Iain Banks - Whit

Outside of Iain Bank's science fiction Whit is his novel that I've repeatedly enjoyed over the years (which explains why it's the first book to be reviewed twice on this blog). It displays Bank's abilities at his best - occasional slapstick humour mixed with the bizarre and unusual, while happily pointing to the hypocrisy of "normal" society. The latter is important in Whit because the story centres of Isis, the elect of God, who leaves the seclusion of her religious community and enters the normal world of 1990s England for find her "lost" sister.

Much of the entertainment comes from Isis' bizarre beliefs contrasted with the outside world. Eschewing comfort she must always sit on a wooden board on transport or sleep in a hammock, she shouldn't use a telephone or other electronic equipment and there are a myriad of other rules and beliefs that make her trip to London (initially) a bemusing experience for Isis and hilarious for the reader. There are some other poignant moments - Isis' encounter with some BNP paper sellers exposes their hypocrisy and her response is deeply satisfying for the reader.

But re-reading this in 2020 I was more intrigued by the nature of the religious group she is part of. Bank's weaves the story of its development into Isis' contemporary trip. But reading it now, rather than in the 2000s I was more aware of the cult-like behaviour of the founder, and Isis' horrible experience with him late in the book takes on new relevance and meaning in the #metoo era, as does the nature of the "festival" the group celebrates every leap year.

Whit is one of Bank's more satisfying endings even though it is ambiguous. I'd forgotten the extent to which Isis' journey opens up her understanding of the world and her own community. The last page leaves the reader open to the suggestion that Isis has realised that what is important is the community, not the religious belief - truth is what matters. But will she tell her followers the whole truth?

Related Reviews

Banks - Raw Spirit
Banks - Matter
Banks - Look to Windward
Banks - Dead Air
Banks - Whit (first review from 2005)
Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata
Banks - Surface Detail
Banks - Against A Dark Background
Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Banks - Look To Windward
Banks - The Algebraist

Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years

To understand Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years means understanding Serge's own life. As a young anarchist he was imprisoned for his rebellious activity. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution he arrives in Petrograd inspired by the Bolshevik revolution and determined to be part and parcel of spreading it internationally. His writings, speeches and activity become geared to that end. Sadly Serge wasn't in Petrograd for the Revolutionary height of the movement. But he was there to document it, and to write on the Civil War and its aftermath - the rise of Stalin's bureacratic state that stifled and destroyed both the Russian Revolution and the international movement that had developed from it. Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, detail much of this experience and are essential for socialists today. His account of the Russian Revolution and Civil War in Year One of the Russian Revolution is similarly indispensable.

These experiences imbibe Serge's novel Unforgiving Years. This was his final novel. It's filled with the darkness at the heart of the twentieth century - the Second World War and the defeat of the Russian Revolution (though not, specifically the Holocaust). In four closely connected episodes Serge sums up the Revolution as an event that drew colossal inspiration and dedication from millions of people, who were then spat out by the regime that took over. It's a complex and difficult work. Serge has a small group of inter-connected characters, two of whom Daria and D might be easily confused. D is a Russian secret agent who wants out, and Daria is a close comrade he has known since she was a young fighter in the Russian Civil War. D escapes, Daria stays and, while disgraced, is recalled to duty in the Siege of Leningrad where she experiences the horrors of that most brutal of conflicts. Characters, lovers, friends, comrades come and go - some die, some vanish, written out of history, and others move on.

Daria ends up underground in Germany as the war ends. She meets up with the Resistance and brutally dispatches the Russian enemies. This is the section that reads most like a novel, as she and others struggle to survive the collapse of Hitler's Reich. It's the final part though, when reunited in Mexico, the two D's face the end.

The novel is dark and full of despair. The hope, the love, the inspiration is fleeting but rather than simply being due to war and destruction it is also because of the tragedy that has befallen people's hopes of a better world: crushed by fascism and Stalinism. In this sense the novel follows Serge's own tragedy. He once told Trotsky's widow that only the two of them really remembered how it was. It was an exaggeration, but not by much. Serge wasn't murdered, but his life's work was broken. Perhaps he saw a future when the movement would grow again, but that's not here in this novel - this is the defeat of a class, individualised down to the experiences of a handful of characters.

The book isn't an easy read. It benefits the contextualisation that translator Richard Greeman gives in his introduction. But it's subject matter, it's disjointed story-line and its wide range of characters make it difficult to follow in places. Nonetheless it's an amazing work.

Related Reviews

Serge - Conquered City
Serge - Revolution in Danger
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Serge - Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901 - 1941

Nevil Shute - A Town Like Alice

A Town Like Alice was an enormously popular book when first published in the 1950s, spawning films, TV-series and a radio adaption and remains in print. But reading A Town Like Alice in 2020 is a odd experience. Firstly there are some outdated concepts and language. Nevil Shute's language and descriptions of the aboriginal people in Australia would hopefully be deemed unacceptable by publishers today. Secondly the book feels old fashioned in terms of pacing and material. Yet there was something more to Alice that kept me going to the end.

The book is in three parts. It's told in overview by an ageing solicitor Noel Strachan who meets the books heroine Jean Paget and informs her that she has inherited a small fortune. As he gets to know Jean, Noel learns of her experiences in Malaya during World War Two, and helps her return to the country to build a well for the people who looked after her and other women who were separated from their families during the Japanese Occupation. Jean briefly meets a young Australian soldier who Joe Harman who she believes killed, but many years later she learns survived the war and has returned to his old life as a stockman on an Australian cattle farm. She visits the desolate Australian desert and, with her inheritance, turns the former gold rush town into a thriving hub of industry.

There is no doubt that Nevil Shute was a talented writer what is odd to 21st century eyes is his choice of material. For instance, much of the book is set around Jean's rebuilding of a local economy. On occasion readers might be forgiven for seeing this as a celebration of the Tory ideal of free enterprise, thrift and investment. Shute himself was certainly not from the left of the political spectrum, though his politics and writing seem far away from the neo-liberal ideals of the current Tory incumbents. Shute always seems to celebrate the hard labour and skills of ordinary people, and is Alice is anything to go buy he was ahead of his time in celebrating the role of women (though he is painfully keen to highlight the chasteness of his unmarried heroine).

