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).

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.