Since I started limiting myself to blogging just once a week, a lot of my posts here have been book reviews. I really don’t want this to turn into a book blog, but there are a lot of good books out there and I like to help promote them.
This week I finished two very different historical novels. One was a serious book about the assassination that triggered World War I, while the second was a more tongue-in-cheek adventure set in the Palaeolithic. Both were, in very different ways, excellent reads. Here are my thoughts:
The Assassins – Alan Bardos
The Assassins is a novel based around the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. It was the murder that precipitated World War I, but who was Franz Ferdinand, why was he killed, and how on earth did this start one of history’s greatest bloodbaths?
If, like me, you’ve got some vague awareness that it was all to do with the Balkan Problem and Great Power alliances at the beginning of the 20th century, but you really struggle with more detail than that, then Alan Bardos’s book will, if nothing else, leave you much better informed. In fact, the time spent reading could be well justified purely for its value as a work of historical pedagogy. But, although there is the odd page where there is a danger of being overwhelmed by “facts” about the political situation, the book reads well as a work of fiction. This is mainly because we see events unfold through the eyes of an entirely made-up (at least, I really hope he’s entirely made-up) young chancer in the diplomatic service, Johnny Swift. Swift’s mother had been a governess. He has made it into the diplomatic service despite being, dash it all, pretty much from the servant class. His response to the continual prejudice and unpleasantness that he is exposed to from his superiors is to behave ever more outrageously, seducing his boss’s wife and embezzling embassy funds to feed his gambling habit.
Rather than dismiss Swift in disgrace and risk an open scandal, the diplomatic service sends him to Vienna to report on the political situation in the Balkans. He is passed from arrogant caddish official to arrogant caddish official, all of whom deny that there is anything to worry about in Bosnia, until he finally ends up in Sarajevo where he quickly learns that there is a violent nationalist movement threatening terrorist outrages.
A series of unlikely, but not incredible, events ends up with him being infiltrated into the Bosnian nationalist movement, mainly thanks to the efforts of Breitner, a disgraced Austro-Hungarian intelligence officer who, like Johnny, doesn’t come from the right background and whose intelligence on the nationalist movement is therefore systematically ignored by the Habsburg administration.
The mechanics of putting these characters into a position which means that the reader will be able to follow in detail the machinations that led to the Archduke’s assassination could be plodding and unrealistic. Instead, Bardos’s mastery of characterisation and fluent writing style carries the reader along with it. In fact, as we move closer and closer to the assassination, I found myself turning the pages desperate to see how it would work out – ironic as we all know exactly what happened.
There is a definite pause in the narrative thrust of the book once poor Franz Ferdinand and his wife (portrayed as easily the most sympathetic character in the book) are duly bumped off. However, Johnny Swift is not just a cipher created for purposes of plot and Bardos now has to conclude his story. Bardos manages to make us care as Johnny is bounced from meeting to meeting when nobody seems quite sure whether he should be given a medal or sent to prison. Again Bardos mixes fact and fiction really well with Johnny’s Odyssey taking the reader through the key moments that finally lead to war. In fact Johnny is even in the room as Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, delivers the famous line: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.”
Franz Ferdinand is dead; the world is about to be plunged into war; but what awaits Johnny? Johnny’s ultimate fate is a twist I did not see coming, but at least he’s still alive at the end of the book. I’m glad about that. Promiscuous, caddish, dishonest, and a thorough rascal he may well be, but he managed to make what could have been a boring history lesson into a most enjoyable read and it would be lovely to share his adventures again.
A Remedy in Time – Jennifer Macaire
Jennifer Macaire’s books combine wild action adventure plots against a meticulously researched background. Her latest thriller does not disappoint on either of these.
Although I am pretty sure the book was written before covid, the background is scarily contemporary: the world is being ravaged by a pandemic with no cure. The best possibility of a cure lies in the blood of sabre-tooth tigers (smilodons) which studies have shown carried the virus and from which you could make an antidote. Don’t spend too long worrying about this: it’s mainly an excuse for our feisty heroine (I really didn’t want to say that, but it’s that sort of book) to travel back to the Pleistocene (Macaire loves time-travel adventures), get a sample of sabre-tooth tiger blood and save the world.