In his other books Shute was vocal about his disdaine for left politics and the state of Britain. Alice has a sense of that (almost everyone in Australia, on meeting the very English Jean, asks her if everyone is still hungry because of rationing). Here he is very much celebrating the freedom he seems to see steming from relocating to Australia with limitless, empty land to be worked and plenty of aboriginal people to labour in the homes and on the farms.

His treatment of the aborigines is, of course, a reflection of the times. But it is also tremendously problematic. There's not attempt to flesh their characters out other than a racist trope of them being very happy (apparently like other black people are). Nor is there anything about them, other than the difficulties their habit of going "walkabout" brings for industrious whites on the farms. Jean sets up a ice cream parlour and doesn't hesitate to make sure that there is a separate room for the aborigines, run by a "coloured girl". This said, Shute is sensitive to how he writes about other non-white people. The Malay villagers he talks about very differently and there are several touching scenes as Jean talks to the Muslim village headmen about their time there.

A Town Like Alice is a product of its time. It's also probably a semi-historical document in its own right. Though dated, and to modern readers somewhat crude and in places reflecting racist attitudes common in the 1950s, I found myself quite enjoying it - though I doubt it will ever reach the levels of success it had in these more enlightened times.

C.J.Sansom - Heartstone

*** Spoilers ***

By the time you've reached the fifth volume of CJ Sansom's books about the Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake you really do know what you are going to get. Near on 1000 pages of well written, convoluted plot about a mystery set around key moments in the reign of Henry VIII. Heartstone is set in the Summer of 1545 as a powerful French fleet is preparing to invade England in the aftermath of Henry's failed invasion of France. Shardlake is asked by Queen Catherine Parr to investigate a mystery brought to her by an old servant who claims that her son died in mysterious circumstances. Her son had been tutoring two young children who were wards of a wealth landowner Sir Nicholas Hobbey.

Shardlake makes the trip to Hobbey's manor house, which conveniently for the story teller is near Portsmouth where Henry is gathering his forces to attempt to repel invasion. Conveniently for Sansom's main character, this is relatively near to the possible home of Ellen, a woman that Shardlake has been looking after who lives in Bedlam. Desperate to solve the puzzle and keen to learn more about Ellen, Shardlake manages to immerse himself in a variety of dangerous escapades which ultimately lead him to be trapped aboard the Mary Rose as she sales on her ill-fated voyage.

A former lawyer himself, Sansom's own legal knowledge often imbibes the books with a sense of realism. In this novel he is able to explore the Court of Wards, a Tudor institution ostensiasly set up to look after those who are too young to manage their estates. For Henry VIII it's also a way to drum up much needed wealth. Sansom gives a real sense of a population tired out by Henry's reign. There's a drunken clergyman Reverend Seckford who complains that his vicar is a radical reform, while he finds "the new ways difficult". There's a palpable sense of weariness to the soldiers, villagers and workers that Shardlake meets and as with the other novels much of the enjoyment comes from exploring the Tudor world that Sansom evokes.

Shardlake's own weaknesses betray him. He jumps to conclusions, gets things wrong and misses the thing in front of him, as one character warns him. The ending is not particularly positive, as Shardlake realises that he has gone too far in delving into Ellen's background. He makes the classic assumption that the outcome he seeks is also desired by the other person.

Volume five is up there with the other books in the series, though I felt it a little too contrived in places - especially the shenanigans getting Shardlake on the Mary Rose in time for its sailing. That said it's one for the fans of the earlier books.

Related Reviews

Sansom - Dissolution
Sansom - Dark Fire
Sansom - Sovereign
Sansom - Revelation

Carys Davies - West

What happens when a passing fancy becomes an obsession? It's something that many novels have dealt with but few perhaps do it with such style as Carys Davies' West. Rightly it has won multiple awards and much praise, and its taken an age old subject and cast it anew.

Cy Bellman is a mule breeder some where in the American east. He has a few dreams, mostly about breeding more mules and moving west to find somewhere to do that better. But one day he reads a report of enormous ancient bones found in a swamp, and comes to believe that giant animals are still living in the unexplored far west of America. Unable to stop thinking about them, he abandons everything, including his beloved daughter Bess whom he leaves with his straitlaced God fearing sister, and buying a new hat, heads west.

If the book simply followed Cy's travels it would be a classic. Davies' prose is brief but descriptive - she evokes the lands brilliantly as weeks become months and years on Cy's fruitless search. The country he travels through are wilderness to him, but are of course inhabited by Native Americans from whom Cy buys supplies and assistance from with shiny trinkets.

In Cy's absence, Bess becomes a young woman, and she too is obsessed with her absent father. Long dismissed by the rest of their village as insane, Bess holds out hope that Cy will return - at the same time with dealing with all her own changes.

Of course, to us Cy's quest is insane. We know there are no dinosaurs or mammoths out there. But to his generation it wouldn't have been impossible and some well read people certainly thought it possible. But really Cy's quest isn't about the giant animals he draws in the dirt for Native Americans when he asks them if they've seen a mammoth. It's also a quest to understand (or even find) is dead wife. Bess comes to realise this and at the finale she is, rather suddenly confronted, by the metaphorical return of both her parents. The strange, and somewhat unpleasant, climax to the book required several re-readings. My initial dismay being replaced with satisfaction as I realised that Cy and his daughter had reached a redemption with themselves that no one else could really understand.

