"Fatal North" by Bruce Henderson

This book is both another harrowing account of arctic exploration and a true crime mystery.

 In 1871, a US expedition on board the Polaris, led by Captain Francis Hall, attempted to reach the North Pole. They had reached North Greenland when Captain Hall died, following a short mystery illness, amid accusations that he had been poisoned. Sidney Buddington, the sailing master, took over as Captain. He, however, had a drinking problem and was terrified of getting stuck in the ice if they attempted top go any further north; he repeatedly refused permission for expeditions northwards. The crew became disorgnaised and mutinous. The ship did get stuck in the ice and then, during a panic when it was believed that the skip was sinking, half the crew were separated from the ship and marooned on an ice flow. They were then abandoned by Buddington and those aboard the ship. Those on the ice flow were kept alive through the efforts of a couple of eskimoes who built igloos on the floe and hunted seals to eke out their meagre provisions. Over the next 197 days, hungry and cold and in constant danger of the ice floe breaking up, they drifted 1500 miles south before being rescued by a whaler. This book attempts to answer the question of why the ice-floe men were abandoned by the Polaris party (which was also rescued, having had a rather better time of it) and whether Captain Hall was murdered. 

Selected quotes:

• "There was a paraselene - an illusion of multiple moons showing beside the true one, arranged so as to form an eerie but beautiful cross. The true moon was a surrounded by a halo, which also embraced two of the false ones, while the other mock moons had a separate halo, making a large circle concentric with the first. The two false moons nearest to the true one showed the colours of the prism." (Ch 8)
• "There was no tell-tale whistling of the wind among trees, for none existed here. Once out on the open plain, the wind struck full force without notice. The wind was felt before it was heard." (Ch 8)
• "Each berg presented, in contour, the effects of battles with wind and water, rain and storm, and the rough jostling with other bergs it had experienced." (Ch 15)

December 2022; 259 pages

Other books about travel, exploration and explorers, including Ninety Degrees North by Fergus Fleming can be found by clicking here.

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

"Prater Violet" by Christopher Isherwood

Written as a memoir (the narrator is a writer called Christopher Isherwood),  this book follows the fortunes of Christopher as he works with a famous Austrian film director for Imperial Bulldog Pictures, making a film called Prater Violet.

Written in 1946 just after the Second World War but set before, during and after the Austrian Civil War in which Austria became a fascist state, the book makes the Prisoner of Zenda-style plot of the film, and the book's plot of the making of the film, metaphors for the political turbulence in the background.

Isherwood is most famous for writing Goodbye to Berlin, another short work of fiction in which the author becomes a character.

Selected quotes (page references are for the Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1969)

• "Ashmeade simply smiled behind his decorative mask." (p 25)
• "This morning, he was no longer an emperor but an old clown, shock-headed, in his gaudy silk dressing-gown. Tragi-comic, like all clowns, when you see them resting back-stage after the show." (p 28)
• "For all my parlour socialism, I was a snob. I didn't know how anybody spoke, except public schoolboys and neurotic bohemians." (p 37)
• "The coming was was as unreal to me as death itself ... because I couldn't imagine anything beyond it." (p 45)
• "The dilemma of the would-be revolutionary writer ... This writer is not to be confused with the true proletarian writer ... His economic background is bourgeois. He is accustomed to comfort, a nice house, the care of a devoted slave who is his mother and also his gaoler." (p 51)
• "If it breaks, it's Bulldog." (p 67)
• "The incentive is to fight anarchy. That's all Man lives for. Reclaiming life from its natural muddle. Making patterns." (p 71)
• "Like nearly all famous people, she seems a size smaller than her photographs." (p 77)
• "It was that hour of the night at which men's ego almost sleeps. The sense of identity, of possession, of name, of address and telephone numbers, grows very faint." (p 121)
• "There is one question which we seldom ask each other directly: it is too brutal. And yet it is the only question worth asking our fellow-travellers. What makes you go on living?" (p 122)
• "J isn't really what I want. J has only the value of being now. J will pass, the need will remain. The need to get back into the dark, into the bed, into the warm naked embrace." (p 124)
• "It is the usual sex-triangle between a girl with thick legs, a boy, and a tractor." (p 126)

Also by Christopher Isherwood and reviewed in this blog:

• Goodbye to Berlin

December 2022; 126 pages

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

"Young Adam" by Alexander Trocchi

Young Adam is about a rootless man working on canal barges in Scotland. This hyper-realistic story describes a few months in his life, from the discovery of a woman's drowned body in the canal, through his various sexual escapades.

