"The Forgotten Man" by Robert Crais

 A whodunnit murder mystery thriller with a difference: the dead victim claimed to be the investigating PI's long lost father. This is the tenth novel featuring PI Elvis Cole but the first that I have read so I might have missed some of the nuances but there is a typical cast of cops and criminalists who, as per genre, wisecrack their way to solving the mystery. The usual low life characters too. A fairly well-written but otherwise standard example of the genre.

Selected quotes:

• "That's the first thing you learn when you work with the dead: We're gone when we no longer cry." (Ch 2)
• "Maybe we each felt our baggage was lighter without the weight of someone else's concern." (Ch 10)
• "That's what you need at eight in the morning, a pimp assuming the moral high ground." (Ch 17)
• "The feeder streets were stop-motion parking lots, advancing one frame at a time. Pedestrians moved faster; cyclists blew by at warp speed. So much for life in the fast lane." (Ch 22)
• "The Salton Sea was the largest, lowest lake in California, filling the broad, flat basin of the Salton Sink like a mirror laid on the desert floor. It was shallow because the land was flat, and surrounded by barren desert and scorched rocks like some forgotten puddle in Hell." (Ch 26)

June 2022; 342 pages

Also starring Elvis Cole: Most Wanted

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Great Arc" John Keay

A comprehensive and sometimes fascinating account of the project to map, by triangulations, most of British-controlled India, beginning in 1800 and ending in the early 1840s. Tigers weren't the only problem the Survey faced. Most of the surveyors suffered terribly from dysentery, malaria and a variety of jungle fevers. Triangulation requires one to see survey poles and flags from a distant theodolite so trees had to be chopped down, towers built (sometimes they piggybacked on religious monuments (such as the Jain statue shown below), to the anger of the locals; sometimes the surveyors were accused by local lords of spying on their women from the towers) and sometimes villages moved. Indian dust sometimes intervened anyway. And there are intrinsic problems with mapping which need correcting; these include:

• thermal expansion of the metal chains used
• refraction in the air causing sight lines to curve
• plumb lines don't hang true when they are near mountains

The first leader of this endeavour was a modest man called Lambton, who got on well with his staff and others (especially the ladies). His work was critical to the success of the mapping and he has been almost totally forgotten; the author uncovered his forgotten grave. His successor George Everest (pronounce Eve-rest) was a horrible man who took all the credit for the Surveys successes and blamed his subordinates when things went wrong; he was a dreadful man-manager and he has had the highest mountain on the world (which he never saw) named after him. Life is so unfair.

Selected quotes

• "Most of the rest of Africa remained shrouded in that mysterious 'darkness' which was simply Europe's ignorance." (Foreword)
• "Giving credit to his subordinates would not come naturally to George Everest." (Ch 1)
• "In 1802 'sea-level' was construed as high water, although later in the century a mean between high tide and low tide would be adopted as the standard." (Ch 3)
• "The people had not previously come across a European - let alone a breeding pair complete with offspring." (Ch 3)
• "If Hathipaon has a ghost, he may be sporting woolly underwear." (Ch 10)
• "By razing whole villages, appropriating sacred hills, exhausting local supplies, antagonising protective husbands and facilitating the assessment of the dreaded land revenue, the surveyors had probably done as much to advertise the realities of British rule and so alienate grassroots opinion as had any branch of the administration." (Ch 11)

By Kuldeep S - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72787861



It was regarded as the tallest monolithic statue until 2016.

It shows Jain guru Bahubali who stood still to meditate for so long that a vine grew around his legs.

June 2022; 172 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"And the Mountains Echoed" by Khaled Hosseini

 Abdullah is a poor boy living with his father, his sister Pari, his stepmother and his baby half-brother Iqbal in a dirt-poor village in Afghanistan. His uncle's rich employer wants a daughter and Abdullah's father arranges that she should adopt Pari; Abdullah is devastated. This book follows the consequences for all those who are touched by the story: for Uncle Nabi and for Markos, the Greek doctor who comes to live in Bani's house, and for the next generations.

If there is a theme, it is that some people are born beautiful and have all the luck; others are ill or crippled, and ugly and crooked and plain; that some people have the gift of caring for the afflicted and that some can only hide themselves away: 

• "All her life, Parwana had made sure to avoid standing in front of a mirror with her sister. It robbed her of hope to see her face beside Masooma's, to see so plainly what she had been denied. But in public, every stranger's eye was a mirror." (3)
• "I learned that the world didn't see inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone." (8)
• "Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly." (8)

This book is beautifully written. There were moments when my heart-strings were tugged and there  are perfect descriptions:

• "A delicate crescent moon cradled the dim ghostly outline of its full self." (2)

There are also moments full of the poetry of parenthood:

• "When I was a little girl, my father and I ad a nightly ritual.  After ... he had tucked me into bed, he would sit at my side and pluck bad dreams from my head with his thumb and forefinger. His fingers would hop from my forehead to my temples, patiently searching behind my ears, at the back of my head, and he'd make a pop sound - like a bottle being uncorked - with each nightmare he purged from my brain. He stashed the dreams, one by one, into an invisible sack in his lap and pulled the drawstring tightly. He would then scour the air, looking for happy dreams to replace the ones he had sequestered away. I watched as he cocked his head slightly and frowned, his eyes roaming side to side, like he was straining to hear distant music. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when my father's face unfirled into a smile, when he sang Ah, here is one, when he cupped his hands, let the dream land in his palms like a petal slowly twirling down from a tree. Gently, then, so very gently - my father said all good things in life were fragile and easily lost - he would raise his hands to his face, rub my palms against his brow and happiness into my head." (9)

Hosseini has also written The Kite Runner, his break-through novel, and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Selected quotes:

• "When you have lived as long as I have ... you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color." (1)
• "He kept returning. Every night he could be heard whimpering mournfully and every morning they found him lying by the door, chin on his front paws, blinking up at his assailants with melancholy, unaccusing eyes." (2)
• "A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and the thrill of being seen with Masooma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream." (3)
• "A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by." (4)
• "Their fights didn't so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered." (4)
• "I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us." (4)
• "Most people have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But what really guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want." (8)

June 2022; 402 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Freedom Evolves" by Daniel C Dennett

 Dennett is a 'naturalistic' philosopher, that is, one who believes that philosophers should take into account changes in scientific thinking. In this book he is trying to reconcile the idea that humans have free will with the scientific picture of a deterministic universe. 