At slightly less than 150 pages the book packs a lot in and reminded me as a devoured it, that many authors today could learn a lot from the sparsity of words which paint a very detailed picture. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

Doctorow - The March
Vuillard - The Order of the Day
Harrison - All Among the Barley
Carr - A Month in the Country
McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Crace - Harvest

Ken Follett - World Without End

Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth is one of the most popular novels around today - a blockbuster that grew famous through word of mouth and has now spawned a TV series and a computer game. Set in the fictional town of Kingsbridge it follows the trials and tribulations of a families as the town's Cathedral is built in the Middle Ages.

World Without End is a sequel set a couple of centuries later, and it is a sequel very much in the same vein. In many regards the book tells a very similar story. Many of the main characters are very similar to characters in the first book, and the story hangs around the building, or rebuilding of part of the Cathedral. The two main characters, Caris and Merthin, are on-off lovers, whose lives revolve around two central issues - the first is the Cathedral, the second the arrival of the Plague. Caris is a young woman who refuses to let her gender hold back her desire to succeed in the world. Accused of witchcraft by a rival, she becomes a nun to escape execution. In the nunnery she uses forward thinking medical practices to treat the sick and prevent infection. Her attitudes and approach incur further wrath from the hierarchy.

As I noted in my review of the first book, the author structures the book like a mini-series or soap-opera. Chapters invariably end on cliff-hangers and characters tend to come and go, revolving around the key people. Again, like Pillars of the Earth, the book focuses very much on working people and their lives though in this case the actual feudal relationship between lord and serf in terms of land use is much more explicit. The rich aren't simply oppressive - they are exploitative too. Follett tries to show how the decimation of the population by disease led to the breakdown of serfdom, though out of dramatic necessity he accelerates the process a great deal. Nonetheless he reflects real history here. I was just disappointed the book finished before the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 when the people of Knightsbridge might have got some collective revenge.

Unfortunately the author tends to imply that the behaviour of the lords against their peasants is based on personality rather than resulting from their position inside society's structure. There were exceptionally cruel lords like Ralph in the book, but all lords had a oppressive, exploitative, violent relationship to the peasantry.

While I enjoyed the book I had two problems with it. The first is the similarities in structure to the first novel. The other is sex. There is a lot of sex in the book, relatively graphic in places, though this isn't particularly a problem. The biggest problem I had was that Follett describes a number of rapes. Follett uses rape as a key plot device - by doing this he is showing the violently oppressive relationship of the local lord to those beneath them. The problem for me is that he describes the rapes much like the sex, and undermines the reality of the actual violence against the women. This marred an otherwise enjoyable, though very long read, which unusually focuses on the lives of those who are normally forgotten in books about the period.

Related Review

Follett - The Pillars of the Earth

E. L. Doctorow - The March

An ambitious and unusual novel, The March is set during General Sherman's march across the southern states of America towards the end of the Civil War. His massive army is followed by huge numbers of freed slaves, many of whom have nowhere else to go, and others follow because they see the Army as their liberators. A key scene, and turning point for several of the characters is the moment the slaves are offered land to farm as their own by the liberating forces.

Living off the land, Sherman's troops destroy the areas they pass through. Crops are burnt in the fields, plantation homes destroyed and slaves liberated. This is war, but war with a cruel vengeance particularly displayed during the burning of Atlanta. Before the war can end Sherman has to destroy the last Confederate forces - so at the heart of the novel are some key, set-piece, battle scenes.

The story of The March is told through the eyes of some key individuals giving differing viewpoints - Pearl, the daughter of a white slave master and her black slave mother, grows up quickly in the midst of war. Disguised as a drummer boy she joins Sherman's army for safety but grows close to Emily Thompson, the daughter of southern landowning aristocracy, who has become the lover of Doctor Sartorius a brilliant surgeon looking after those injured in the battles. Comic relief is offered by two Confederate troops who switch sides on multiple occasions, one of whom is driven mad by the death of the other.

The brilliance of the novel is that it makes the march the main character of the book, described through the experiences of the various individuals we follow. The Union troops aren't heroes, in fact several of the leading military commanders are extremely unsavoury and characters have to be careful to avoid rape and murder. While the different viewpoints allow Doctorow to let us see everything, the twist that allows one character to be at Lincoln's deathbed seemed awfully contrived.

While it's not an easy book to read, it does give a sense of the brutality and chaos of the Civil War and the liberation that followed in the path of the armies. It doesn't attempt to show what happens next, but the hope of those liberated is a fitting finale - though overshadowing it all has to be the reader's knowledge that the legacy of slavery remains with us today.

Éric Vuillard - The Order of the Day

The parallels between the rise of the far-right in Europe in the 1930s and today, with far-right and fascist figures and organisations gaining positions of influence and power across the world, has been noted by many different writers in many different forms. Éric Vuillard's short novel, brilliantly translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, avoids drawing any too obvious links with the author concluding near the end that "we never fall twice into the same abyss". Rather he allows the reader to draw their own conclusions as he tells the story of how Hitler gained power and was able to annex Austria and Czechoslovakia with barely a murmur of protest from the international community.

The story is told through descriptions of that most of bureaucratic and mundane of events, the meeting. One meeting is that between various senior German industrialists who meet Hitler to discuss supporting him in the crucial election of 1933. There's the meeting between Kurt Schuschnigg and various senior figures in the Hitler government who browbeat Schuschnigg into accepting German entry to Austria and there is the less formal meeting of senior figures in the Chamberlain government as Ribbentrop says farewell to British diplomacy before war breaks out.

Vuillard tells these stories well, with an eye to emphasising details that are seemingly inconsequential but really demonstrate the power of the fascist regime - though he never lets us forget the power and interests that led to Hitler's success. Of the 24 industrialists at that fateful meeting he writes, that they stand "affectless, like twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of Hell."

The story is told well, and is clearly intended as a warning for our times. But I was unsatisfied. This is a history of the rise of Hitler though the eyes of industrialists, bigwigs, politicians and diplomats. There's no sense of the ordinary person, and definitely not a sense that Hitler could have been stopped. What of those who battled the Nazi thugs in the streets? What about those heroic anti-fascists in Vienna that fought to stop the rise of Schuschnigg's predecessors and their austrofascist politics?

