The Mouthless Dead by Anthony Quinn. Quinn also wrote Curtain Call, recently made into a film (The Critic) with Ian MacKellan. If his gets made into a film it should also be renamed as I've no idea why it is called that. Is it a quote from something else?
I ordered this in at the library after a glowing review in the FT. Unable to sleep at 2am or so I picked it up and didn't put it down until 50 pages in.
It's based around the real-life Wallace murders in Liverpool in 1931 in which a nondescript middle-aged man was accused of killing his wife, the case became a cause celebre at the time and subject of much comment; it was the sort of case that prompted Agatha Christie's writing I guess, all in the context of the time. The writer pulls the trick of having two narratives, both seen through the eyes of a fictional copper who briefly knew the suspect via his chess club and watches appalled as the wheels of justice move against him; and the same character retired in late 1940s, having cause to reflect on the case years later.
It's the soap opera trick, neither plot lines necessarily that interesting on their own, but by jumping back and forth, they appear to be and allow the author to end a chapter on a cliffhanger. GoldenEye employs that method but most Bond films prefer the three-card trick of having different things on the go to distract and engage.
A creeping unease is felt by merging fact with fiction, it does seem in bad taste nearly 100 years on even so, then again like the Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently doing the breakfast rounds to dismiss claims of a leadership coup, claiming he also didn't shoot JFK and knew nothing about [the missing famous racehorse] Shergar, it seems some conspiracy theories are cosier than others - if he'd referenced the Fiat Uno and Princess Diana or TV presenter Jill Dando's doorstep murder, or 9/11, he'd have most likely have had to resign.
I looked up the Wallce murder after reading this, here is a website:
It's very comprehensive though the phrase 'too much information' comes to mind; it seems there's an ongoing, cult-like fascination with the case though we can't talk, being devoted to a James Bond website. But reading it in the early hours, again, I felt disquiet as it appears to be a propaganda piece for the Liverpool Police, explaining how they got it right all along. It's like the State tries to maintain a kind of papal infallibility - maybe in 60 years they'll be a website devoted to how South Yorkshire Police were right on Hillsborough all along, and that a couple of fans were a bit tipsy and sang rude songs, so they had it coming. Or a site defending the Post Office cases against their staff - do you know, one or two of them really were involved in embezzlement, after all? Or that Lucy Letby really did kill those babies. There is something mad and chilling about it, this deep-seated, enduring determination to hold the line. Don't get me wrong, it's well written and one section called Armchair Critics pours scorn on amateur sleuths applying their talents, giving not necessarily wrong psychological reasons why they feel the might like to 'best' the police, but come on... It's as if the police are never corrupt, right? Just as well a few armchair critics had another look at the jailing of the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six or they'd have stayed longer in jail - but if you worked for Surrey Police, you might not mind if they did!
There is conjecture that there was a police coverup to let one suspect off the hook, due to his connections. So the whole thing is very murky.
Later on in the novel the policeman makes a reference to how husbands can arrange to have their wives just 'disappear' by rehousing them in asylums for a fee and consultation with the family GP, it's just dropped in, in a horrifying way - I think that would deserve a novel in itself. I think Charles Dickens did this to his wife and the late writer Edna O'Brien narrowly avoided such a fate as a young woman.
Because of all this, the read is a bit dispiriting and depressing not withstanding some get nuggets of terrific descriptive and observational writing. It reminded me of another book I read this year, it's on the previous page, I can't recall the title, set in London in the 20s I think and featuring a middle-aged, somewhat depressed policeman as a key character.
Unfortunately half way through the lead character, the policeman, is revealed to have done things both in the past and present plot strands that are out of character and strains credulity past breaking point, from thereon despite various surprises, one is just reaching for the end and as it turns out a slightly silly final denouement in the last sentence. That all said, I read this book in just a few days and enjoyed it so on that basis for me it was a success. But I'd like a lighter happier read at some point.
Annoyingly, there is no epilogue of the kind we see at the end of the Sharpe or Flashman novels in which the author as himself talks about the case and what bits of the novel are true and which are speculation.
Another Holly Gibney thriller. Although starting off very well the story drifts into ho-hum territory as Kate McKay hires Holly Gibney to protect her during her tour crusading against anti-abortionists, whilst Holly also helps police officer friend Izzy with her serial killer case. The two strands are inexorably heading towards each other for the climax, which by the time it happens has become uninteresting and lacks tension. I like the Holly character, but this one seems forced, I don’t think she would have taken the job of a bodyguard. Siblings Jerome and Barbara return, and not only has Barbara become a famous published poet, but in this one she becomes a backing singer for a old time diva. It’s all too much to believe and King’s writing is seriously off key. I think King has taken these characters far enough and needs to get back to basics.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Not my favourite King, in fact not even my fave of his Holly tales. The ingredients are mostly there, though there's a definite sense of something missing and yes, please, can he stop it with these characters? I get that he's been enjoying this series but it's beyond time to go back to his normal thing.