What could possibly go wrong?
As if dire wolves, giant beavers, huge salmon with enormous teeth, and mammoths were not enough of a problem (not to mention the smilodons), the expedition is packed with Bad People, anxious to kill Robin and get the vital serum for themselves. Cue murder plots, terrible deaths and a great deal of running through the woods trying to avoid becoming something’s dinner.
Is this a good read? You betcha. Macaire’s writing is fluid and entertaining. I powered through the story. Is it an improving read? Well, oddly enough, it does have quite a lot of fascinating facts about the animals of the time, so you can claim an educational credit. Is it great literature? Of course not. It’s entertainment pure and simple and easy to disdain as commercial rubbish. But it’s huge fun and brightened my day at a time that we all need our days brightening. And, though it’s easy to dismiss this sort of thing as hack writing, it’s surprisingly difficult to get right. Macaire scores a bullseye on this style.
‘Coercive control’ is a form of domestic abuse that has started to be taken much more seriously over the past few years, especially since the Serious Crime Act in 2015. It’s not a new thing and there have been many stories and films featuring it over the years. In fact, ‘gaslighting’, when the perpetrator convinces the victim that the abuse is all in their head, takes its name from the 1940 film ‘Gaslight’.
Like many men, I had my suspicions that coercive control was mainly an invention of militant feminism and that, if it happened at all, it happened to weak women who were, to a degree, complicit in their abuse. Since then two separate friends of mine, both strong, confident women, have fallen victim to this sort of relationship. It’s a terrifying problem and people (mainly, but not exclusively, women) need to be aware of the behaviour and its dangers.
This makes Karen King’s latest, The Stranger in my Bed, a timely novel.
Phil and Freya have married after a whirlwind romance. Two years later, the marriage is in trouble with rows that often turn violent. Mind games are being played. But who is the abuser and who is the victim? At this point, though, Phil is involved in a car crash when his brakes are tampered with. He wakes in hospital with no memory of the abuse. All he recalls is the courtship and marriage.
King’s book, then, sets out to tackle several different issues.
It’s a straightforward whodunit. Who tampered with the brakes (and continues a campaign to harass Phil, breaking into his house and leaving threatening notes in his home office)?
It’s (as it says on the cover) a psychological thriller. Is Freya really in danger from Phil or is it all in her mind? Or is Freya the abuser?
It’s a sort of romance. Given the chance to start again, can Phil and Freya rekindle the love that characterised the courtship and honeymoon that Phil remembers or are they doomed to remain in the cycle of abuse?
The story is told in the third person but with chapters from the point of view of different characters. Mainly it’s straightforwardly from Freya’s viewpoint but some chapters are from Phil’s point of view. Phil sees himself as a loving husband. OK, he can lose his temper from time to time, but then his wife, as he puts it “always presses his buttons”. Some of her behaviour (I can’t give examples because of spoilers) goes way beyond what I would consider acceptable in a marriage and I found my sympathies moving to Phil. Karen King’s willingness to forgive the kind of behaviour that would suggest a marriage has already broken down makes me uncomfortable and blurs some of the lines in the book. It certainly doesn’t fit well with the “can they get their marriage back on course” subplot. Surely the marriage is doomed? But, given the structure of many romantic novels, maybe there will be a happy ending after all.
Karen King has a lifetime of writing romance behind her and her writing flows well. All the bits that could be in a romance novel read just as they should. Nice, normal Freya, her handsome sexy husband, their comfortable home, her interesting job. But the ‘psychological thriller’ elements are less comfortable. I felt that there wasn’t quite enough menace for it to work as a thriller. Perhaps that’s what makes coercive control so insidious. It’s very difficult to believe that there can be a real threat lurking in such an apparently ‘normal’ home. Some authors of psychological thrillers introduce a pet animal at this stage – as with the rabbit whose fate gave rise to the expression ‘bunny boiler’ in ‘Fatal Attraction’. Dogs, too, have met grisly ends in plenty of films and books. I have a twisted mind: I miss that sort of peril in a thriller.