"We never fall twice into the same abyss" writes Vuillard. But continues, "but we always fall the say way in a mixture of riducle and dread. We so desperately want not to fall that we grapple for a handhold, screaming". But the lessons of the 1930s are that we don't have to fall. There's no inevitability to our defeat. Our predecessors stopped Moseley in the East End. They stopped the fascists in France in 1934 and they almost stopped them in Germany. That's the lesson we have to cling to. For liberals today, gripped by fear at the rise of the right, we ought to be reminding them that history doesn't automatically repeat. Our side has agency too. Our side can win. That Éric Vuillard's book fails to do this undermines his otherwise powerful reminder from history.

Julian Rathbone - The Last English King

Walt, the last surviving bodyguard of King Harold, roams Europe in the aftermath of William the Bastard's invasion of England in 1066. As he does so, mourning the fact that he survived and failed to die defending his monarch, he joins a growing band of travellers whose interwoven tales explore the background the death of the "last English king".

Brilliant evocative of the Anglo-Saxon and Norse world, this is by far the best Julian Rathbone novels I've read. Unashamedly he uses anachronism to illuminate the story, or at least make the reader chuckle, but behind the story and the humour is an exploration of a version of feudal society - one were the peasantry supported their lords through thick and thin, because they would provide when times were hard. It is,  modern retelling of the myth of the Norman Yoke, the idea that before the Normans there was a mythical past were the land and people were one.

There's elements of the Canterbury Tales here of course, and as Walt and his companions exchanges stories, and we learn more about the world beyond England's coastline, we are drawn into a continent on the cusp of great change - Muslim armies threaten the Christian kingdoms, traders and explorers bring news of wider places and ideas are in foment.

But the myth of England before the Conquest is matched for Walt, by the reality of his own life before the Battle. His post-traumatic feelings are gradually, though never-completely, healed as he and his companions make their way towards the Holy Land. Historians no doubt will find much of fault here. Was King Edward the Confessor really gay? Was William really an insane, near idiotic, psychopath? It doesn't really matter, because the story is an highly enjoyable account of a key year of transition in English history, centred on Walt but telling a much more traumatic tale. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

Rathbone - A Very English Agent
Rathbone - The Mutiny

Tash Aw - We, the Survivors

Tash Aw's novel We, the Survivors is not an easy read. It deals with the consequences of economics and history for ordinary people. In this case the poverty stricken workers and peasants of Malaysia. Looming large over the individuals that we get to know in intimate detail is inequality - the wealth of Kuala Lumpur, whose glittering towers are a beacon to young people who dream of getting a little bit of the wealth that they see on the soap operas and in the expensive cars that drive past them.

The story centres on Ah Hock, who at the start of the novel is a not particularly attractive older man who is unable to work due to an injury he received in prison while serving a sentence for murder. His case attracts some notoriety, and a wealthy young idealistic graduate, Su-Min, decides that Hock's story can make her famous, as well as exposing the corruption and inequality in Malaysian society.

Hock tells his story to her, while gleaning nuggets of information from her about Su-Min's own, alien, life. Hock's life has been one of regular movement as he or his family have looked for work or shelter. His one experience of stability, when his mother and him work a small plot of land and grow food and breed fish for the market, is ruined as eventually the annual floods become to much and swallow the land. Dark murmurings about "climate change" are heard from the local villagers. Hock looks back on this teenage experience of intense labour with pleasure, remembering acting out the fantasies of his idols. But it's also the point he learns his mother isn't all powerful anymore, and there's a poignant story of him getting her a hearing aid via his friend Keong, who gets it with money from crime.

Hock, and many of those he lives and works with aren't, to paraphrase Marx living in circumstances of their own choosing. Their industries are made or broken on the whims of the international capitalist markets. The fishing community Hock is part of finds their prospects rise as newly middle class communities look for local seafood, but simultaneously the water is poisoned by pollution and plastic. As Hock muses:

Some politician in America decides that they can't buy Malaysian rubber gloves; suddenly ten factories in  the area have to shut down. The Europeans want to save the fucking planet so they ban the use of pal oil in food; within a month the entire port is on its knees. Life continues, but you feel it slipping quietly away, and you worry that it'll never return. And because of that fear, you feel caught in a suspended state. On the outside, life seems normal, but inside it's drawn to a standstill.

It's the fear that ultimately leads to the incident that means that Hock ends up in prison. His friend Keong has followed the path from small time criminal to minor gangster in charge of getting slave labour for unscrupulous businessmen. The victims are refugees and the dispossessed, many from Rohingya, but Keong sees them only as workers suitable, or more likely unsuitable, for profitable labour.

Suddenly the workers that Hock manages can't work due to Cholera, and the enterprise that he manages, a fish farm that needs careful maintenance is threatened with collapse. Hock desperately reaches out to Keong for replacement labour to save the farm, and his own livelihood. Hock faces the risk of losing everything - his home, life and partner, but this time in his 40s and unable to work like the young man he was. This is the real angst in the novel - the fear that everything that Hock has achieved, or hoped to do, will suddenly unravel and there's nothing that he can do, and it's partly why almost everyone in the book is a victim too.

Cleverly using Hock's interviews with Su-Min as a way of going back and forth through his life, Tash Aw avoids We, the Survivor's being just an expose of poverty. Rather it's an thoughtful discussion on how our lives are shaped by forces outside of our control, and how its the choices of politicians and big business as well as the gang-masters and exploitative bosses, that shape our destinies. There are hints at wider, collective solutions - the mass protest marches against corruption that Su-Min joins, but by and large there's no real hope for those at the bottom of the pile. It is not a cheerful book, but its powerful and brilliantly constructed.

Ernest Dunlop Swinton - The Defence of Duffer's Drift

Despite being dated this classic military text retains much value both historically and as a work of literature. The author, later Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, was a commander in the Boer War and wrote this in order to explain basics of small unit military tactics in an easily accessible style. The book has been repeatedly reprinted and emulated, and as recently as 1989 was republished by the US Marine Corps.

