 32 in this series). At the time of her death in 2023, aged 84, she’d had 102 books published.

At the end of July, 1856, William Monk regains consciousness in hospital. He’d forgotten his name and all of his past up to the accident three weeks earlier. He soon learns that he is Peeler, a Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector. An envelope in his belongings tells him his home address – 27 Grafton Street – where for the first time he looks in a mirror. ‘It was not that it displeased him especially, but it was the face of a stranger, and not one easy to know’ (p20).

Briefly, he visits his sister (knowledge gleaned from his desk) in Northumberland where he recuperates. When he returns to work, his boss Runcorn gives him a difficult six-week-old murder case to solve. Major the Honourable Joscelin Grey, a Crimean war hero and a popular man about town has been killed in his rooms. He’s teamed up with a novice, John Evan.

Monk’s problems are mounting. He can barely remember how to behave as a detective, though happily he has his wits about him and conceals his memory loss, not wanting to lose his job. From what he can discover, he had not been particularly liked by his fellow policemen. Piecing together his past was going to be no easy task: ‘...learn to know himself, and he would grow firmer memories in reality. His sanity would come back; he would have a past to root himself in, other emotions, and people’ (p67).

Runcorn suspects a member of the House of Lords but has no proof. Monk has to tread carefully – again at risk of losing his job. During his investigation, Monk meets a number of gentry as well as a nurse recently returned from the Crimea, Hester Latterly. ‘Hester was abrasive, contemptuous of hypocrisy and impatient of dithering or incompetence and disinclined to suffer foolishness with any grace at all. She was also fonder of reading and study than was attractive in a woman, and not free of the intellectual arrogance of one to whom thought comes easily’ (p174). Hester is indeed a worthy foil for Monk.

The Crimean War figures in the story through traumatic memories, and includes snippets about Alan Russell, the brave war correspondent and Rebecca Box, a heroic nurse. The terrible slums of the London rookeries are depicted well. It is not all grim; there is humour and some enjoyable verbal fencing.

Perry’s grasp of the Victorian period brings the story to life. There is one moment that brought to mind Michael Dibden’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978); however, as the tale went on I was happily disabused of that thought entirely. If I had one criticism it would be Perry resorting to dialect for a few minor characters.

An excellent historical mystery novel.

DRAGON TEETH - Book review

Michael Crichton’s novel Dragon Teeth was published in 2017, nine years after his death. There’s no indication as to whether the completed work was entirely by him or someone else contributed or finished it. 

It’s based on much historical fact. In 1875 eighteen-year-old William Johnson made a bet with a college friend to join the archaeological expedition of Professor O.C. Marsh in his quest for dinosaur bones. This was then considered a dubious endeavour at the time: ‘many prominent ministers and theologians explicitly denounced ungodly paleontological research’ (p28). Marsh was quite a character and ‘was a good friend of Red Cloud’ (p41). Inexplicably, Marsh abandoned Johnson in Cheyenne. Johnson then teams up with Marsh’s competitor, E.D. Cope and his team, among them a chap called George Morton. They head further west, into the Badlands and the Black Hills.

Johnson’s peregrinations are shown on a helpful map at the front. He encounters a number of famous characters, among them Wyatt Earp and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as hostile Sioux who have recently sent General Custer to the Happy Hunting Ground.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are extracts from the journals of Marsh, Cope and Johnson.

While most of the characters are based on real people, Johnson is fictitious. The final third of the book is the most interesting, being almost entirely pure fiction, whereas the first two thirds seem slow as the story tends to stick to real events (though condensed from a number of years of historical reports).  This is not the only book about the fascinating ‘Bone Wars’ between Cope and Marsh which took place over a period of ten years. There are four pages of bibliography – books that Crichton consulted to get the flavour of the individuals, the period and the historic events leading up to the unearthing of Brontosaurus teeth – dragon teeth.

Writers are urged to ‘show’ not ‘tell’. Most of this book is ‘tell’ all the way, with authorial interjections about scientific theories, without any attempt to let the characters learn themselves.

An interesting treatment of the period. A quick read. 

BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON - Book review

Nelson DeMille’s By the Rivers of Babylon was published in 1978. He’d had about eight books published before this, but this was his breakout novel. 

Although written and published over forty years ago, it has chilling relevance even today.

A UN conference in New York is on the cusp of bringing peace to the Middle East. Two brand-new Concorde planes (01 and 02) have just been delivered to Israel to take about fifty peace delegates in each aircraft to the conference.

Onboard the 02 aircraft is Miriam Bernstein, the Deputy Minister of transportation, who was a child-survivor of the Nazi death camps. Her lover is Air Force Brigadier Teddy Laskov; he is flying an escort F14 plane. Among others on 02 are El Al’s Security Chief Jacob Hausner, an ex-intelligence man; General Benjamin Dobkin; and the pilot Captain David Becker.

A Lear private jet contacts the two Concorde planes shortly after they take off, advising their pilots that there is a bomb in the tail of both aircraft which can be activated remotely. The terrorist in the Lear plane is Rish, a man Hausner has encountered before. The terrorists’ purpose is to wreck the peace conference.

The planes are ordered to land next to the River Euphrates – by the ruins of Babylon. Waiting for them are over 150 Palestinian terrorists – Ashbals – orphans of the wars with Israel. ‘They’ve been indoctrinated with hate since the day they could comprehend. They reject all normal standards of behaviour. Hatred of Israel is their tribal religion’ (p159).