He starts off by suggesting that the idea of souls "immaterial and immortal clumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers" has lost its credibility thanks to science. Having used Conway's Game of Life to probe what is meant by determinism and to suggest that there are levels of ontology (the level of the individual cell in the game, that of the clusters of cells that are assembled etc), he then considers whether we can 'recapture' free will by inserting a quantum discontinuity into the otherwise deterministic decision-making process but he shows that this cannot give us the moral responsibility that proponents of 'free will' are seeking (random chance is no more within our moral control than full mechanistic determinism). 

He seems to suggest that contrasting 'hard' Determinism (everything is preordained so we don't have free will) with Libertarianism (we have free will, therefore determinism is false) is a typical philosopher's trick of making you choose between two extremes; he says that philosophers should beware of hard positions: “There are no such miraculous things as levitators, but there are some pretty good near levitators. Hummingbirds, helicopters, blimps and hang gliders come to mind.” (Ch 4) Dennett suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between. After all, free will is concerned fundamentally with moral responsibility and this relies on a different sort of causality, one that involves intention as in 'the lumberjack caused the tree to fall', and determinism is most commonly involved with physical causality, as in 'the lumberjack's axe caused the tree to fall'. This is another refocusing of ontology onto a different level and I'm not sure that this isn't another typical philosopher's trick, that he isn't really saying that he can't solve the problems on the atomic level so he's going to ignore them and argue elsewhere. 

It seems clear that on the systems level there is something at least approximating free will. Dennett invokes (or seems to come close to invoking) chaos theory and the idea that our consciousness is not a single Cartesian 'self' but a chaos of competing thoughts. He makes the point that most people, when deciding what they want for lunch, don't always make the same choice, showing that despite most of the inputs being the same the output can be different (presumably because one of the inputs is yesterday's output fed back into the decision-making process). 

He considers society as a competition between freeloaders and cooperatives and suggests that, in the end, a social animal such as man will evolve into a stable equilibrium because cooperatives tend to develop their own, cooperating, groups which ostracise freeloaders and a society made up entirely of freeloaders will have catastrophic competition. Of the freeloaders that are left, they may be coerced into cooperating if they think they are being watched, which may  explain why old societies believed in a “vigilant, omnipresent God.” (Ch 7)

His next consideration is whether we can have (moral) responsibility for a decision, given that who we are has been shaped by our genes, by our upbringing and by our circumstances. Again, I think he ducks this question. He points out, sensibly, that the criteria we use to decide whether a person has moral responsibility shifts over time. In the end he suggests that whether we should be punished depends on whether we accept that we should be punished. If we are incompetent to make that decision (like a young child or a lunatic) or if we are competent to make the decision but reject the punishment (like a psychopath) we should not be admitted to the benefits of full citizenship (eg jailed).

I'm not sure that I fully understand Dennett's arguments and I'm not sure that I full accept his conclusions but this is a fascinatingly readable book and many of the things he says are very wise.

There were things in here which had me thinking back to Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark.

Selected quotes:

• “One widespread tradition has it that we human beings are responsible agents, captains of our fate, because we what we really are are souls, immaterial and immortal clumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers. ... But this idea of immaterial souls, ... has outlived its credibility thanks to the advance of the natural sciences.” (Ch 1)
• “You are ... an assemblage of roughly a hundred trillion cells ... The bulk of these cells are ‘daughters’ of the egg cell and sperm cell whose unison started you, but they are actually outnumbered by the trillions of bacterial hitchhikers." (Ch 1)
• “Look around at those who are participating in this quest for further scientific knowledge ... they are manifestly not short on optimism, moral conviction, engagement in life, commitment to society. In fact, if you want to find anxiety, despair, and anomie among intellectuals today, look to the recently fashionable tribe of post-modernists, who like to claim that modern science is just another in a long line of myths.” (Ch 1)
• “‘Be all that you can be’ ...  Aren’t we all, automatically, all that we can be?” (Ch 1)
• “One can often embarrass the asker of a rhetorical question by simply trying to answer it.” (Ch 1)
• "A fact-laden disquisition on the biomechanics of sexual arousal and erection is not a good topic during foreplay.” (Ch 1)
• “The religious right has also mastered the art of refutation by caricature.” (Ch 1)
• "Why is Dumbo better off without his myth of magic? Because he is less dependent, more enabled, more autonomous in the undeluded state.” (Ch 1)
• "even though the sun has risen every day so far, there is no contradiction in the supposition that tomorrow will be different.” (Ch 2) 
• “In a totally chaotic, unpredictable environment, there is no hope of avoidance except sheer blind luck.” (Ch 2)
• “In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it.” (Ch 2)
• “We know that in the early days - the first few billion years - of life on this planet, self-protective designs emerged, thanks to the slow and non-miraculous process of natural selection.” (Ch 2)
• "A predicate is necessary when there is no possible world in which the opposite is true. ... "A predicate is possible when there is at least one possible world in which the predicate is true." (Ch 3)
• “We are designed by evolution to be ‘informavores’, epistemically hungry pursuers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.” (Ch 3)
• “We have evolved to be entities designed to change their natures in response to interactions with the rest of the world.” (Ch 3) This sounds contentious but it really only claims that ‘humans learn’.
• “You can rightly be held responsible for the outcome of a deed that includes a chance or undetermined element, if that is what you were trying to accomplish” eg assassin’s lucky shot (Ch 4)
• “Your immune system is composed of cells that are now members in good standing of the host team, but they began their career in your ancestors as an invading army, which was gradually co-opted and turned into a troop of mercenary guards, their own genetic identity merged with that of the more ancient lineages they joined forces with, another instance of horizontal transmission of design.” (Ch 5)
• “We are the species that discovered doubt.” (Ch 5)
• “(Those who don’t get this parenthesis may consider themselves fortunate to be in the dark.)” (Ch 6)
• “A person is a hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages.” (Ch 6)
• “In at least one chimp community, the slyly lascivious stroking of a plucked blade of grass by a male apparently means, to an onlooking female, something like ... ‘Would you like to come up and see my etchings’?” (Ch 6)
• “Religion is ubiquitous in human culture and it flourishes in spite of its considerable costs.” (Ch 6) 
• “The only position on reasons that memetics contradicts is the well-nigh incoherent position that supposes reasons somehow exist without support from biology at all, hanging from some Cartesian skyhook.” (Ch 6)
• “The trick to gaining the reputation for being good, a valuable prize indeed, is actually being good.” (Ch 7)
• “Our free will, like all our other mental powers, has to be smeared out over time, not measured at instants.” (Ch 8)
• “You are not out of the loop; you are the loop.” (Ch 8)
• “If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.” (Ch 8)
• “The process of self-description begins in earliest childhood, and includes a good deal of fantasy from the outset.” (Ch 8)
• “If you are free, are you responsible for being free, or just lucky? Can you be blamed for failing to make yourself free?” (Ch 9)
• “Those whom we end up punishing are really paying a double price, for they are scapegoats, deliberately harmed by society in order to set a vivid example for the more ably self-controlled, but not really responsible for the deeds we piously declare them to have committed of their own free will.” (Ch 9)
• “90 percent and more of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back billions of generations.” (Ch 9)
• “We almost always adjust our behaviour to harmonize with ... the social demands of the current circumstance.” (Ch 9)
• “Like everything else evolution has created, we’re a somewhat opportunistically contrived bag of tricks, and our morality should be based on that realization.” (Ch 9)
• “How shall we draw the line between ... he couldn’t control himself - and people who do evil ‘of their own free will’ ... If we set the threshold too high, everybody gets off the hook; if we set it too low, we end up punishing scapegoats.” (Ch 10)
• “One of the few uncontroversial propositions in ethics ... is, ‘ought implies can’ - you are only obligated to do something you are able to do.” (Ch 10)
• “The ideal for an institution of punishment ... would be that every punishment should be justified in the eyes of the person punished.” (Ch 10) 
• “You can’t readily uneducate people.” (Ch 10)
• “The economic realities of the twenty-first century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child.” (Ch 10)

June 2022; 309 pages

Also by Daniel Dennett and reviewed in this blog:

• Consciousness Explained

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Sanders of the River" by Edgar Wallace

Not so much a novel, more a collection of tales about a District Commissioner in Africa during colonial rule. 

Fundamentally racist, it portrays the Africans as childish, ignorant and bellicose who must be ruled using corporal and capital punishment; white people who seek to educate the Africans and who see them as having rights are frequently murdered; Sanders keeps order with soldiers and machine guns. The implicit values espoused in this book are horrid and make it difficult to read.

The author, Edgar Wallace, was a hugely prolific and hugely popular writer of thrillers from 1905 until his death in 1932; Sanders of the Rivers (written 1911) inspired a series of works. His other popular works were the Four Just Men series; he also wrote the original screenplay for King Kong. His immense popularity suggests that he tapped into the zeitgeist of the time. It is instructive to read books such as this if only to understand the values of popular culture at the time and to be thankful at how far we have come from that in only just over one hundred years, even if we have not yet progressed far enough.

I also found it interesting that Wallace adopted short sentences, short paragraphs and a very direct tell-don't-show (past tense third person) style.

Wallace spent some time in South Africa as a soldier and journalist, so presumably he had some background on which to base his stories. His books are mostly out of print in the UK, presumably because they are too racist to publish, but wikipedia says that Wallace still has a readership in Germany.

Selected quotes:

•  "Gold-leaf imposed upon the lead of commerce" (Ch 1)
• "The people hesitated, surging and swaying, as a mob will sway in its uncertainty." (Ch 2)
• "For many years have the Ochori people formed a sort of grim comic relief to the tragedy of African colonization." (Ch 3) There are occasional indications that Wallace is aware the colonialism is an evil system but fundamentally he has espoused and incorporated its basic values: that one man's life is worth more than another's and that this valuation depends upon the colour of his skin. 
• "The Isisi Exploitation Syndicate, Limited, was born between the entree and the sweet" (Ch 4) The word 'exploitation' is at least frank. But the exploiter is a (disguised) Jew and Wallace demonstrates his racism includes anti-semitism.
• "the green path to death" (Ch 4)
• "There had been good crops, and good crops mean idleness, and idleness means mischief." (Ch 5) 
• "Heroes should be tall and handsome, with flashing eyes; Sanders was not so tall, was yellow of face, moreover had grey hair." (Ch 6)
• "You who do not understand how out of good evil may arise must take your spade to some virgin grassland, untouched by the hand of man since the beginning of time. Here is soft, sweet grass, and never a sign of nettle, or rank, evil weed. It is as God made it. Turn the soil with your spade, intent on improving His handiwork, and next season - weeds, nettles, lank creeping things, and coarse-leaved vegetation cover the ground." (Ch 8) He uses this to suggest that missionaries are bad for Africa but by extension it suggests that education is bad for poor people. 
• "He had sown ... the seed of an idea that somebody was responsible for their well-being." (Ch 8) Wow! Wallace was a fascist in so many ways.
• "He was in the despondent mood peculiar to men of action who find life running too smoothly." (Ch 9)
• "The wise goat does not bleat when the priest approaches the herd." (Ch 9)
• "As he walked, you saw the muscles of his back ripple and weave like the muscles of a well-trained thoroughbred." (Ch 12) 
• "A story about Africa must be a mystery story, and your reader of fiction requires that his mystery shall be, in the end, X-rayed so that the bones of it are visible." (Ch 13)
• "'Puck-apuck-puck-apuck-puck' went the stern wheel slowly, and the bows of the 'Zaire' clove the calm waters and left a fan of foam behind." (Ch 13)