It is told in very spare prose, which reminded me of The Outsider by Camus. It conjured up images of the 'kitchen sink' films and dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The deadpan narrative related what had happened with very little comment; at the same time there were nuggets of philosophy, such as "It is the word 'I' which is arbitrary and which contains within it its own inadequacy and its own contradiction." (1.1)

I think I most enjoyed the first part of the book, which sets the scene, and seems to be a narrative going nowhere about an amoral young man going nowhere; again reminiscent of the existential novels of Camus (and Sartre). In the second part there is more narrative and at the same time more introspection. It is more conventional and less alienated, yet somehow less amoral (because the narrator seems to recognise his ethical dilemma, so there is more understanding of right and wrong). 

Trocchi also wrote Cain's Book, a more experimental, much less structured and beatnik-influenced book about a junkie living on a barge in America.

Selected Quotes:

• "From the moment I had wakened that morning things had begun to happen, nothing spectacular - I'm not talking about the corpse - but a kind of excitement at the edges of me." (1.2)
• "The brick factory stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke." (1.3)
• "There is a point at which a man and a woman stalk one another like animals ... each move on either side being capable of more than one interpretation." (1.3)
• "I had experienced before this conjunction, I mean the cold air containing the warm smell of a woman." (1.4)
• "What we said was trivial but our way of saying it was not." (1.5)
• "What remained implied what was missing." (1.5)
• "Above, a ribbon of white sky, just beginning to be overclouded, from which rain fell in slender, broken javelins." (2.2)
• "I am a rootless kind of man." (2.3)
• "All judges, it occurred to me, all lawyers and lawyers' clerks ought to be forced to try their case in the nude." (3.1)
• "Whether or not they are conscious of it, all judges must look upon themselves as God. To judge is to presume one is God." (3.2)

December 2022; 153 pages

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

"Cat and Mouse" by Gunter Grass

The book is set during world war 2, in a coastal town in Germany, among schoolboys. The narrator hero-worships his friend and fellow Roman Catholic Joachim Mahlke; the great Mahlke, he calls him. When Mahlke learns to swim he joins the schoolfriends on the partly sunken barge, he dives, staying under longer than anyone else, bringing up treasures from the wreck.  Mahlke, slightly older than the others, and significantly better-endowed, is a proper hero, always a step ahead the rest of them in mischief, seemingly unvulnerable due to the protection of the Virgin Mary whom he adores. And when he goes to war ...?

The mouse is Mahlke's prominent Adam's apple; it seems to symbolise his masculinity. The cat attacks it at the start of the book. And perhaps the metaphor is that little mice always get caught by the big cats in the end.

The style is discursive. Sometimes Mahlke is referred to in the third-person, and sometimes in the second person (or is that only when the narrator is addressing the mouse?). The narrative has a more or less straightforward chronology, although there are flash-forwards and repeated hints of what is about to happen (repeatedly baited hooks). There are fascinating descriptions, such as "the screwdriver did dance steps over his quaking collarbones." (Ch 1) Here is a longer extract from towards the end, to illustrate the style:

So then I rowed back. But before rowing back, I threw the can opener in the direction of the dredger, but didn't hit it.

So then I threw away the can opener and rowed back, returned old man Kreft's boat, had to pay an extra thirty pfennigs, and said: 'Maybe I'll be back again this evening. Maybe I'll want the boat again.'

So then I threw away, rowed back, returned, paid extra, said I'd be, sat down in the train and rode, as they say, home.

There are two mentions in the book of a child with a tin drum, recalling the title of the author's first novel.

Selected quotes:

• "A typical swimming teacher with a torso like a lifebuoy and thin hairless legs." (Ch 1)
• "Above him the screams of the gulls substantiated the doctrine of transmigration." (Ch 8)
• "If Mahlke had said: 'Do this and that', I would have done this and that and much more." (Ch 8)
• "But the Great Mahlke had started down a path resembling that tunnel-like, overgrown, thorny and birdless path in Olica Castle Park, which had no forks or byways but was nonetheless a labyrinth." (Ch 12)
• "Ever since that Friday I've known what silence is. Silence sets in when gulls veer away. Nothing can make more silence than a dredger at work when the wind carries away its iron noises." (Ch 13)

A strange and lyrical novella, full of hints, grounded in reality, full of complex characters but with the relationship between the narrator and the Great Mahlke, the most complicated of all.

