"The fears of Henry IV" by Ian Mortimer

Ian Mortimer writes mediaeval history so readably. This biography of "England's Self-Made King" starts with 14 year old Henry in the Tower during the Peasant's Revolt and a retainer persuading the invading mob not to murder him. Henry had a glorious youth: son of John of Gaunt, England's richest and most powerful lord, grandson of Edward III (named as heir after Richard II and John of Gaunt), cousin and boyhood playmate of King Richard II, a talented musician, a big reader, a student who (in exile) attended lectures at the University of Paris, a star jouster from the age of 14, a crusader (with the Teutonic Knights in Lithuania) and a pilgrim (the only mediaeval English King to enter Jerusalem), and a key member of the opposition in Parliament to Richard II's increasingly arbitrary and tyrannical rule. All this potential seemed dashed by Richard's hatred (possibly caused by jealousy since the dashing Henry was everything that Richard was not). Richard continually promoted others over him (including naming them as heir) and slighted or spurned him. Finally Richard exiled Henry. In exile Henry must have felt that all his promise was for nothing. But he returned from exile to lead a rebellion against Richard, to depose Richard and to be recognised by Parliament as King in Richard's place. Then things began to go wrong.

All the early promise evaporated. His vow to be merciful was falsified almost immediately when he (probably) gave the order to ensure that Richard was killed in imprisonment (possibly starving him to death). Two harvest failures and an inability to be good with money meant that his manifesto commitment not to impose peacetime taxes plunged him into debt. Scotland, Wales and France all fought against him. There were many rebellions at home (including eight assassination attempts) culminating in the Battle of Shrewsbury when Henry decisively defeated and killed Harry Hotspur. Even peace left him at the mercy of a hostile and penny-pinching parliament. Finally some dreadful skin disease left him crippled and dying, dead before he reached fifty.

Mostly uncommemorated (Mortimer claims that his only statue is in Shrewsbury's Battlefield church) Henry started the tradition of giving to the poor on Maundy Thursday (his birthday) an amount proportional to his age. He owned an early (perhaps the first) portable clock (p93). In exile he stayed at Sangatte, outside Paris and in 'Newenham' Priory (I presume this is Newnham Priory which around this time was involved with Mowbray who was the Earl of Norfolk involved in a dispute about a rebellion with Henry which led to his and Henry's exile; Newnham Priory received a grant from Henry IV on 15th February 1409) in Bedfordshire on 7th July 1403 (p265). 

Fabulous history of a fascinating king. 

November 2011; 387 pages

"The Devil's Cup" by Stewart Lee Allen

An interesting history of coffee is turned into a mesmerising thriller by the adventures of Stewart, following coffee from Ethiopian genesis to the USA. On the way this beatnik turned author travels on a gun-running boat from Djibouti to Yemen while these two countries are at war, negotiates a people-smuggling deal, is conned whilst trying to participate in an international forged art smuggling business, meets low-lifes of all sorts, travels from Italy to Rio, has his passport confiscated and his car searched, interrogates entranced mediums, and drinks every variety of coffee possible from Ethiopian brewed with the leaves to Yemeni, to Turkish, to Viennese, to Parisian, to Italian, to Brazilian, to American.

Unbelievable. Why have I never heard of this book before?

November 2011; 230 pages

"Possession" by A S Byatt

A penniless literary researcher discovers a love letter from the Victorian poet whose biography he is working on to another Victorian poetess. He and a lady lecturer trace the details of an unknown and illicit Victorian love affair. What happened and why?

Despite acres of Victorian allusive poetry, pregnant with myth, and a whole chapter of letters from poet to poetess, mostly discussing nothing, this book draws you in. But oh how shallow the modern world appears and how unromantic our couplings and uncouplings are compared with the enforced chastities and unconsummated desires of the past.

A mystery but also a satire on the obsessions of the modern biography industry.

Delightful. The winner of the Booker Prize in 1990. Selected by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923).

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

November 2011; 511 pages

"The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie

Longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize.

This book reminded me of a silk and velvet version of my own 'Don Petro de la Hoz'.

It was certainly lavish. A yellow haired wanderer and magician of Florentine descent related to Amerigo Vespucci and named after Niccolo Machiavelli but calling himself the 'Mughal of Love' arrives at the imperial Moghul court of Akbar the Great. He tells a story of Qara Koz, the woman he claims to be his mother, a princess of the line of Tamburlane and Genghis Khan, who was multiply abducted through the fortunes of war until she found love with a Florentine Janissary. This makes him Akbar's uncle.

His stories weave magic around the Mughal court and enchant the great emperor (who has himself conjured up a fantasy queen). And the tale weaves back and forth from past to present, from India and Persia and  Ottoman Asia to Transylvania and Italy and the Nuovo Mondo, from history to fantasy, rich, gorgeous and romantic.