June 2022; 159 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"In Plain Sight" by Ross Coulthart

In the first part of this book, the author goes through a large number of reported UAP (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, the term he prefers to UFO) sightings; these come so thick and fast that it seems he wants to convince the sceptical by the sheer frequency of the sightings. However, he hardly ever goes into any single sighting in sufficient depth to convince me (and I am profoundly sceptical) that any particular sighting offers clear evidence of an alien spacecraft, in particular since almost all of the author's 'evidence' is anecdotal. 

He also relies a lot on hearsay: "It was reported" is a much-repeated phrase. When official sources doubt the reliability of the witness, the author assumes this provides evidence of an official cover-up. In Chapter 5, ironically entitled "Hard Evidence" he reports on the testimony of "United States researcher Budd Hopkins" who himself is reporting the testimony of an "air force sergeant" about a film supposedly of a UFO and some 'men in black'.

Almost every one of the sightings reported in this book happened near a US military base or US military exercises which might be due to the author's sampling techniques, though I suspect he would prefer to think that aliens have chosen to monitor the US military (though why, I can't imagine).

In the second part of the book, the author plunges into the world of claim and counter-claim, building up his case that the US military has conspired to hide the truth about UFOs from the world for years, and that they have recovered crashed alien spacecraft powered by Physics beyond our present-day understanding and reverse-engineered technologies of eg "anti-gravitics". He gets very excited when someone (for example a punk-rock star but more frequently someone who calls themselves by a scientific-sounding title like Doctor or Professor) makes sweeping and bizarre claims with minimal supporting evidence, suggesting repeatedly that even if a small part of the person's claims are true, this has huge implications. He doesn't seem to feel that if one part of a person's testimony is shown to be inaccurate (perhaps because the person is deluded or misguided or mendacious) that undermines everything else he says. He would rather give the benefit of the doubt ... until someone denies what the author so devoutly wishes to be true, in which case he nit-picks over their denial, often concluding, in a perfect example of heads I win, tails you lose, that the existence of the denial suggests that there must be some truth to the thing being denied. Another tactic is to take the absence of a response as tacit confirmation.

Another HIWTYL tactic is to claim that UFOs used mimicry so that they sometimes appear to be meteors, stars, or aircraft. Presumably the author believes that if it looks like a helicopter and moves like a helicopter it's a UFO masquerading as a helicopter.

Even so, the author sometimes appears to realise that some of his so-called sources are a little untrustworthy:

• “Greer bizarrely claims that the gatekeepers of what some call ‘The Big Secret’ then tried to kill him with a secret remote death ray. ... There is no evidence for such a claim.” (Greer survived the cancer he alleges was caused by the death ray because his golden retriever "took some of the “hit” from the EM weapon")
• One member of the team investigating cattle mutilations ate the Skinwalker Ranch is a Colonel in the oxymoronic 'military intellignece' who worked on the idea that psychics could use 'remote viewing' to learn Kremlin secrets. The team investigating this was led by another of the author's 'experts', Dr Hal Puthoff, whose credentials are later used to authenticate other wild claims about UAPs.
• A punk rocker called DeLonge who claims that one his tracks was "about aliens that come to Earth and ‘fly up your butt. And it’s true’” gets several chapters. "The idea that a punk-pop rock star could achieve what decades of UAP conspiracy whistleblowers have tried to do and failed – forcing the whole purported US government UAP conspiracy out into the open – is surely ridiculous." It may be, but the author is still enthralled by it. “DeLonge also claimed the US already knew the secrets of free energy, so-called zero-point energy. ‘One inch of air could power the US for hundreds of years,’” (Ch 16)

There are some inaccuracies. At one stage it is stated that "A 15-metre circumference is an 11-metre diameter." Actually 15m circumference is less than 5 m diameter. He also offers an "estimated" speed of 104,895 mph for a UAP, believing, as many non-scientists do, that you can convince by the accuracy of your numbers, without realising that this undermines the whole concept of an "estimate".

At one stage he name checks Chuck Zukowski who investigates cattle mutilations in The 37th Parallel by Ben Mezrich.

But the last word has to be left to the author: "If there is a kernel of reality in all this stuff, it is truly the most amazing story on the planet. And for me, at least, it’s passed the sniff test.” It is heartening to know that such a load of nonsense passes such a robust criterion.

Selected quotes

• “The biggest problem about the UAP phenomenon is that these strange sightings are not repeatable; they are not a replicable experiment,” (Ch 1)
• "Around the world, sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena escalated in the years immediately after the Second World War. Perhaps this was in part because aliens and flying saucers were increasingly popular fodder for movies, comic strips and science-fiction stories." (Ch 2)
• “Random personal observations, fuzzy photographers, and crop circles will never “prove” the existence of anything, especially since UFO appearances to humans are transitory and somewhat related to the observer’s state of mind. What needs to be collected and publicly disseminated is hard scientific data collected from instruments that are known to be accurate and reliable,” (Ch 8)

June 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The White Ship" by Charles Spencer

 The White Ship was a ship travelling to England that sank in 1120 on a voyage from Barfleur in Normandy France; its historical significance was that among the dead was Prince William, the only legitimate son of Henry I, King of England. William's death provoked a succession crisis on Henry's death leading to a eighteen-year-long civil war between the supporters of King Stephen and Henry's only legitimate daughter, the Empress Matilda.