December 2022; 132 pages

Other books by German authors that I have reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

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

"The Fact of a Body" by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

 A six-year-old boy is murdered by a paedophile. The author encounters this case while working as an intern for the law firm appealing the murderer's death sentence. The story haunts her because it awakens memories of when she was a child and was abused by her grandfather. 

The narration flips backwards and forwards between the story of the murder and the subsequent trials and the story of the author's own childhood and young adulthood. As usual with American literature - both fact-based and fiction - the narration includes a vast amount of specific detail and this makes the verisimilitude visceral. The ambiguities and uncertainties in the case are brilliantly brought out: there are many discrepancies between the confessions the murderer made; there are moral questions over the behaviour of the neighbour's family with which the murderer was living; the mother of the victim appeals for mercy for the murderer. It's a remarkable story, powerfully told.

Selected quotes:

• "I disembarked into air that was a not wet slap." (Prologue)
• "Each night now what we eat together comes from the garden as we race with bounty, trying to keep ahead of the coming spoilage." (Ch 8)
• "My parents have always loved money, always had the faith that more will appear if they spend it." (Ch 12)
• "Medical bills cost Bessie and Alcide the land they built on and the house they built on it, too." (Ch 15) This has to be the reason why we in the UK don't want the NHS to be replaced by as US-style health system; that and the premise of 'Breaking Bad': that the only recourse for a chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer is to manufacture illegal drugs.
• "Doesn't seem lonely if it's the best kind of aloneness you've ever had." (Ch 21)
• "Though it is called death row, it is where men live." (Ch 21)
• "The reception area looks like someone set it up long ago in a burst of optimism before succumbing to dust, time, and too much work." (Ch 22)

December 2022; 324 pages

This book, both in its subject matter and in its style, flipflopping between two narratives, reminded me of Dancing With the Octopus by Debora Harding

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

"The Amur River" by Colin Thubron

 Colin Thubron was born in 1939 and he is travelling in Outer Mongolia (on horseback) and Russia and China in 2020 (there is a reference to the Ukraine-Russia war) which makes him eighty! And travelling alone! On horseback (and taxi and car and riverboat and train and bus). He is amazing. (Like me, he's an Old Etonian, so we're not all like Boris.)

He travels the Amur river from the source of its longest tributary, the Onon (in a restricted area of Mongolia), into Siberia (where it is for a while the Shilka) and then along the Amur, for some time along the Russian-Chinese border and then later solely in Russian Siberia. The Mongolian section is lyrically natural, the Chinese parts thriving and full of agriculture, industry and lots of commerce, and the Russian sections depopulating, decaying and depressing, where old people eke out bleak existences in towns emptied of their young, and of hope.

The writing is wonderful; the achievement immense.

Selected quotes:

• Lyrical descriptions:
• "Across the heart of Asia, at the ancient convergence of steppe and forest, the grasslands of Mongolia move towards Siberia in a grey-green sea." (Ch 1; opening paragraph)
• "My shadow falls black over the grass." (Ch 1)
• "The young men are hefty boys with hedgehog hair." (Ch 7)
• "We walk in harsh wind along the river, whose esplanade stretches and bulges out as if for some grand future. Waves are slapping at its foot, seagulls crying, and two men bathe in the freezing shallows." (Ch 7)
• Masterful metaphors:
• "Vladik drives as if he's angry with the world." (Ch 3)
• "It is as if the words occupy a basement in his memory, and have to be pulled up one by one." (Ch 7)
• Cultural insights:
• "You can read in histories about what happened here, but often they are wrong ... it is people, not regimes or doctrines, that do these things." (Ch 2)
• "Always they are seen not as persons, but as a composite mass. Images of insects and pollutants abound." (Ch 6) Immigrants, Chinese in this case.
• "A culture less preserved than imprisoned ... as though to define and terminate a society by consigning it beneath glass: This will not return, this we have superseded." (Ch 9)
• "Mourners returning from funerals never looked behind them, for fear that the dead would overtake them and lodge in the village of the living." (Ch 10)
• "Soon the kitchen table is spread with black bread and red caviar, gherkins, wild garlic stalks, and some wandering ants." (Ch 8)
• Fascinating facts:
• "The source of great rivers is often obscure. They descend in a confusion of tributaries, or seep from inaccessible swamps and glaciers. ... The Danube, it is claimed, issues from a gutter in the Black Forest." (Ch 1) This resonated with me. When I walked the River Lee, I found its source was a concreted-over spring behind a couple of tower blocks in a suburb of Luton. The Thames oozes from a meadow in Gloucestershire.
• "Manchu ... belongs to the obscure Tungusic branch of the Altaic family, shared by Turkic peoples, Hungarians, Finns and Mongolians." (Ch 7)
• "Every few yards, across some random surface, a blackly gleaming carving appears. ... These figures are, literally, incalculably old. They belong to some distant Neolithic antiquity, perhaps six millennia ago ... The guide identifies a mystic boat - a slanted and corrugated line - which she tells me carried dead souls into the sky. ... But the most common subject, recurring at random, is a mask-like face with hollowed eyes and simian jaw, ringed by a sunburst of spokes." (Ch 9)
• "The strangest foretelling of the Amur's isolation - and its first known record in English - emerged as early as 1719 ... in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." (Ch 10)
• And even some humour from his last hotel room:
• "A fire notice on the door ... advises that if you cannot liquidate the burning, do not use the lift for avocation (there is no lift)." (Ch 10)