Selected Quotes:

• Philosophical: "If there had never been a God, the Emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was." (Chapter 19). 
• Political: "Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalizing force bestowing bounty and success upon its adherents, or did it adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole?" (Chapter 19)
• Witty: "Only the humble did not stumble" (Chapter 19)

Spell-binding.

November 2011; 443 pages

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

"The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Impressionists"

The Impressionists were an brilliantly talented bunch of artists who happened to meet in Paris  and studied together and worked together and exhibited together and in some cases lived together.

This books explains their incredible history and then gives an authoritative analysis of some of the leading lights including the incomparable Monet, anarchist Pisarro, unwillingly controversial Manet, balletophile Degas, working class Renoir and gentle landscapist Sisley. It explains about their key beliefs, such as painting landscapes in the open air and their use of brilliant colours and concentrating on patches of light but it also explains which artists followed which styles.

My only complaint about the formidably impressive book is that the illustrations rarely co-ordinate with the text so that you are reading about one painting while seeing another or you are flicking through the book to understand what they are talking about. Perhaps a slideshow version of the book might be the answer.

"After Me, the Deluge" by David Forrest

This tells the story of a young priest in a tiny French village who receives a telephone call from God commanding him to build and Ark for the forthcoming flood that is going to destroy the world. The eccentric villagers including a massive, ex-para, whore-mongering, poorly endowed barman, an officious policeman and a pompous mayor help construct the Ark. But word gets out via a cod-Jewish newspaperman called Morry. The government send the police in but the Vatican send a Cardinal.

It reminded me very much of The Mouse that Roared which I read when I was about 12 and so I assumed initially that this book was written about the same time (late fifties/ early sixties) but the rather more explicit sexuality of this book firmly placed it in the seventies.

Light comedy; a fun easy read (but with a disappointing ending).

November 2011; 189 pages

"Appleby House" by Sylvia Smith

A chronicle of a year in rented accommodation.

Sylvia rents a bedsit with kitchen in a four bedroom house, sharing with lonely Laura, Susanna and her sister Beverley, Sharon and her boyfriend Peter, and later Tracey. The girls bicker about the domestic arrangements and the noises they make to keep the others awake. They surf the highs of sharing a bottle of wine and getting a little tiddly and the lows of being ill at Christmas and redundancy. The characters are grey and thin, the dialogue is stilted and colourless, the book is banal and humdrum.

"The East End minimalist is back," says the Observer. "If her style were to be translated into an object, it would  be an antimacassar or a crotcheted white-lace doily." Which is fair enough. If that is your idea of literature.

Boring.

November 2011; 160 pages

"Veronika Decides to Die" by Paolo Coelho

Veronika attempts suicide and wakes up in a mental hospital to be told that her heart has been irreparably damaged and that she has only a week to live. She spends the week interacting with the other inmates and the staff.

The inmates are all good and the staff are all bad.

Every character is cardboard. I know Coelho has this parable-like way of narrating but this can get rather tedious and he reduces the complexity of human characters into two dimensions. At the same time he spouts a lot of crap about crystals and astral projection and saints.

The best thing about this book is that it is brief.

October 2011; 191 pages

"1492: the year our world began" by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

This book considers individual events across the world in 1492 and shows how each led to the development of the modern, western-dominated world.

It is sometimes not very well written. He meanders disjointedly. He repeats himself. Sometimes it seems as if the book has been composed in short sections that have not been integrated properly.

I also have problems accepting his thesis (which he himself disavows) that so much depended on a single year. I also wonder how he can be so authoritative  (eg "The conventional explanations [for how the Spaniards so easily defeated the Aztecs]  - that the Spaniards were inherently superior, that they were mistaken for gods  and preceded by omens, that their technology was decisive, that disease undermined defence, and that their enemies were subverted by corroded morale - are all false."; pp287-8 and his rubbishing of the theory that the Chinese fleets under Zheng-He circumnavigated the globe as espoused by Gavin Menzies in '1421' p226) when he is dealing with the whole world. When you paint a big canvas you expect broad strokes but you shouldn't deny the art of the miniaturist.