Bunnies nervously considering possible plot twists
In summary, this is a romance author who is tackling an important, and very unromantic, subject. It has meant breaking away from her usual style to explore a new genre and, inevitably, there is some grinding of gears as the drive engages with a whole new terrain. But it’s an important subject and one that her audience probably isn’t that familiar with. It’s well written and carries the reader along and anything that makes people more aware of the issues is to be applauded.
In keeping with my promise last week that I am going to cut back slightly on blogging, I’m going to stop doing all my book reviews as separate Tuesday blogs. So here, as my first Friday book review for a while is a look at Kirsten McKenzie’s latest. Like all of us, Kirsten has had to revise her plans for her book launch because of covid and the book is officially being launched in her native New Zealand in November. It is, though, already available on Amazon and you can buy it HERE.
Kirsten has moved away from her time-shift historical novels to immerse herself thoroughly in horror and The Forger and the Thief is a full-on Gothic novel with all the trademark tropes of the genre: horror, death, and romance, with a suitable side-order of religious references and morality.
The story is set in Florence in 1966. It revolves around five people, although there is a substantial supporting cast. Although they all have names, the chapters refer to them by the iconic types they represent: the Guest, the Wife, the Student, the Cleaner (more accurately the Thief) and the Policeman. All but the Student have guilty secrets in their past and even the Student, though not carrying any guilt, is living with the horror of having survived the Nazi death camps.
The characters are drawn with a fairly broad brush (though some who are painted very dark do redeem themselves at the end). That’s fine in a Gothic novel and it does mean that, although the story seems confusing at first with several parallel narratives that only slowly come to intertwine, there is none of that flipping backwards and forwards to remember who people are that can take you out of a story. You always know whether we are looking at the woman fleeing an abusive husband, or the concentration camp survivor, or the policewoman (a more significant character than the Policeman, I thought, but casual sexism was all the rage in 1966). There is a lot of fun as we begin to see the links between them.
The narrative takes place in November. The winter rains have turned the river Arno into a raging torrent, which bursts its banks and floods Florence. The River itself features as a character in the novel and the sense of its destructive power is one of the strongest things about the book.
As the river hits town, all the plans and intrigues of the characters are literally swept up in the cataclysm that will leave several of them dead. I’m certainly not going to spoil the suspense by telling you which ones.
This is not a deep and meaningful book but it does race along. Like all the best stories it leaves you wanting to know what happens next. I didn’t start with high expectations, but I was soon caught up in the narrative, putting aside some much worthier books as I rushed on to get to the end.
I live with somebody who understands a lot about money. I don’t mean that she’s great with the household budget (although we seem to keep afloat somehow) but that she understands some of the arcane areas of financial policy that make me very pleased that it’s her job and not mine. She’s always reading books on the financial system, or the pensions industry, and she knows how credit cards work. (You may think you know how credit cards work, but I promise you, you don’t.)
Anyway, I thought it might be nice if I could read something intelligent about money and kid her that I am entitled to view on whether or not Britain is running an unacceptable deficit, just as much as she is. So when Atlantic Books offered me a copy of Jacob Goldstein’s Money via NetGalley, I leapt at the chance to improve my financial literacy.
Goldstein hosts a podcast, Planet Money, and writes about money for New York Times Magazine. He understands his subject and is an excellent communicator. He talks through the history of money from the idea of proto-money – things that had value because of, for example, their use in religious ceremonies – through the use of precious metals as stores of value and into paper money. Paper money is probably what most people today would identify as “real money” but Goldstein goes on to point out that most value now is stored not as paper currency but as digital information on the ledgers of financial institutions.
As the money that we used to settle our debts, pay our mortgages, and trade with, became increasingly detached from any material store of wealth we moved more towards modern financial systems with all the strengths and weaknesses that they have. The strengths include the ability to create money by lending out more than you actually have. While you can’t lend people more gold than you have in your vaults, it’s easy to write promissory notes for more gold than there is in your vaults provided that not everybody cashes them in at once (as in a run on the bank). The extra money that is created in this way and the liquidity that it provides within the economy allows for substantial economic growth. Goldstein argues that times when money is being created correlate well with periods of economic growth while times when money is taken out of the system (for example by increasing interest rates or increasing taxation) correlate with periods of depression. He argues that the principal cause of the Great Depression was the Fed’s policy of raising interest rates in an attempt to maintain a link between the paper money that they issued and their gold reserves.