This is the fifth Reacher book as a joint exercise from the Child (Grant) brothers. It is, by far, the worst of the bunch to date. I would imagine that Lee gave Andrew the opening scenario of Reacher waking and finding himself handcuffed to a bed and then telling him to go from there (in itself a standard Reacher set up). Andrew has not got to grips with the Reacher character, it’s someone else pretending to be Reacher. The story is boring, Reacher makes un-Reacher-like decisions. The book was a struggle to get through, and indeed I scanned through the final dozen or so chapters to end the suffering quickly. Lee should have ended the series with a bang writing his own last book, I understand that the publishers will have given a very lucrative deal to continue, but sometimes money isn’t everything, and Lee is a wealthy man, he shouldn’t have sold out the soul of Reacher when it’s clear that he has little input into the books anymore.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,057Chief of Staff
I’m saddened but not surprised 😕 since Andrew ‘took over’ these stories have nosedived…Reacher used to only kill when necessary but he seems to kill with complete disregard now - and that just jars with the character…I haven’t read this one or the last one and I don’t think I will…
My Life as a Mankiewicz by Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane (2012). Unique, I think that Tom Mankiewicz was more like James Bond than certain people realize. Simply replace the vodka martini, shaken not stirred, with a big bottle of Jack Daniels. He also slept with just about any woman that he could. He lived an interesting life, on and off screen. His dad, Joseph Mankiewicz accepted nothing but perfection from his children, particularly Tom. He had a hard life growing up, his mother was bipolar and committed suicide when he was a teenager. There was also a family death that may have influenced the NYC car crash in LALD.
As for the interesting Bond behind the scenes facts, there really isn't he says that we don't already know. I give him credit for leaving and not taking the easy route of just writing Bond for most of his career. He had a few opinions on other Bonds (not his) in his book. He didn't view Lazenby as much. He wished that Dalton would have done more than two. For Brosnan, he said he simply played Bond. He stated that this wasn't a good or bad thing. As for Craig, he apparently got tailed by Barbara Broccoli on a highway. They pulled over. He simply said he loved CR, and Craig had a bright future. He didn't like QOS, and that was the last Bond movie he got to see. She thanked him for his help on the series.
More interesting was some of his Superman stories. He said that Marlon Brando was fun, and was proud of the movie. Another interesting story of his was the top choices for General Zod. Albert Finney was the first choice, Christopher Plummer was the second, and Christopher Lee was the third. He (and I) were happy that Terence Stamp got the part in the end. He also said that Richard Donner is arguably one of the few directors who got fired for directing a successful movie. He said he and Donner got along partly because he was a drunk and Donner was a stoner. There are more fun Hollywood stories from him, but I'll let you read to find out.
In his final reflection as he was dying, he predicted his fears for the future of cinema. And sadly a lot of them have come true. Fair payback for Quentin Tarantino for all of his bashing lately: TM said that QT never made a movie about a fair human being, other Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I to a degree can agree with his QT criticisms. I think he would be happy to know that Steven Spielberg is directing decent movies. He was arguably blacklisted in his later years, which is why he slowed down. I won't spoil anything, as he was like his writing: truly witty, and as flawed as it could be, he was a generally entertaining writer, on screen and in his book.
Thanks @DrMaxMGoldthat's a good read, I may look that one up. Though the QT sentence at the end doesn't read well in terms of meaning.
Hucklebery Finn by Mark Twain
I feel a bit sheepish writing this review, firstly because it's late in the day for me to have read this classic for the first time, and because I come across as a bit thick in the reviewing.
There were rave reviews for a new book, James by Percival Evereret, who also penned American Fiction (the book has a different title) with our own Craig era Felix Leiter actor (my brain seems a bit shot these days). James retells the story of Huckleberry Finn from the first-person perspective of his runaway friend and accomplice, the slave Jim. The idea is to show things from a different, more enlightened point of view. So I thought I would read HF first, to know what he was satirising.
So I ordered in HF from the library, it took months to arrive presumably because folk had read the review of James and had the same idea as me. Eventually it arrived and the first thing it says is 'you probably have read about my adventures in the book Tom Sawyer from a while back' or words to that effect, well, no I hadn't read Tom Sawyer so I returned HF to the library and ordered that in instead.
So it was the best part of a year before I got round to reading that and HF and I could start on James.
Now, Huckleberry Finn picks up some time after Tom Sawyer and indeed was written the best part of a decade later, it wasn't an immediate sequel. As with such sequels, it has to unpick the happy resolution of the previous novel to have a premise, though in fairness Sawyer didn't quite end on a happy-ever-after note for Sawyer's mate Finn, who was more of a white trash character who had less going on in his life, more of a wayward vagabond character who could just take off down the river and be gone.
A plot device means this is indeed the situation Finn is thrown into, and it is at this point he happens upon runaway slave Jim who is hiding out on the same island on the Mississippi and the two, who already know each other, forge a bond in escaping and evading the authorities.
This is the nicest part of the book and there is a real sense of pleasure in reading about their escapades, it has a Lost Boys in Peter Pan vibe and I am stretching a point but I'll make in anyway in saying that the comradeship they experience finds happy echo in films like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard where the white guy bonds with the black guy and it feels like all is well in the world.