The tension never lets up as the Israelis crash land and, with a handful of weapons, make a desperate stand. There are heroes, cowards, betrayers and villains aplenty, and both good and bad people die...

Unputdownable.

THE GATE OF WORLDS - Book Review

Robert Silverberg’s 1967 novel The Gate of Worlds was published in the UK in 1978. It’s an alternative history, set in 1963. Eighteen-year-old Englishman Dan Beauchamp is sailing from Byzantium England to Mexico on the evening of King Richard’s coronation to seek his fortune. Aircraft haven’t been invented yet, but they’re working on it. The Turkish conquest of Europe was long ago now, though they had left England. ‘People who try to rule over other people are going to be hated. That’s true of Turks in Europe, of Incas in the lower Hesperides, of Aztecs elsewhere in the New World, of Russians in Asia’ (p15).

This is a first-person narrative, vastly inferior to Silverberg’s excellent historical novel Lord of Darkness (1983). Yet it is fascinating in relating the coal-driven motor cars, ‘the electrical voice-transmitting machine is not yet perfected’ (p145), and the violent customs of the Incas he befriends on his way. It is laced with self-deprecating humour, too. ‘I was coming to like Mexican food, which was just as well, since I stood little chance of tasting Yorkshire pudding and leg of mutton again for a while’ (p32)

He meets up with a helpful magician and soothsayer, Quequex and they travel together. ‘a cart drawn by two plodding llamas, those sawed-off camels from Peru’ (p49). Dan serves as a bodyguard and Quequex talks of the Gate of Worlds – his belief that each person reaches a number of turning points in life where their life splits, depending on their decision, each going in a different direction in parallel worlds. ‘For each possible future, there is a possible world beyond the Gate’ (p56). Sadly, this sci-fi concept is not realised in any way – it’s a straight-forward picaresque journey, interspersed with new friendships, threat, battles and disappointments.

Thanks to his travels, Dan matures.

Silverbeg is always readable, though this is probably only for fans of alternative history books and completists.

NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON - Book review

Catherine Gavin’s 1978 novel None Dare Call it Treason is the second in her three books about the French Resistance. The first is Traitors’ Gate (1976) and the third is How Sleep the Brave (1980).

It’s 1942 and Britain’s new allies, the Americans, are landing in vast numbers to fight in Europe and North Africa. General Charles de Gaulle is a particular thorn in the planners’ sides. An abrasive character, de Gaulle is not greatly liked. De Gaulle ‘stands condemned to death by a military court for desertion – in absentia’ (p76). Roosevelt called de Gaulle ‘unreliable, uncooperative and disloyal to both our governments’ (p121). In fact, de Gaulle was kept in the dark about the North African landings – much to his embittered chagrin. ‘De Gaulle’s favourite word was Non’ (277).

A French barrister, Jacques Brunel, is running one of several networks that operate in Occupied France and Vichy France. He gets lumbered with Polly Preston, an eighteen-year-old woman, half-American, half-French who needs to get to America and reunite with what is left of her family. That in a nutshell is the plot. However, once you get past the initial chapter set in London, which is mostly exposition, you get involved in the story and the characters. Gavin’s descriptions of the people and the places put the reader in the scene.

Brunel has a response to the charges against De Gaulle: ‘If and when the Allies bring de Gaulle back to France, nobody will dare accuse him of treason. They’ll be too busy incriminating the collaborators’ (p77).

The point of view is omniscient. The main reason for this approach is that there’s a great deal of narrative relating to the real events from a historical context.

There are many descriptions that bring the scenes to life. ‘they slept until lunchtime in a brass bed with a white honeycomb spread and a red satin quilt which kept slipping down to the carpet as the little hotel shook with the passage of the trains’ (p222).

There is tension aplenty, betrayal, rivalry between different resistance cells, politics, threat, torture, death, and passion too. Gavin was a British war correspondent in France and the Netherlands and she knew the places she describes, and it shows.

The book title is from Epigrams by John Harrington (1561-1612), a two-line poem:

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

PS – An Army lieutenant appears, his name is Morton (p257).

ERUPTION - Book review

Michael Crichton and James Patterson’s Eruption was published in 2024. Crichton died in 2008 and left an unfinished manuscript plus many notes and research details which the ubiquitous Patterson completed and shaped into this novel. 

After a prologue set in Hawaii in 2016, we move to the near-future, April 2025. All the signs are that an enormous eruption of the volcano Mauna Loa is imminent, within a week! ‘If you measure Mauna Loa from its base on the ocean floor, it is almost six miles high – more than three miles underwater, two and a half miles above... largest geographical feature on this planet’ (p69). Its 1994 eruption produced enough lava to bury Manhattan to a depth of 30ft.

John (Mac) MacGregor was a geologist who headed the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. He has a dedicated team who help monitor the area. There is a second slightly smaller volcano called Mauna Kea that dominates the nearby US Military Reserve. Mac’s main concern is the safety of the major town, Hilo that potentially could be in the path of any eruption’s lava-flow or pyroclastic cloud. Then he learns some staggering information that threatens not only the island but the world if the eruption is not diverted.

Patterson’s tendency to use short chapters ramps up the tension and keeps the pages turning. Inevitably, there’s a lot of technical stuff, but it works. We also get to learn how many lives volcanoes have claimed over the years – not only those people caught in the eruptions, but those studying and investigating the natural phenomena. There’s a helpful map of the Hawaiian islands and 109 chapters.

It’s a blast.

PS: There's a US officer in the story called Morton. Fancy that...

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).