"The Man Who Died Twice" by Richard Osman

Shortlisted for the 2022 crime/thriller prize in the British Book Awards.

 This is a worthy sequel to The Thursday Murder Club and the quartet of geriatric detectives (and the pair of police officers, and Bogdan the Polish superhero) are caught up in another multiple murder mystery, courtesy of Elizabeth, who used to work for the Security Services. There is the trademark humour and the very real empathy for those who are growing old and are facing death while still wanting rather more out of life. 

As before it is written in short chapters, each told from the perspective of one of the main characters. I thought some of the clues were quite obvious but, as usual, I reached the conclusion before the solution after the final twist ... and I thought my conclusion was better.

Selected quotes:

• "A lot of people at Coopers Chase smoke cannabis. Supposedly to relieve glaucoma, but statistically not that many people can have glaucoma, surely?" (Ch 5)
• "The twinkle in his eyes was undimmed. ... The twinkle you soon realize is actually the beam of a lighthouse, warning you off the rocks." (Ch 6)
• "Why had she married him? Well, he had asked at around about the time she felt she ought to get married." (Ch 9)
• "People seem to get allergic to all sorts as soon as they move to London." (Ch 10)
• "When they say that time heals, that's what they mean. Like most things, when you really drill down into them, it is neuroscience, not poetry." (Ch 16)
• "Does expensive paper come from more expensive trees, or do they just make it differently?" (Ch 39)
• "On the lake to her right, a goose misjudges a landing, inelegantly belly flopping into the water. She swears the goose looks round to make sure none of the other geese were watching." (Ch 55)
• "If one is never lost in life, then clearly one has never travelled anywhere interesting." (Ch 57)

July 2022; 420 pages

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

"The Bermuda Triangle" by Charles Berlitz

 A classic attempt to blame the unexplained on anything but natural causes, with a predisposition towards UFOs and Atlanteans. "One theory ... presupposes the actions of intelligent beings based beneath the sea, while another, more popular theory ... deduces that extraterrestrials periodically visit the earth and kidnap or ‘spacenap’ men and equipment to ascertain the stage of our technological development.” (Ch 3) Is a perfect example of the irrational rhetoric used to convince the reader: first he only offers two alternatives (a classic salesman's technique) and second he uses words such as 'deduces' rather than more honest words such as 'speculates'.

The problems include: 

• Berlitz is scientifically illiterate (in chapter 5 he uses 'knots per hour' as a measure of speed and confuses melting with dissolving, in chapter 8 he seems unaware that lines going due north will pass through the north pole from wherever they start); 
• He illustrates natural phenomena with fictional accounts (whirlpools with Poe's short story about the Maelstrom) and then uses the fiction to discredit the scientific explanation;
• He never checks his sources:

• He refers to an Egyptian papyrus of doubtful provenance
• He repeats a story about Alexander the Great which first appeared in a magazine in the 1950s
• He repeats a story about an abandoned ship which appears to be based on an oral legend first recorded nearly 100 years after it allegedly happened; he even gets the date of this occurrence wrong;
• He repeats an urban myth about a plane experiencing a time lapse without any check on the original source;
• His story about Byrd's flight over the south pole in 1929 observing greenery, primitive people and bisonlike animals has no evidence ... he claims it has been suppressed;
• He uses 'experts' without authenticating their expertise as unquestionable authorities ("scientifically competent observers", ... “of considerable scientific and disciplinary preparation” [whatever that means]) provided they say what he wants them to say.

In short, this is the sort of nonsense that, if it had been included in an undergraduate's essay, should have failed.

Selected quotes:

• “interdimensional changeover through a passageway equivalent to a ‘hole in the sky’ (which aircraft can enter but not leave) ... entities from inner or outer space ... still functioning man-made power complexes belonging to a science considerably older and very different from ours.”
• “Theories concerning antigravity warps have been advanced, presupposing areas where the laws of gravity and normal magnetic attraction no longer function”
• "It may be that exists, in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle and other nodal locations of electromagnetic gravitational currents, a door or window to another dimension in time or space”

July 2022;

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

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe

 

Journalism, rather than fiction, but New Journalism in which the reporter is submerged within the events he is reporting, and the book is structured using novelistic techniques; but in this case rather more Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, than Truman Capote's utterly detached In Cold Blood. 