Of course, mediaeval history relies on just a few chronicled sources, so there are insufficient details in the story of the White Ship itself for a whole book, especially when you write narrative history and don't spend endless pages considering your sources. So Spencer chooses instead to set the incident of the White Ship into the context of the history of Norman England from 1066 to 1154. But encapsulating 88 years into 300 pages leads to problems of brevity. This is especially true when trying to describe the dynastic battles in northern France between the mini-states of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Flanders, among others' it is even more true when trying to follow the convoluted history of the Stephen-Matilda conflict in which many participants changed sides at least once. The result is a history which manages to be at once confusing and over-simplistic. The book was a disappointment compared to Spencer's other forays into narrative history: Blenheim and Prince Rupert.

This is a fascinating period of history, responsible for much in the making of England, and it is better served by histories that take their time, such as:

• King Rufus by Emma Mason
• Henry I by Judith Green

Nevertheless, Spencer mentions, en passant, some fascinating insights into the Middle Ages.

• As a prince, Henry I was regarded as "something of an intellectual" because he could read ... although "there is no evidence that Henry could write". (Ch 2)
• Magnus Barefoot, who became King of Norway in 1095, "took control of a strong of islands around the north and west of Scotland, moving on to the Isle of Man, before landing on the island of Anglesey." (Ch 3) He was supported by Harold Haroldson, son of the King Harold killed at the Battle of Hastings. (Ch 5)
• William II made (later Saint) Anselm of Bec , who formulated the ontological argument for the existence of God, Archbishop of Canterbury (Ch 3)
• Just before the death of William II by an arrow in a hunting accident one of the illegitimate sons of Robert Curthose, William's older brother and Duke of Normandy, was killed by an arrow in a hunting accident; the guilty knight fled to the priory of St Pancras in Lewes and became a monk to avoid punishment. (Ch 4)
• Scottish King Macbeth ruled for 17 years: he "was a devout Christian who attended a papal jubilee in Rome in 1050 ... impressing onlookers with the amount of alms he doled out to the poor. As king, Macbeth insisted on enlightened measures, such as the legal defence of widows and orphans ... His strength of purpose and his vision helped to bring prosperity to his people." (Ch 4)
• Henry I's Queen, Matilda, built a single-span bridge over the River Lea, bear a favoured bathing place, which soon became known as Stratford-le-Bow. (Ch 6)
• The infamous cruelty of Robert de Belleme, at one time master of Arundel Castle, "is believed to be the model for 'Robert the Devil', a mythical Norman lord of chilling depravity, who was supposedly the spawn of the Devil." (Ch 8)
• The loss of his wife Matilda on the White Ship led the Lord of Perche to found a chapel at Soligny-la-Trappe which later became the site of the first Trappist monastery. (Ch 12)
• The father of Geoffrey of Anjou who married the Empress Matilda, daughter of King Henry I and mother of King Henry II, was Fulk, who later became the second crusader King of Jerusalem. 
• "There were those who believed that the house of Anjou descended from a diabolical source. Supposedly an Angevin count had long before returned from a visit to a far-off land with a beautiful wife who was a suspiciously reluctant churchgoer. When she did attend, she always left before the consecration. One day her husband had four of his knights tread on the fold of her cloak so she could not slip away mid-service. Forced to witness the priest holding aloft the host she was said to have screamed, slipped her cloak and flown away with two children in her wake. This was how she was revealed to be Melusine, the Devil's daughter." (Ch 15)

June 2022; 298 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"On Chapel Sands" by Laura Cumming

 A gently meandering memoir about the author's mother's childhood in a tiny Lincolnshire seaside village; drifting reminiscences in the style of Cider with Rosie but less lyrical; I often drifted away.

The hook is that the author's mother was abducted from the beach when she was three years old and discovered a few days later. The second hook is that the 'parents' from whom she was abducted were not her birth parents; she had been unofficially adopted at the age of three. There is here the makings of a potent human interest story, but these two hooks are dangled repeatedly as unrefreshed bait in the way a cheap television programme keeps on telling you what is coming up so that you don't turn over during the commercial break. My frustration was not soothed  by the way that  the author flips backwards and forwards between her own narration and the quoted narration of her mother; this is not always clearly signified (often just by a slight change in paragraph indentation) and I found myself confused, from time to time, as to which 'mother' and whose point of view I was following.

The subtitle is 'My mother and other missing persons'; I missed the other missing persons. Where were they? The focus seems entirely on the author's family, plus a smattering of art criticism. 

I found this stodgier than it should have been.

There are a couple of interesting 'facts' which seem doubtfull:

• The author claims that during WWII to Norwegian King lived in exile at Ingoldmells on the Lincolnshire coast near Skegness. This doesn't seem to be the fact. According to wikipedia, the Norwegian Royal family lived in London and Berkshire while in exile. The wikipedia entry on Ingoldmells doesn't mention the Norwegians.
• The author also states that her father taught life drawing classes and his models included an old man who once posed for Eros and a young man called Sean Connery. Wikipedia gives the name of the Eros life model as fifteen-year-old Angelo Colarossi ... who seems to have lived in later life as a solicitor's clerk in West London and was buried in Feltham in 1949 which seems to make it unlikely that he would have been available for modelling in Edinburgh.