The story centres on Lieutenant Backsight Forethought (BF) a new commander with no battlefield experience who commands a small force of 50 soldiers and NCOs and is ordered to prevent the Boers crossing a shallow river at "Duffer's Drift". Arriving at the drift BF fails to setup a defended base and allows the locals to enter his camp to sell milk and eggs to his men. Thus spied upon, an approaching force easily overwhelms his position with high causalities.

Following this easy defeat, BF awakens to dream the scenario again, this time remembering the lessons of his previous defeat. Six times the dream repeats and it is only on the final occasion that the Boers are defeated and BF's command is relieved.

All twenty-two of BF's lessons learnt can be read on the wikipedia page. Of most interest for those of us unlikely to command a small military force in the near future is two fold. Firstly, in defeating a experienced guerrilla army, BF is forced to deprive his enemy of their local support - imprisoning the local farmers, their families and their (black) workers. Readers should be aware that the author uses language in referring to this latter group that today is consider offensive, though I note that the Marine Corps version fails to comment on this.

Secondly, it is only by throwing the military manual away, ignoring some of his hard learnt lessons from the academy and adopting the tactics of the enemy that BF is successful.

Chiefly of interest for its historical lessons, the book is also remarkable as being an early example of that genre of fiction that focuses on the impact of small decisions and their outcome. For want of a nail...

John Biggins - A Sailor of Austria

John Biggins' A Sailor of Austria is a fine novel that will inevitably be compared with George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books. But this first volume of a trilogy is actually very different - not least because the hero is neither a coward, nor a racist product of British colonialism. On the other hand KuK Linienschiffsleutnant Ottokar Prohaska is also a unique character who manages to be present at some key moments in a (semi fictional World War One). Prohaska however is doubly unique - he's a U-boot captain for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though by the end of the book (and the war) the new country, Austria, has no coastline or navy.

Its a simple idea that's humorous and poignant at times. The book is related by the centenarian Prohaska who has ended up in a Welsh old people's home run by an eccentric group of nuns. His many decorations, exploits and stories fascinate the staff who encourage him to record his history. This account, both highly personal and historic is the bulk of the book though it mostly focuses on Prohaska's experience of the gradual defeat of the Empire by its myriad of enemies.

It's unusual to read a book by a British author which focuses on the enemy, and its even more unusual that the character is not German, but Austro-Hungarian. Biggins has a detailed knowledge of the experience of World War One, as well as submarine technology and most importantly the nature of the Empire itself. It makes for a fascinating read.

At times the exploits of Prohaska and his crew are extremely hilarious, as with the story of how they came to bring a camel back to Europe in their submarine, or the tale of the exploding toilet. But the book is at its best when depicting the close solidarity of a crew trapped in a dangerous environment and utterly reliant on each other for survival. It makes the ending even more poignant.

Sadly A Sailor of Austria is very difficult to find as its out of print. I discovered it by accident and I will eagerly hunt out the sequels that are set within the extended time-frame of this book.

John Williams - Stoner

I often devour novels, rushing to find out the ending as quickly as possible. John Williams' Stoner defies this because it gives you the ending on the very first page. The protagonist, William Stoner, dies and this is the story of his undistinguished life. Little noticed at his death, and un-lamented among his family, his name is quickly forgotten. But what Williams shows is that every life, however undistinguished, is one of high-drama - the sort of drama that every human being has as a result of their social networks - their partners, children, colleagues and friends - which is unimportant to most of the rest of humanity, yet is part and parcel of the network of our lives.

Stoner's parents are struggling farmers and manage to send him to agricultural college in the early 20th century. At college he discovers the wonders of English literature and ends up making a career in the university he enters as a young man. He never leaves the town, instead his exploration of the world is through literature. His marriage to Edith is an almost instant failure, marked only by the briefest weeks of passion when she determines to get pregnant.

To the modern reader there is more than the hint of mental health in Edith's life - a situation that is completely unsolvable given the circumstances of 1930s America. Instead the couple muddle along, Edith isolating her and playing games against Stoner, who tries to carry on his career and bring up the daughter he dotes upon. 1930s mores impinge again when Stoner embarks on a beautiful and passionate affair with a young student. The school authorities make it clear that this is unacceptable and she's driven out of the college.

Most reviewers discuss the book in the context of two aspects - the "campus novel" that frames the whole book - Stoner's career and his battles with bureaucracy and his management and it's celebration of literature, explored through William's discovery of books and poetry and his life immersed in the subject. These are absolutely central to the book, but for me this novel was really about alienation - the way that our lives are atomised and decoupled from wider society. Stoner's life is dramatic, but it's isolated and individualised - notably he doesn't serve in either War. His own greatest achievement - the book he authors, and reaches for on his deathbed - is almost completely forgotten by everyone in academia. Yet Stoner is no failure, his personal struggles are ones that he is happy to have made and he can pass away convinced that his life was worthwhile and satisfactory. In writing Stoner's life, John Williams teaches us the importance of every individual within the context of wider society - though he reminds us that society, certainly as it is organised today, doesn't see this importance at all.

It's a beautiful book, neglected during William's own lifetime, and thankfully having had a massive rediscovery since its republication in the 2000s it deserves continued readership. It's likely one of the most poignant I've ever read and I highly recommend it.

George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman

Long standing readers of this blog (I am sure there are some) will know that I have loved the Flashman novels, a collection of outrageous historical fiction that follow the career of the "lovable rogue" Flashman through all the major military events of the 19th century. Some of these I've read and re-read over the years, though I hadn't read the original Flashman book for perhaps 25 years. I picked it up second-hand recently and reading it today I was struck by several things.