This is a brilliant book! What a great writer.

December 2022; 275 pages

Shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year

Other travel (and exploration) books reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

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

"Captain Cook" by Frank McLynn

 A hugely detailed (exhaustingly so) biography of the explorer James Cook. While I was interested in his early life (he was late going to sea and even then he worked for a long time in the merchant marine and his transfer from mate to able-seaman in the navy was a surprising career move) and the details of how he learned his trade as a surveyor during the Canadian campaign of the Seven Years War, I had very little interest in the minute details of Cook's day by day adventures in Tahiti or Tonga or even Hawaii; at this stage less would have meant more.

It was, however, to McLynn's credit that he sees Cook as a flawed human being who represented a corrupt and flawed Royal Navy with latent imperialist and colonialist intentions and fundamentally racist attitudes. Cook rarely comes out of an encounter with Polynesians and Maoris, Australian aboriginals and Melanesians, Inuit and Siberians etc; to his utter failure to understand the opposing culture he added autocratic decision making, flogging, maiming and even shooting 'natives' without compunction; I was only surprised that it took so long for an angry 'native' mob to murder him. McLynn repeatedly compares Cook with HM Stanley who, in McLynn's own (earlier) biography, is depicted as a monster). But McLynn doesn't do hagiography, describing James Wolfe, the British general who, by taking Quebec, turned Canada from French to English, as "habitually addicted to war crimes and even genocide ... deeply unpleasant ... by any standards a war criminal." (Ch 2). He also debunks the credentials of Alexander Dalrymple who seemed to receive rather kinder treatment at the hands of his descendant William Dalrymple in his history of the East India Company, The Anarchy.

But Cook's achievements are immense. A brilliant cartographer, he mapped New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia, he saw icebergs and almost the coast of Antarctica, he 'discovered' (to Europeans) Hawaii, he mapped the Oregon and Alaskan coast. The book alternates between descriptions of the sexual freedoms enjoyed by his sailors (but not Cook) in Tahiti and Tonga and, to a lesser extent, Hawaii, where they introduced syphilis, and the dramatic battles with the sea. 

So there's plenty of incident. But the sentences are long and the paragraphs are, at times, immense. I have always understood that a paragraph is organised around a single theme but McLynn sees them as department stores of ideas. I was repeatedly fatigued while reading this book.

The sort of biography that is brilliant for the scholar but rover-detailed and heavy-going for the general reader.