It is written in the breakneck, breathless, runaway prose of Kerouac's On the Road of which it is a direct descendant (indeed Kerouac has a walk-on part and Neal Cassady, the model for Kerouac's hero Dean Moriarty, is an important member of the Pranksters). The prose is laced with hippy words and comes into its own when describing the LSD trips that the Pranksters experience. But there were times when I wondered whether it was a little self-indulgent and needed a severe pruning or at least a little self-restraint; it was a sort of Californian hippy rococo. 

The style is also much more Thompson's with a huge nod to Kerouac, especially ; indeed, one for the characters in this book is Neal Cassady who was the model for Kerouac's Dean Moriarty. Other name checks include the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Test, Owsley, the first creator of quality mass-produced LSD (and later a sponsor of the GD), Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg.

The book follows the adventures of Ken Kesey (real life author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) as he travels with a bus-load of stoned hippies (the 'Merry Pranksters') across America from San Francisco to New York and then starts a series of "experiences":  discos/parties in which the attendees take LSD (not yet illegal in California at the time): these are the 'Acid Tests'; in one of them LSD is used to surreptitiously spike the Kool-Aid which somewhat disastrous experience provides the title of the book. It continues to describe Kesey's flight from the law following his arrests for drugs offence and his exile in Mexico, while the Pranksters started to disintegrate, and his return and the fizzling out of the movement.

The influence on the Merry Pranksters of Robert Heinlein's sci fi novel A Stranger in a Strange Land is acknowledged; the book claims that the La Honda location of the HQ of the Pranksters is the same place where the mystic brotherhood in the Heinlein novel gather. The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse is also cited.

The book also claims that the Pranksters, the Grateful Dead and the Experiences were the creators of acid rock and a direct influence on the Beatles Revolver, Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper. These were very early hippies, around 1964; they attend a Help-era Beatles concert on San Francisco when nothing can be heard apart form the screaming of young girls. They are more or less direct descendants of the beatniks; they find a fellowship of outlawry with the Hells Angels.

It is a fascinating chronicle of the early days of LSD use on the West coast of America but it is sometimes hard to cut a path through the overgrown jungle of the prose.

A much more conventional novel focusing on the experiments with psilocybin and LSD of Timothy Leary, in which the Pranksters feature, is Outside Looking In by T C Boyle.

Selected quotes:

• "Everyone is picking up on the most minute incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself." (Ch 2)
• "In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world.  ... but it screens out the most wonderful part of a man's potential experience without his even knowing it.  ... the drugs opened these ancient doors." (Ch 4)
• "the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive" (Ch 4)
• "The Now Trip exercise, in which you try to catalogue the information your sense are bringing you in the present moment. You make a rapid series of statements beginning with the word 'Now': 'Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration on my forehead ... Now I hear a bus coming up the drive in low gear' ..." (Ch 10)
• "The Hermit memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue." (Ch 11)
• "He talked in clots of words." (Ch 11)
• "Amputated apartments, as I called them The seats, the tables, the beds - none of them ever had legs." (Ch 11)
• "Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you." (Ch 11)
• "No Left Turn Unstoned." (Ch 12)
• "Outlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off dead centre and were out in some kind of Edge City." (Ch 13)
• "Bummer was the Angels' term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world's term for a bad trip on LSD." (Ch 13)
• "They start grumbling, like a bunch of prisoners who haven't been fed but don't know whether this is the time for the slave revolt or not." (Ch 15)
• "The Pranksters were not the world's greatest at the mechanics of things." (Ch 18)
• "Cassady had a microphone and started rapping." (Ch 20)
• "A pair of jockey shorts show faintly under the leotards ... just the right touch." (Ch 27)
• "Oh, did we give in to Fear and Doubts, which a good head cannot afford, and thereby stop a brave cat doing his thing." (Ch 27)

July 2022; 366 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"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