Whilst the creation of money not backed by any tangible assets allows dramatic economic growth and a genuine increase in wealth, it also allows substantial opportunities for fraud or crashes caused by that foolishness that we call “bubbles”. A good example of both would be bitcoin. It’s worth noting here that, whilst I still can’t claim to properly understand it, the description of the theory behind bitcoin given in this book is the clearest I have ever seen.
After talking us through the theory of the gold standard and the arcane mysteries of shadow banking, as well as more technical terminology (all terribly clearly explained) that I’m not going to fit into a review, Goldstein gets political. The theory behind the euro is examined and found wanting while the ideas underpinning modern monetary theory (MMT) get a much more positive assessment.
The penultimate paragraph of the book mentions covid (full marks for topicality). As we re-examine so many of the fundamentals of the modern world, perhaps MMT and the possibility of governments simply printing all the money that they need and never worrying about paying it back, is not as mad as it may once have seemed
This is a fascinating book full of random digressions that do not make you lose sight of the main argument. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of increasing wealth in terms of the amount of light that you can buy for a day’s work. It includes what is undoubtedly the most impressive illustrative graph I have seen anywhere and the book is probably worth buying for that alone. Even without that graph, though, it is an astonishingly entertaining and informative gallop through the theory of money and how it can be applied in the real world. If you don’t already know all this stuff and want to be able to understand something of what is going on around you (let alone share your opinions on social media) I strongly recommend that you get hold of a copy.
After the historical mysteries I reviewed last week, this week’s offering is another contemporary mystery story by Jorn Lier Horst. This is the third book of his featuring Norwegian detective William Wisting. (I had to check the first name: he’s always referred to as Wisting.) Fans will be getting familiar with him, his daughter Line and the unscrupulous cold case investigator, Adrian Stiller.
This is the most straightforward police procedural of the three. Sexual sadist Tom Kerr is taken out of prison to reveal where he has hidden the body of his last victim but he makes a dramatic escape, injuring several of the police in his escort. Line, the freelance TV reporter, is there to film the whole exercise for the police, hoping to use the film later in a documentary she is planning. (I’m still worrying about how journalistic ethics work in Norway.)
Wisting is tasked to find Kerr, but discovers that Stiller has other ideas: he wants Kerr free to lead them to his accomplice, the Other One, who was never caught. The plan goes wrong, Kerr escapes and Wisting is somehow blamed. (There’s some kind of administrative reason given, but I can’t help thinking that whoever agreed to let Kerr out without an armed escort in a country where police routinely carry weapons is surely more obviously to blame than Wisting.) Wisting, we are repeatedly told, feels guilt about the whole thing, but I’m never entirely convinced. Line remarks every now and then how Wisting seems old too, but there is remarkably little character development over the series, which seems a waste of some interesting characters. Everybody makes the same mistakes as usual. People trust Stiller to play straight when they should know by now that he always has his own agenda. Line finds herself alone with the killer again, which you’d think she’d be more careful about after last time.
There’s quite a complicated plot, but if, fairly early on, you find yourself thinking, “Hey, isn’t that a bit odd? Why do the police go along with that?” hold that thought and then you can feel smug at the end.
As in the previous books, Horst tries to use the story to explore notions of good and evil. One of the characters has written a dissertation on the nature of malevolence:
“.. it posed questions about whether malevolence was an animal instinct latent in all human beings. Whether this was what made a cat play with the mouse before finally taking its life, or why the bestial gladiator fights in their time could feed the enjoyment of the masses.”
In the end, though, there’s no deep psychological examination. The Other One is basically just evil.
“… he had sought out such cases in order to satisfy his own lust, his own desires.… He had built up a large portfolio of deviant photographs, kindling his personal fantasies. Then he had met Tom Kerr, and these fantasies began to be played out in real life. He was no longer an observer. He became the accomplice, the Other One.”