Selected quotes:

• "He insisted on doing things his way, and was obstinate, inflexible and even somewhat unpleasant." (Ch 1)
• "Great explorers are seldom outstanding human beings." (Ch 1)
• "Within six weeks of stepping ashore ... Cook had a wife." (Ch 3)
• "The arioi seemed to Cook and Banks no more than sex-obsessed strolling players ... Partly a freemasonry, partly a showbusiness organisation something like the Order of the Water Rats, partly a Polynesian version of the Eleusinian mysteries, they often ... performed on public and festive occasions, staging shows with a very strong sexual content, which were meant to point forward to the lubricious delights of Paradise." (Ch 6)
• "Yaws has the curious quality of providing immunity to syphilis." (Ch 6)
• "Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no whingers in a life-and-death maritime emergency." (Ch 7)
• "Typical eighteenth-century intellectuals, the Forsters were torn between the idealised picture of Polynesia as they would like it to be and the grim reality which they could not avoid  an almost perfect paradigm of Paradise Found and Lost." (Ch 12)
• "'No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough yo get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned ... A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company'." (Ch 12; quoting Samuel Jonson)
• "As he grows older a man obsessed with control is likely to find the sheer contingency of the world and its stubborn and irreducible nature intolerable, which in turn generates impatience and tantrums." (Ch 13)
• "In a new version of la ronde de l'amour the women of Nomuka transmitted syphilis to comrades of the men who had originally given it to them." (Ch 13)
• "The Tahitians laid on a super-erotic heiva, of a kind that, to use a later idiom, would have made a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." (Ch 14)
• "It is an unfortunate aspect of Cook's personality that he tended to attribute all his remarkably good luck to his own peerless seamanship and all his bad luck, in paranoid fashion, to a malign fate." (Ch 15)
• "By definition a man who wants quick results is not a careful planner." (Ch 17)

December 2022; 421 pages

Other books on travel and exploration, and other biographies of explorers, can be found on this page.

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

"Astral fall" by Jessica Mae Stover

 In a world of space wars, a young man graduates from military training and joins an elite team of space warriors. The bulk of the book concerns his fitting into the team; the final couple of chapters is almost a trailer for the sequel.

What I like about this book is that the author doesn't waste any time inducting the reader into the fictional world. Straight away, I had to contend with "auttie yanks" and "hardhoods", "fractal trepid suits" and "orgo-panels".  This made it very hard to read but, having persevered, the story started coming through. And all the details made it utterly convincing. It was all a bit too technical for me - it made it hard to glimpse the human dilemmas - but, remarkably, this author made what might have been a simple, futuristic space yarn seem very real. This means that it undermines the trope of militaristic novels that seem to be based on shoot-em-up games in which bad things happen with few consequences. 

Hugely atmospheric. An epic. Ideal for those who like the military equivalent of police procedurals. 

Of course, that means the reading was hard work. But in the end, it made for an extraordinarily realistic and thrilling story.

Selected quotes:

• "A patch of stars shines through a cloudhole"
• "black cloud cover— Hands fly, jerk, dance—we claw at sky and air— FALLING— The battle, the ridges, the bodies, the blood, the limp and the dead—THE RED THEATER RUSHES UP TO MEET US"
• “Don’t clutter chatter during crucials. When not sure about protocol, be polite, even downchain. Maintain secrecy at all times. What happens in the loop stays in the loop. If in doubt, create the situational report, run the diagnostic, supply the information, ask the question. Don’t assume, know."
• "The day you think that shit won’t go down, it does. I promise you that. It’s the way of the universe."
• "the most famous PT genius alive invites you to let her pull your auttie yank in her quarters, see if you pass.”
• “Military. All that mech training, all of it based on science, and yet they’re superstitious."

December 2022

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

"Joanna Southcott: The woman clothed with the sun" by Frances Brown

 Joanna Southcott was a Devon woman working as a servant and upholsterer who started hearing voices and became a prophetess. She recruited followers, issuing 'seals' and publishing books. Eventually, on Christmas Day 1814, at the age of 64, she claimed to give birth to the Shiloh, a sort of Messiah, dying two days later. She is mostly remembered nowadays for her sealed box, supposedly containing prophecies, which must be opened in order to usher in the Millennium.

A replica of Joanna Southcott's box.

This biography is certainly comprehensive. It chronicles all the arguments, the lawsuits, the ups and downs and ins and outs of Joanna's life. I found it very difficult to follow. For example, the information about the seals is scattered and it was difficult for me to ascertain when they were first issued, what they meant to the receiver, how they were supposed to be used etc. The information about the Duke Street chapel also seemed to be dropped in little bits, here and there, presumably because the material was chronologically arranged. Equally, I never felt I understood the importance of Richard Brothers, nor the man Joanna eventually married who seemed to pop up out of nowhere. There was so much detail! I think I found it difficult to see the wood for the trees.

This is one of those biographies that might be useful for the scholar but it wasn't a fun read for the generalist.

December 2022; 305 pages

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