The first book which is set immediately after Flashman's fall from grace at university and his enlistment in the army. It follows his accidental and cowardly service in Afghanistan in particular he is at key points in the debacle that leads to the destruction of the entire British Army during the retreat from Kabul. I won't repeat the history here, suffice to say there are several non-fiction books I've reviewed elsewhere on the blog that I recommend listed below and Fraser sticks very close to historical events. I should note, that while reading this I also read Saul David's book Victoria's Wars where he credits the Flashman books as giving him a lifelong fascination with the historical period. I am sure this is true for many readers.

But what struck me on re-reading the first book is how awful Flashman is. In fact he seems far worse than in the later books. His racism is more explicit, his sexism is appalling and in a scene I had forgotten, he rapes a local woman who is betrothed to his arch-enemy. His violence against women isn't limited to Afghans though. In a disturbing scene in England, after he has slept with his father's mistress and been turned down by her another time, he hits her in the face.

I hadn't read the first Flashman novel in almost 20 years and I think Fraser toned things down in later novels - which possibly makes the characterisation far worse in returning to the first book. But I was struck also by Fraser's preface to the new edition. This, the publishers claimed, was found in his study following his death. Fraser gives a potted history of Flashman's origins, and some entertaining stories about those who have analysed the books or believed them to be real. But in responding those who complain that Flashman is a racist Fraser argues "of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity." I was reminded of Fraser's annoying right-wing politics which ruin his memoirs of the Burma conflict.

But most of humanity isn't racist - not in the way that Flashman is or that Fraser seems to think they are.But ost of those who oversaw the British Empire or fought in its wars had appalling views of those they subjugated in this Fraser does manage to capture that about his character, but he plays it for laughs far more than any attempts to expose Flashman's character or the reality of the Empire. In my re-read, Flashman comes out of the book not as the lovable rogue ("coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler") that Fraser and many fans imagine, but instead a thoroughly nasty character. In that, at least, he personifies the Empire.

Related Reviews

Fraser - Flashman and the Mountain of Light
Fraser - Flashman and the Tiger
Fraser - Flashman on the March
Fraser - Quartered Safe Out Here
Macrory - Signal Catastrophe; The Story of the Disastrous Retreat from Kabul 1842
Dalrymple - Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

CJ Sansom - Revelation

The adventures of CJ Sansom's Tudor hero Matthew Shardlake continue in Revelation. Unlike several previous books Revelation is not set around a particular event during Henry VIII's reign. Instead it's context is the confusion in the latter part of Henry's kingship as different forces vie for control - in particular different factions representing different aspects of religious ideas. Henry is increasingly moving towards a return to more tradition religious practice, at the same time others are holding out for a continuation of the Reformation. The religious changes over the last decades have left many ordinary people confused and a large minority are pulled by more extreme religious doctrine.

Shardlake moves through this confusing situation as he attempts to solve a gruesome series of murders. The killer appears to be using the apocalyptic biblical book Revelations as a basis for the murders - torturing victims in grim parodies of chapters taken from the book. One of the early murders is of a close friend of Shardlake which leads to him being pulled into a secretive effort to find the killer. He is up against time as the killer must be found before he concludes the murders as laid out in his reading of Revelations and before the King learns of the crimes that would likely lead to instability and panic in London, a city already close to religious violence.

Revelation deals little with wider issues - though in the background is Henry's courting of Catherine Parr. This means the book is much more like a modern detective story, albeit set in Tudor London, than the earlier books. Nonetheless it's a gripping read and, despite being fiction, like CJ Sansom's earlier books it gives the reader many insights into the Reformation and Henry's rule.

Related Reviews

Sansom - Sovereign
Sansom - Dark Fire
Sansom - Dissolution

Hallgrímur Helgason - The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

This unusual and highly entertaining novel begins with the hero Herra Björnsson, near bedridden and living in a garage in her eighties with nothing but a laptop, her memories and a hand-grenade. It wasn't until I'd finished the book that I'd appreciated that it was based in truth - the story of  Brynhildur Georgía Björnsson whom the author met on the phone when he was telephone canvassing for an election. Brynhildur's father was one of the few Icelanders who fought for the Nazis in World War Two. I have yet to find out precisely how much of the novel is historically accurate, but the books character tells the story of her life interspersed with contemporary events when she is mainly entertaining herself by pretending to be a much younger woman online.

As a young girl Herra is trapped on continental Europe by the outbreak of World War Two. Through a series of misfortunes she finds herself a refugee in various parts of Eastern Europe and Germany itself. Her father is a fanatically follower of Hitler who joined the SS and then loses Herra in a British bombing raid. The book tells of her experiences - both while lost in rural Eastern Germany and while an outsider living among the Germans with her mother. While the book is run through with humour, its also deeply honest about life as a refugee for a young woman in wartime. Rape and murder are part and parcel of Herra's life and on returning to Iceland she cannot cope with peacetime and those around her who've escaped the war's ravages.

The story of how Herra becomes the woman in the bed with the hand-grenade is beautifully written and very poignant. From wartime Germany to Argentinian farms and Iceland's fishing villages it's a story of how we are shaped by the world we are in, and the relationships we have. It's also a story about Iceland's place in the wider world - and how the nation was buffeted by wider imperial interests and the economic world. It's a lovely book - funny, poignant and difficult in places - but well worthwhile.

Julian Rathbone - The Mutiny

There have been plenty of novels set during the Indian "Mutiny" of 1857. In fact, it was a George MacDonald Fraser novel Flashman in the Great Game that first taught me about this seminal moment in British Imperial history. It shouldn't be a surprise that 1857 has had such a hold on accounts, fictional and non-fictional of British history - it was a tremendous shock to colonial arrogance at the time, and accounts of the barbarity were wildly discussed and stoked, in the popular press. How could formally subservient people suddenly rise up and violently assault their benevolent rulers?