In summary, this reads well and is a solidly constructed police procedural, but not much more than that. If you are looking for solidly constructed police procedurals with a Scandi-noir edge you could do a lot worse than read this.
Two short reviews this week, both of detective stories. The first is set in Victorian London, the second in Madrid in the run-up to the Spanish Civil War.
Death Comes But Twice
This is the second of David Field’s detective mysteries featuring the pathologist James Carlyle and the preacher Matthew West. The characters having been well established in the first book Field now has more opportunity to concentrate on the story, but for people who are new to the series the first chapter summarises all the important relationships quickly and efficiently
Carlyle is experimenting with the new-fangled idea of fingerprints and in the course of collecting samples he discovers that a corpse brought in to the morgue after a murder is apparently that of a man who Matthew West had seen hanged. How had the villain escaped death when West, in his pastoral role, had been present to see him dropped at Newgate? As a detective mystery, it is not up there with the best of Agatha Christie, but it’s a reasonable puzzle with a solution which does make sense. As far as the story is concerned, though, the significance of a mystery which involves a failed hanging is that it allows Field to discuss the mechanics of capital punishment and present arguments for its abolition. This provides the main subtext to the mystery element, though the developing romance between West and Carlyle’s daughter is another important thread.
Field is familiar with his period as demonstrated by an interesting historical note at the end of the book. There are no obvious errors that bring you out of the story and, while the characters are probably more liberal in their attitudes than the average Londoner of the time, their beliefs are credible given the social backgrounds that they come from.
If you enjoy Victorian murder mysteries this is a series that is definitely worth visiting.
A Murder of No Consequence
I picked this up as it was being promoted as a free offer on Amazon and I wanted to read a detective story. Depressingly often these free books seem to be somewhat overpriced and I read a few pages before giving up. This one, however, grabbed me from the opening lines.
“Madrid, that summer, was a city suffocating under a blanket of heat and a dark cloud of fear. Armed gangs roamed the streets like packs of rabid dogs. Shots cut through the night air; the rattle of machine-gun bullets punctuated the usual afternoon calm. Anarchists shot fascists, socialists killed communists. In the first week of July alone eleven young men were murdered for their political beliefs.”
We are in 1936 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. It’s not a place or time I know much about (unless we’re moving over 100 years earlier and following Wellington as he marched through the peninsula). James Garcia Woods, though, obviously knows the period well. There’s a lot of historical detail about specific incidents during 1936, but what I found made the book for me was the sense of living in a society that is falling apart around you. Our hero, Inspector Ruiz, is an honest policeman, trying to do his job, solving the murder of a young woman. But the young woman was the mistress of a senior politician and policemen do not get to “just do their job” once politics are involved. Ruiz comes up against the realities of trying to enforce the law in a country where law and order are breaking down. We see the breakdown at every level: by reference to great political events, the continual interference by politicians in his investigation, and the way that the growing political divisions in the country come to intrude on the personal relationships and friendships of the characters.
The characterisation and back stories are almost all utterly convincing – the exception being the beautiful American student who is there, it seems, just to provide romantic interest and to give Ruiz an outsider to whom he can explain details of Spanish society that the reader cannot be expected to know.
In the end, dogged determination means Ruiz is able to solve the murder and achieve some kind of justice. It is, though, meaningless. A man who would have been shot out of hand in the political upheavals is, instead, to be executed for murder.
At one level, Ruiz’s crusade is utterly pointless, but at another it is vital. Ruiz represents the small man, a state functionary who holds to his principles and tries to do the right thing even when everything around him is collapsing.
I picked this up as a detective story, not as a historical novel, but it is, in fact, the very best kind of historical novel. The story makes sense only because of its historical context and we come to understand the history much better for seeing how it impinged on everyday life – even if everyday life here is a murder investigation. It’s also, I think, an important lesson in why historical fiction matters. These events were happening in a Western European nation less than a century ago. As we see our own political system becoming increasingly divided and politicians increasingly ready to interfere in the running of civil society, we need to be ready to learn from the lessons of history. These things can happen again and not just in Spain. What we need now is more men like Inspect Ruiz.