Selected quotes:

• "The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent; so writes St Augustine." (Ch 1)
• "She taught me how to remember paintings ... first draw the frame, then summarise the main shapes and volumes in rapid thumbnail." (Ch 1)
• "Perhaps experience develops into memory like a photograph, its latent imprint invisible to us until finally fixed by conversation." (Ch 3)
• "I have never felt able to represent myself in speech, only through the merciful slowness and forgiving second chances of writing." (Ch 4)
• "What is sand but the pulverised past, ancient history in billions of particles?" (Ch 8)
• "George only appears happy in rare shots with men. He never smiles in the company of Veda or Betty." (Ch 12)

June 2022; 297 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Twelve Secrets" by Robert Gold

Ben, an investigative journalist, investigates the twenty-year-old murder of his brother and the ten-year-old death of his mother. Everyone in the London 'village' in which he lives seems to have a secret; mostly these concern paternity of children. 

There were lots of revelations; one of them I didn't expect. Otherwise it was thriller business as usual. The plot was transparent. The characters one-dimensional, if that. The prose offered no moments of excitement.

I was mostly bored.

June 2022; 439 pages  

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Pigs Have Wings" by P G Wodehouse

 Another Blandings book and once again there is an imposter at the castle, as well the two sets of young lovers who have managed to get themselves engaged to the wrong people, as well as a pig that needs protecting from kidnap, or another that needs kidnapping. 

As well as reusing characters and plot devices (all Blandings books include imposters and young lovers, most include the pig) PGW is not beyond reusing phrases. For example: "It was plain that she was in agreement with the poet that of all sad words of tongue or pen the saddest are these 'It might have been'." (8.1). A very similar sentiment was first used by Psmith in Mike (“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” said he, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’"; C 33) and in Leave it to Psmith ("Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these. 'it might have been'."; 3.1). The quote is originally from a nineteenth-century American Abolitionist Quaker poet called John Greenleaf Whittier. Perhaps reusing your material is the only possible strategy if you are a prolific author.

But you don't read PGW for the predictable plot or the insight into character; you read him for the joy of the way he takes the language all the way to the fair.

Selected quotes:

PGW enjoyed taking the mickey out of authors in this book. One of the young lovers writes short stories: 

• "For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked." (4.3)
• "Jerry Vail is an author and you know as well as I do what authors are. Unbalanced. Unreliable. Fatheads, to a man." (9.1)

Other quotes:

• "A man with a fondness for the fleshpots and a weakness for wines and spirits who, after many lean years, suddenly inherits a great deal of money and an extensive cellar finds himself faced with temptations which it is hard to resist. Arrived in the land of milk and honey, his disposition is to square his elbows and let himself go till his eyes bubble." (2.1)
• "Silence fell, one of those deep, uneasy silences which occur when all good men realize that now is the time for them to come to the aid of the party but are unable to figure out just how to set about doing so." (2.5)
• "'Why is it?' inquired Penny - she seemed to be addressing a passing butterfly, 'that men always say that?'" (4.3)
• "He looked like the things you find in dust-bins, which are passed over with a disdainful jerk of the head by the discriminating alley cat." (6.2)
• "I've been thinking about that cold of yours, and I'll tell you the stuff to give it. You want to take a deep breath and hold it as long as you possibly can. This traps the germs in your interior, and not being able to get fresh air, they suffocate." (8.1)
• "It is a very intrepid young man who can see an English butler steadily and see him whole without feeling a worm-like humility and all Jerry's previous encounters with Beach ... had left him with the impression that his feet were too large, his ears too red and his social status something in between that of a Dead End kid and a badly dressed leper." (10.3) It is the addition of 'badly-dressed' to 'leper' that makes PGW so wonderful: he takes a metaphor and keeps adding.
• "He was experiencing the quiet satisfaction of the raconteur who sees that his story is going well. ... Just the right hushed silence, and the eyes protruding just the correct distance from their sockets." (11.2)

June 2022; 253 pages

Other P G Wodehouse books reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Wall Jumper" by Peter Schneider

 The 'Wall' is the Berlin Wall which divided the German city from 1961 to 1989. The narrator lives in West Berlin (when it was "a half-city, a walled-on enclave set within a surly, repressive state"; Introduction) but frequently visits East Berlin where he visits relatives, goes to bars and collects stories of those who 'jump' the wall. There are some remarkable stories, including three teenagers who live close enough to the early wall to leap from the roof of their apartment block onto the wall; they make use of this facility to go to movies in the west, returning each night, only being caught after western journalists record their adventures. Another wall jumper goes from west to east. 

The main thrust of the book is to explore how growing up under two different systems, the capitalist West Berlin and the communist East Germany, affects the characters of the inhabitants.

The Introduction (by novelist Ian McEwan) calls this book a novel although there is little novel-type structure (it is difficult to discern a plot and the character of the protagonist does not seem to be affected in the way that the hero of a novel normally is). It is more like reportage, although the narrator is anonymous and one presumes that the other characters are pseudonymous, perhaps even fictional.

It's a very short book (120 pages in the Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition) and I read it quite quickly. It fascinated me but it didn't always hold my interest which may have been due to the lack of a normal novelistic structure.

It is an interesting insight into the thoughts and feelings of people growing up in East Germany. For example, one character makes the point that it is wrong of the West German leader to lecture the East German leader about remembering the Nazi massacre of the Jews, since during the Second World War the West German leader had fought in the Wehrmacht and the East German leader had formed part of the resistance, spending ten years in Nazi jails.