Nevertheless I enjoyed this book because he gave me alternative perspectives for some things I thought I knew:

• "The idea that the demand for spices was the result of the need to disguise tainted meat and fish is one of the great myths of the history of food. Fresh foods in mediaeval Europe were fresher than they are today, because they were produced locally." p17; 
• "Mediaeval Castilians eschewed olive oil and used lard as their main source of dietary fat" p88; 
• "Few of the people foul-mouthed as 'motherfuckers' in gangland parlance actually practice incest" p89; 
• The Turks were unable to conquer the western Mediterranean world because the prevailing winds were against them and the straits of Messina south of Sicily effectively bottled them up p112; 
• Columbus sold his plan of a voyage across the Atlantic with a different spin for whichever audience he had, sometimes talking of new islands like the Canaries, sometimes of an unknown continent and sometimes of a route to Cathay p183; 
• Maritime exploration is encouraged by winds that blow into your face because then you know you are likely to be able to get home p241 but Monsoon systems with regular seasonal winds are best and led to early and well-established trading routes across the Indian Ocean p242; 
• "Whatever modernity is, the high valuation of the individual is part of it" p272

But possibly the very best bits of this book were the things I didn't even know I didn't know:

• How Islam came to dominate Western Africa
• The economic effects of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492
• The explanation of how Muscovy became Russia
• The origin of pre-Berber cultures in the Canary Islands and the hundred years it took the Spaniards to conquer them despite the fact that they had no weapons other than sticks and stones

So a great little introduction which has opened my eyes and made me want to read at least half a dozen more specialised histories!

October 2011; 321 pages
The richness of the pre-Mediaeval Indian Ocean

"The Stars' Tennis Balls" by Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry brings the Count of Monte Cristo to the twentieth century.

Ned Maddstone, the son of a Tory MP, is Head of School at Harrow, a star cricket player, destined for Oxford. He meets and falls madly in love with Portia. On a school sailing trip he accepts a sealed envelope from a dying man. Before he can deliver it a schoolboy prank causes him to be arrested; following his arrest he is spirited away to an isolated existence on an island.

This is the story of Edmond Dantes (an anagram of Ned Maddstone) and the three conspirators who tore him away from his wedding feast (his one and only shag with Portia) and had him consigned to the Chateau D'If. The remainder of the story plays out exactly, from the mad Abbe (called Babe, another anagram) to the escape in Babe's coffin, to the appearance of the fabulously rich Simon Cotter (yes, you guessed it, an anagram of Monte Cristo) who engineers his revenge.

Like the original in every sense except literary merit. This is a shallow conceit. It has the usual public school boy Fry hero and the usual snobbery about class; in the teachings of Babe one can even hear Fry pontificating on QI. A pleasant enough read. It has the merit of being far shorter than the original which is, I suppose, essential for today's market, but this in itself gives it the demerit that it does not have the time to delve deeply into the evil that revenge undoubtedly represents.

A good game but a disappointment as a novel.

October 2011; 371 pages

"The Lost City of Z" by David Grann

A true story which reads like an adventure from the pen of Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle.Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, one time spy and legendary British explorer of the Amazon jungle, travels with his son and his son's best friend into the rain forest in search of a mythical city which sounds like El Dorado but which he refers to as Z. The little party disappears. What has happened to them? Over the years many go to seek them; many fail to return. This brilliant book is a biography of the eccentric colonel, a history of white colonial exploration of the Amazon, an investigation into what might have happened to him, a search for Z, and a wonderful analysis of obsession.

If nothing else it has made me NEVER EVER want to venture into an insect ridden swamp. The list of predators was awesome. Not just hostile Indians with poison tipped arrows who seek to enslave you, or torture you, or kill you, or cannibalise you. Not just Piranhas but fish that lodge themselves into your ureter causing such pain that penilectomy is required. Not just mosquitoes and death from malaria but a bug that 'kisses' you on the lips inserting a protoplasm that, in the next twenty years, will cause your heart or your brain to swell fatally. Not just maggots who eat you from the inside out but vampire bats.

October 2011; 275 pages

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, that are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

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

"Emergence: from chaos to order" by John H Holland

This is a worthy book. It is an academic book. It contains the intricate details of mathematics and algorithms. And at the same tine it attempts to be a general and genial introduction to the network science written by one of the earliest workers in the field.

A good book but not an exciting book. Some interesting concepts but it didn't hook me as much as the other similar treatises I have read over the last few years:

• Six Degrees
• Smart swarm
• And others such as Complexity, and the classic Critical Mass by Philip Ball.

But probably Emergence is the one to quote when I wirte my textbook.

September 2011; 248 pages

"The Devil and Sherlock Holmes" by David Grann

Twelve real-life stories of murder, mystery and madness. Sort of. Actually a remarkably eclectic collection which makes one wonder how one man, albeit writing for The New Yorker, can have found the time and sources to acquire such a miscellany. Even the title stores are as different as chalk and cheese: a 'was he killed or did he commit suicide?' puzzle about the wannabe biographer of Conan Doyle to an assortment of interviews with and biographical fragments of an exiled Haitian politician. In between we learn about an arson that wasn't and a criminal gang that terrorises US penitentiaries. My favourite story is the murderer who used the details of his unsolved crime as material for a bizarrely surrealist novel; this led to his eventual conviction.

A fascinating and unusual collection of articles.

September 2011; 334 pages