Of course, British rule was anything but benevolent, something that Julian Rathbone skilfully shows in this, his final novel. Rathbone was not afraid of being unorthodox in his books and this one uses a combination of fiction, historical factor, letters and author asides to draw a brilliant portrait of British India on the cusp of rebellion and then during the uprising itself. With a cast of hundreds and a viewpoint that jumps rapidly between different locations, people and even times, it's not a book that everyone will enjoy. Rathbone appears to be using the story mostly to tell the history, rather than letting the history be the backdrop. As a result, characters occasionally make rather irrational choices, simply to make sure they are in a particular place.

In the first half of the novel we follow the fortunes of a couple of families of British officers based in Meerut. When the uprising begins the children's' servant takes them away to escape the bloodshed, ending up near Cawnpore where one of the mothers eventually arrives to try and rescue them. It's convoluted but allows Rathbone to describe the reality of a country in complete upheaval and then look at the barbaric reality of the revolt and the British response.

Rathbone doesn't shy away from the violence arguing that brutality took place on both sides. At least he tries to show why the petty racism, day to day humiliation by the British could lead to violent retribution. He also argues that the main spur to revolt was not a desire to kick out the British, but a reaction against attempts to forcibly Christianise the population. He also spends a lot of time on the detail of the violence which some readers have found difficult, but I thought made the tension at the heart of the book much more real. The besieged people on both sides had a lot to lose.

There are few happy endings to any of the story threads here. Rathbone skilfully weaves history and fiction together (helpfully providing a list at the end explaining who is real and who isn't) and thus cannot escape the fact that things did not end well for the majority of those Indians who rose up. His afterword argues that there was a a lot of good about British rule in India post 1857, though this doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. It is a clever book clearly based on a close knowledge of the historical sources, but unafraid to give a fictional spin on real events (there's a couple of clever allusions to Flashman and the characters Flashman - in both the Fraser and Hughes versions - might be based on). I wouldn't describe it as an enjoyable read, but certainly it's a good one. It might even encourage further reading about the reality of British rule in India.

Related Reviews

Farrell - The Siege of Krishnapur
Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Wagner - Amritsar 1919
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried

Melissa Harrison - All Among the Barley

*** Warning Spoilers ***

You don't have to read much fiction about the history of the English countryside before you encounter writing that is essentially about a fantasy rural idyll. In it, rural inhabitants live poor, but fulfilling lives, essentially in a balance with both the natural world and their compatriots, rich and poor, in the village. Disagreement - such as the failures of an absentee landlord or, the drunkenness of a labourer - usually resolve themselves through the internal democracy of the community; either that or happy accident. Weirdly these fantasies are nostalgic for something that never existed but are often tremendously popular.

Oddly enough a fair bit of non-fiction writing about the countryside falls into this trap too. Though there are also many exceptions. Ralph Whitlock's 1945 classic Peasant's Heritage mostly avoids the nostalgia trap, but has a telling comment about it's main subject, the agricultural labourer, the "English peasant ... the same man as his forefathers, the men who fought and won Agincourt, the men who made the face of rural England with crude tools and by hard work, and defended as passionately as they worked for it." A bigger problem is that books that are actually quite faithful accounts of working class life in the countryside are often stripped bare of their reality and turned, usually for the TV screen, into pastiches of their content. To choose two cases in point, Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie is often remembered as a sun-infused coming of age account in a Gloucestershire village, but few people remember the murder that takes place when a rich returnee splashes his cash around and is collectively set upon by the locals. Flora Thompson's wonderful memoir Lark Rise to Candleford is often read for their accounts of life and nature in her home village but she notes the exploitation and oppression at the heart of country life. As I noted in my review of it she writes:

The joy and pleasure of the labourers in their task well done was pathetic, considering their very small share in the gain". Later when discussing the elaborate (and extensive) feast given by the farmer to those who'd laboured on the harvest, a celebration that was even extended to any passing "tramp", Thompson has her father comment that "the farmer paid his men starvation wages all the year and through he made it up to them by giving that one good meal. The farmer did not think so, because he did not think at all, and the men did not think either on that day; they were too busy enjoying the food and the fun."

Life in the English countryside was, as I tried to show in my own book Kill All the Gentlemen, one of constant class struggle against poverty, exploitation and oppression.

I dwell on this because I want to contrast it with Melissa Harrison's wonderful novel All Among The Barley about life in East Anglia in the early 1930s. I did put a spoiler warning at the top of this review, but I want to repeat it. Do not read further if you don't want to have this novel ruined!

Having read a few pages I was ready to lump it in with all the other terrible books about life in the countryside where the sun always shines, and the much needed rain comes during the night. But quite quickly I began to notice that something wasn't quite right. The main character Edie Mather is writing, as an adult, about her childhood, and occasional references to an event that took her from her home village left me with a real sense of foreboding. The story unfolds slowly, framed around the arrival of Constance FitzAllen in the village. Constance is very much the glamorous modern urbanite. She wears trousers, drinks in the pub and is not afraid to impose herself on the rural community. She is writing a series of articles about the countryside and wants to know all about the traditions that make up family and farming life. Here, for me, is the genius of the novel. Harrison has taken that awful trope of countryside nostalgia and inserted one of its proponents into her novel in the act of creating the fantasy itself. Of course Constance finds what she wants to find, though often to the bemusement of the rural community and in the process she begins to transform Edie.

Edie has little to look forward to. She's good at school but there's little chance for her to do anything than become someones wife "pushing out babies" every year or go into service somewhere. So Constance's London glamour entrances her. The reality of hard work, poverty and a prospect of a forced marriage to a man who rapes her, with a background of economic crisis and crop failure, help to push Edie closer to Constance, until in the novel's climax we see what has been increasingly hinted at - Constance is a rather slick fascist, who is writing for a far-right publication and believes that England's farming communities need to be protected and returned to their traditional ways. Fantasies of idyllic rural communities based on traditional values and the family are a favourite of fascists - both in the past and today and Harrison cleverly manipulates this into the story - though it should also be remembered that the left has not been immune from this either - with William Morris a case in point.