In the Introduction, Ian McEwan makes the following points:

• The people living in West Berlin "tended to be the more adventurous spirits ... leaving behind them the prosperity and stifling conformity - as they saw it - of other German cities ... [for] cheap, shabby, once grand apartments. Those high ceilings echoed to the sound of radical political talk and avant garde jazz sweetened by the reek of cannabis. It was the presence of the Wall ... that made West Berlin both edgier and yet intellectually more vital than other cities in the West." 
• "Their stories are unfolded artfully, in a Scherezade-like manner, as bar-room anecdotes, cleverly overlapping throughout"

Selected quotes:

• "The difference between German and Latin American cooking becomes trivial when you see the garbage cans." (Ch 1)
• "A joke is always an epitaph for a feeling that has died." (Ch 1)
• "Smoke rises among exotic trees, light glows behind windows, human silhouettes become visible." (Ch 1)
• "Even more telling are the colors: pale gray, olive gray, wine gray, dove gray." (Ch 2) NB: My copy was an English translation published by a British publisher ... yet it uses American spellings! Why?
• "I leave the lines for name a title blank." (Ch 2) The narrator is anonymous throughout.
• "The Russian formula for concrete: a third cement, a third sand, a third microphone." (Ch 2)
• "If a human right is trampled anywhere in the world, she seems to come out of it with bruises of her own." (Ch 2)
• "What would happen to me if I stopped finding fault with myself, as I've been taught to do, and blamed everything on the state? Where does a state end and a self begin?" (Ch 3) This last sentence is repeated near the end of the book.
• "The street looks scoured." (Ch 3) 
• "Lena's stories seemed to me the product of a wishing so strong that the conditional past became the past pure and simple; they were not lies." (Ch 3)
• "The use of the subjunctive, even where grammatically appropriate, was artificial, showed lack of feeling and directness." (Ch 3)
• "I am entering a state where even things that will happen anyway require authorization." (Ch 4)
• "Pommerer, an intellectual under socialism, has about as much contact with the workers as I do in the West. He gets to know them when a water main bursts, a facade is restored, or a chair stands vacant at a barroom table." (Ch 4)

June 2022; 120 pages

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rottnest" by E V Faulkner

An intriguing and absorbing story which quickly had me hooked and turning the pages.

Peter, an ageing music journalist, who has been sent a cassette tape of what sounds to be an amazing new band, seeks them out on a remote estate in Yorkshire; he hopes they might rekindle his flagging dreams of promoting new talent. But the four people living there seem to be trapped in the nineteen seventies. None of them admit having sent the tape. They live an 'hippie' lifestyle without TV or computer, or telephone (and there is no mobile phone coverage); they are cut off from the outside world. Aldous, the eldest, the leader, resents Peter's presence and repeatedly insists that he leaves before he corrupts the innocence of his siblings. Magni, the other brother, digs holes and fills them back in. Dharma, the eldest girl, espouses  and alternative medication; her little sister Eowyn seems lost and confused. As Peter explores, and gets lost in, the crumbling mansion and the overgrown grounds, the mysteries deepen.

At the same time, there is the story of Peter, going through a rather late mid-life crisis, learning from the siblings' rejection of the world he takes for granted and reaching an epiphany (three-quarters of the way through; the pacing in this novel is near-perfect).

“Nothing’s as it seems here, Peter.” (Ch 22) I was quickly intrigued, forming all sorts of theories about what had happened (and what was going to happen). This kept me hooked for the first four-fifths of the book. The difficulty with a book like this is how to keep the magic alive and the reader still reading after all has been explained.  This was done successfully by exploring the idea of whether Peter, representing the outside world, had the right (or the duty) to destroy the innocence of the brother and sister musicians.

The plot could be considered as a variant on the 'hero's adventure'. The hero-protagonist is Peter whom we first see in the normal world as he walks down the muddy drive with his wheely luggage and afterwards again see in the 'real' world but he spends most of his time in the 'other' and slightly magical world of Rottnest, which is where he becomes a  changed and better man, learning the skills that will enable him to become a better man. He encounters trials along the way, some of which he fails (falling off the loo seat, his abortive attempt to record the music-making) and some of which he passes (seeking Eowyn). Could you argue that Dharma and Eowyn (and Magni?) are his helpers while Aldous is the antagonist?

A thoroughly enjoyable read by a writer at the top of her game.

Selected quotes

• "No one told you anything about late adulthood, that middle age was a transition from ‘The future is a long way off,’ to ‘The end is nigh.’ Just when you got your shit together and your head in a relatively stable place, your body goes to pot." (Ch 5)
• "He eyed the remaining three insults to the world of baking and wondered where he might secrete them in the room." (Ch 8)
• "Each time he determined to head to a particular area, his way was somehow altered, as though Rottnest realigned its passages once he had set foot in one." (Ch 9)
• "Peter had nothing against dreadlocks per se, but he drew the line when they were unkempt and could be smelt from two strides away." (Ch 17)
• "When does a person become too old to drink and smoke and stay up late? It seemed that middle age had come suddenly upon him. Youth, that long ago idyll, that green and pleasant land, barely lasted before dragging one inexorably towards old age. Then death." (Ch 20)
• "They looked about as alert as koala bears after bingeing on eucalyptus leaves." (Ch 20)
• “Last chance saloon, and the bar’s closed." (Ch 27)
• "Pretend you’re Heathcliff, he tried to cajole himself along. More like Cathy, you great, soft lump.” (Ch 29)
• "He’d been wallowing so much in his own so-called lack of success, and the need to be worth something, he hadn’t understood how lucky he was." (Ch 29)
• "People said children were empathetic, Peter disagreed. As a child, it could be difficult to truly appreciate the pain of another - hence school bullying." (Ch 30)
• "As evening drew in, someone lit candles around various rooms and in the main hall. They didn’t so much light up the place as add flickering shadows," (Ch 34)
• "In the dark, Rottnest lurked as though waiting for something." (Ch 34)

June 2022

Other books by this author reviewed in this blog:

• As Alexandra Peel:
• The Floating Church
• Where Sleeps the Serpent

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Secret History of the Hell-Fire Clubs" by Geoffrey Ashe

This is a hugely comprehensive history of the tradition of immoral dissent in post-mediaeval western society from Rabelais to Charles Manson, taking in the hell-fire clubs, the Marquis de Sade and Aleister Crowley on the way. I think it has little pretence to be scholarly, it never questions its sources and it repeats stories that other authorities regard as made-up. Even in what is quite a long book, such a massive breadth means it is a little difficult to have much depth. But as an introduction to the subject it is well-written and easy to read and I learned a number of things I hadn’t known before (including all of the stuff about Rabelais - the author was clearly very well read and has prompted me to add yet more books to my tbr pile).