But what is really clever is how Harrison shows Constance slowly winning people to her point of view. Slanders against the few local Jews, hostility towards agricultural unions and criticism of big government lead to splits in the community and eventually, an enormous chasm opening up in Edie's family. Frighteningly in 2019 the method will not be unfamiliar as we survey far-right politicians around the world. The novel's ending is brutal (with an implicit critique of Thatcherism) and I had to read it two or three times to fully get its enormity.

Melissa Harrison has written a marvellous book. It turns the genre on its head; skewers the invented history of the countryside and does it at the same time as being a faithful account of life in a poor rural community. But this is certainly my highlight of 2019 and I am not sure I'll read a better novel in the remainder of the year.

Related Reviews

Berger - Pig Earth

Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Archer - A Distant Scene

Kerr Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Thompson - Lark Rise to Candleford

Derek Robinson - Hornet's Sting

Hornet's Sting is the third novel that I've read recently about the Royal Flying Corps in France in World War One. It is a prequel to the excellent Goshawk Squadron, which I reviewed here. This has many similar themes - though set a year earlier its pilots fly the Bristol F2 flyer and some of the characters from the later book only appear in this one latter on.

The introduction of the Bristol F2 was a disaster - depicted here in a horrific scene where five planes are lost as the pilots and gunners strive to use tactics that are brilliant on paper, but terrible in the air. Flying straight and level the gunners are supposed to knock attacking aircraft from the air, but the technical difficulties of this sort of shooting condemn the crewmen to certain death. Captain Woolley, who is the key figure in Goshawk Squadron turns this on its head and orders his pilots to fly the F2 like the fighter it is intended to be.

Here, Robinson is using themes that are evident from many of his books - the leadership of the RFC and later RAF are unable to allow themselves to learn from those fighting the actual battles and stick hard to outdated tactics. For Robinson the men flying the planes knew best and should have had more freedom to learn them. In particularly his novel argues that the Deep Operating Patrols over enemy territory were dangerous and unproductive.

Either way, the turnover of pilots is shocking. New faces come and go, and few last more than a couple of pages. From their vantage point the pilots know that's its worse on the ground and there's a clever scene when they get to view the water-logged ground ahead of the final Battle of Ypres.

As with all of Derek Robinson's novels in this vein there is brilliant dark humour as the men drink and joke their way through the stress and losses of friends. Hornet's Sting doesn't work as well as te earlier books, and I felt that some of the subplots were a little unbelievable, particularly the one that takes place on the other side of the lines. The depiction of air-combat is believable and the senseless waste of war is a constant theme, that underlines a solid novel that isn't quite up to the excellence of other books by this author.

Related Review

Yeates - Winged Victory
Robinson - Goshawk Squadron
Macdonald - Passchendaele

V. M. Yeates - Winged Victory

Having recently finished Derek Robinson's classic novel of war in the air Goshawk Squadron, I was directed towards V.M. Yeats' book Winged Victory. This, I was told, is the definitive novel about the subject written in the aftermath of World War One by someone who had reached Ace status flying Sopwith Camels on the Western Front.

Winged Victory deserves its accolades. It is a powerful denunciation of that particular war and what it did to the men who fought it. The key figure in the book, Tom Cundall, who we can suppose is a proxy for Yeates himself, begins the novel relatively cynical, but by the end has been destroyed emotionally and psychologically by the deaths of his friends and the strain of combat.

Ironically this is a novel where little happens. The main characters in the story exist against the backdrop of wider conflict, but their space in the war is reduced down to small areas, intense, short lived conflict with enemy planes or horrible periods of dangerous ground strafing. Despite their height above the battlefield the pilots, like the men in the trenches, lack the over-view of the war. Inevitably their is a disconnect - from far behind the lines the squadron is ordered into the air, despite the weather meaning its dangerous to fly and the enemy can't be scene. Pilots die on the whims of commanders, through accident or through enemy action they don't even see. Names come and go, and few pilots last long enough to develop the skills and instincts to survive. Even fewer pilots last the six months that Tom endures; and increasingly he copes through heavy drinking.

Tom and his closest friends try to understand the war. Tom's and some of his friends blame a nebulous group of financiers and capitalists who are making massive profits out of the war - given the book was written in the early 1930s I was struck by occasional references to Jewish people. Tom's closest friend Seddon argues:

Do you think we're fighting for England? In private life I'm a ruddy bank clerk, and it's some of those big bank balances we're fighting for. They're not England: they're what gangs of financiers, Jew and Gentile, get out of England. It's too damn funny the way people think England belongs to them because they've nearly all got the vote, whereas its parceled out among a lot of blasted tradesmen who run it as a business for their own profit.

These ideas are confused. Later Seddon sees the war as originating in "Germanic revolt against the International Jew". It's impossible to know whether Yeates intended Seddon's anti-Semitism here as commentary on the growth of fascism in Europe while he was writing, or whether they reflected real arguments in the mess halls of his squadron in 1918. But they have the ring of truth of the type of debates that take place when people are struggling to understand what is going on around them; and the only source of information is propaganda.

Tom is pulled in different directions. On his leave he sees the green pastures of England from his train window, but also visits the East London slums to try and understand what they are fighting for. But by the end of the novel he no longer sees England as his own. The decline in belief in the war - the rapid erosion of patriotism, or indeed humanity, is a great theme in this microcosm of wider arguments around the conflict.

Furious arguments like these, the occasional fantasy of life after the war, heavy drinking, food and a preoccupation with women are the only things that keep the men going between combat. But even these aren't enough and boredom is the day to day reality.

Some will read Winged Victory for its accounts of combat. But there's much more to this than a tale of flying. This is a detailed account of the way the war ruined lives; it demolishes the myth of Biggles and "knights of the air", replacing it with alienated, scared, confused and drunk young men, desperate to survive but with little hope. It deserves to be read alongside great anti-war novels like All Quiet on the Western Front or Catch-22.

Related Reviews

Robinson - Goshawk Squadron
Macdonald - Passchendaele
Romains - Verdun
Bücher - In the Line 1914-1918