His thesis is fundamentally that the Hell-Fire clubs first thrived in the atmosphere of optimism during the Enlightenment following the middle ages and that they were given an essential impetus because of the number of bored young men, rich and aristocratic, who, during the long Whig ascendancy under Walpole in George II's England, had no outlet for their energies, the Tory party of the time being disorganised and tainted with Jacobite sympathies, “they dwindled into a mere scattered grumble, with a literary tinge”. (Ch 3)

He very much makes the point that all the idealistic societies proposed in which a group of people could dispense with normal morality depends on (a) them being part of a select elite, both rich and good-looking and (b) on them being served by others:

• “Anti-moralists tend to believe in privilege and selection.” (Ch 1)
• “magic tended to be an affair of elite groups with elite ethics . . . or nonethics.”
• “Unbridled freedom could work only inside a select club. When the random myriads began doing as they willed, or as they pleased, they required curbing. Universal, benign, liberating Nature was not to be trusted.” (Ch 11)

Having said that, the appeal is obvious, and repeated time and again:

• “Is it so absurd to suggest that the secret of freedom and fulfillment is to be free and fulfilled?” (Prologue)
• “Everybody should accept Nature’s guidance, say “yes” to life, and try all things, good-humoredly, uninhibitedly” (Ch 1)
• “if Nature was benign and the rational way to live was to obey her ... then why not be wicked, if that ... was how Nature prompted you to assert your freedom, what right had the sourpuss of Respectability to complain?” (Ch 3)
• “What lunacy to believe that God has created us to act in ways which go against Nature, and make us miserable in this world! That he wants us to deny ourselves everything which satisfies the senses and appetites he has given us!” (Ch 5)
• “Nature dictates sexual enjoyment, but she does not dictate “normal” sexual mores, and outside western Europe hardly anyone pretends that she does.” (Ch 13)
• “Anybody not blinded by Christian or post-Christian prejudice must admit that Nature wouldn’t allow men to enjoy (for example) sodomy if such conduct offended her.” (Ch 13)
• “if so-called vice gives you greater pleasure, then the natural and proper course is to scrap virtue. Which will usually be the result if you face facts, because virtue is weaker. Virtue means not doing things. Virtue means timidity, obedience. Virtue means conforming to custom. Vice, on the other hand, is (or should be) bold and adventurous and enlarging." (Ch 13)

Selected quotes:

• “Organized goodness has had a long inning and, it must be confessed, often a painful one.” (Prologue)
• “The golden rule, as Shaw said centuries later, is that there are no golden rules.” (Ch 1)
• "When he [the Messiah] failed to arrive, the Kabbalah offered the ghetto-weary a path of release” (Ch 2)
• “In 1736 Bishop Butler—one of the few Anglican clerics of high mental attainments—declared that most educated men had ceased to regard Christianity as even an object of inquiry, ‘its fictitious nature being so obvious’.” (Ch 3)
• “the less gifted could make hay while the philosophic sun shone—and, having made it, could roll in it.” (Ch 5)
• “No one in England was prepared—yet—to condone stealing or murder also, on the ground that “natural” promptings can inspire crime as well as fornication.” (Ch 5)
• “When inmates become sick or unattractive, and cease to please the rest, they are swept out of sight to live in a basement, with nothing to do but fret over their symptoms.” (Ch 7)
• “Omne animal post coitum triste est, praeter gallum gallinaceum et sacerdotem gratis fornicantem—Every creature is melancholy after sexual intercourse except a barnyard cock and a priest getting it for nothing.” (Ch 9)
• “The real-life Hall-Stevenson was an unbalanced anti-Catholic witch hunter, collector of dirty books, and hypochondriac. Whenever an east wind blew he retired to bed in the belief that he was dying.” (Ch 11)
• “Pleasure—your own—is the sole object worth pursuing. This should be done in a scientific spirit, with no restraints whatsoever. The only authentic pleasure is sexual. Other kinds are feeble and limited and should never be allowed to compete. Perversion, so-called, is a higher pleasure than normal intercourse, which has distracting associations of love and parenthood. Furthermore, the essence of the pleasure in sex is egotistic and manipulative. Hence it reaches its height where there is the most selfishness, the most cruelty, the most tyranny over the partner, or rather victim.” (Ch 13)
• “Since the secret of the supreme thrill is (in conventional language) evil, an ever-widening repertoire of evil can be built into your sex practices and be made the basis of ever-more-fiery, ever-more-exotic thrills. This is the royal road to an anti-moral superhumanity, which the null virtuous can never hope to rival or to stand up against.” (Ch 13)
• “Sade, and Sade alone, pointed out that the only way the Age of Reason could put its philosophy together again was by embracing the consequences. ‘Nature isn’t well planned or benign. She is at best neutral, at worst appalling. But live according to Nature still. Be appalling!’” (Ch 13)
• “Love? Merely an entanglement best forgotten. The physical thrill should be the whole thing.” (Ch 13)
• “One of his characters does believe in God, for the very logical Sadian reason that God can make life more horrible. You can hope to get your victim damned in the next world as well as tortured in this.” (Ch 13)
• “She loved the games men played with death,” (Ch 14)

Full of fascinating ideas. June 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Also read:

• The Hell-Fire Clubs by Evelyn Lord which is rather more critical of its sources.