But the book is written with Twain as the narrator but in the first-person by Finn, so the writing is less agreeable, given it has to be filtered via his uneducated vernacular. There won't be any of Twain's smart, philosophical observations on life here. That said, ingeniously, something of Twain's writing still comes through occasionally, his prose in describing a plantation (I think) and the deadness of the vibe, is poetic but it's like a magic trick; it still manages to sound convincing coming from Finn's mouth. You could argue that PG Wodehouse did a similar thing with Bertie Wooster, who is meant to be a chump but comes up with some fabulously witty lines that would be beyond someone like that, these lines are all Wodehouse, of course. And you get this with many comic characters - I mean, nobody wants to be Basil Fawlty (funny how that name is in autocorrect), he is awful of course - but then again, sometimes, when he is pouring articulate scorn on the old battle-axe played by Jean Sanderson, you are cheering him on, you want to be him. And this is the thing with the best comic characters, from Will Hay onwards - even if they are idiots, there are times when they are surrounded by bigger idiots, so you never know which way the humour is going to go, you are on tenterhooks waiting to see. ( A character like Citizen Khan, from the unloved titular sitcom, failed imo because he was only ever an idiot, he lacked this breaking of the fourth wall from what I could see.)
It's said by others than me however that Huckleberry Finn takes a turn half way through where it feels like a different book and it feels a bit sour. Until this point, I couldn't see what leeway Everett might have in sending up Finn's selfishness as he doesn't seem such a bad guy, but then we learn that for all their bonding, Finn is considering handing over his mate Jim to the authorities because, after all, he is a runaway slave and doing his owner out of significant money.
Now, normally I avoid reading the preface to a book for fear of spoilers but in this case I really wish I had because there is a subtext to the novel that I didn't pick up on, and this is where I feel a bit thick. I was just reading it as a romp.
So I'd advise you read the preface of this edition which I picked up from the library.
For one thing it advises that Mark Twain is not merely a pseudonym but a fictional character in itself, the name taken from a navigational term used by the great steamers on the Mississippi. (BTW did you know that the steamer used in Culture Club's 1983 video for Karma Chameleon in which the band expose an onboard cardsharp is the one seen moored at Kingston-up-Thames in Surrey, and it was filmed along the river?)
The other thing is that the story is a satire on the treatment of the black man by the United States at that time and that is what the plot is getting at. Possibly when Huck and Jim are co-opted by a couple of conmen, one pretending to be descended from English royalty, the other from French royalty, it is a comment on British and French colonialism, and both the American and the black man's escape from those shackles. Not having read the preface, all I saw when Tom Sawyer improbably returns for the final reel is that the whole novel has gone to pot, not only that but given its time of writing, the steady and depressingly repetitive use of the 'n' word, while authentic, just seemed an example of the racism of the times and I struggled to get through the book. Though another reason being, most chapters are 20 pages long and it's a case of one chapter before turning in for the night, it aims to be a satisfying read, not a page-turner like today's books.
The term Honeychile in Dr No I now see comes from the then black way of calling another 'honey' or 'Chile' as Jim uses it a lot to Huck.
Sawyer's reappearance is the most outraging aspect as he sees fit to put a captured and imprisoned Jim through all manner of trials to make his escape, secured by Sawyer and Finn, more satisfyingly romantic, Finn is nonplussed at this but goes along with it, but it is painful to read. This however is meant to be the author's satire on what the blacks had to go through to win emancipation. This is all very well but I prefer this kind of stuff to work both on the surface as a narrative with the clever subtext there if you look for it. Similarly, from a Bondcentric universe, Skyfall is a clever Bond movie when you look at the subtext (the British Empire's chickens coming home to roost) and that would have been clear had the pre-credits been set in India, as it originally was, rather than Turkey, which I'm not sure - I could be wrong - was never a British colony or at least never associated with that), the whole Bond rebirth/recinarnation thing which I found implausible might have worked better in India too. Likewise his disrespectful attitude to the natives makes sense with this subtext (contrast how polite he is with the commuters on his Tube chase in London), then you have Dench who played Queen Victoria of course as M, and the film may have been timed with Queen Elizabeth's death too, and the end of Empire (okay, she went on for a good many more years.) So the subtext of Empire in Skyfall is simply brilliant, better than any Bond film - problem is, I stand by my assertion that the superficial narrative of the film is complete nonsense and wholly unconvincing.
Anyway! I got on to reading James by Percival Everett after this. It is written in the first person perspective of James, the runaway slave. The gag is that he and other black slaves don't really speak in that vernacular but in fact like educated white folk. This is a one-note gag, similar to that of the stuttering, inarticulate jailors in the Life of Brian, or the standing cows in the Gary Larson cartoon who know to get down on all fours when they see a car coming, and not plausible but it works very well because it introduces a note of jeopardy into any scene where James the slave is in the company of a white man, which is most of the time.
There is a brilliant bit where James is training another slave into informing his white master that the house is on fire - you have to phrase it properly, never, 'Hey, grab some water, there's a fire!' combining both instruction and information, which would be deemed impertinent and worthy of a whipping. Instead it has to be something like, 'Lordy, master, what is going on there?!' in that wide-eyed way of the black stereotype. Thing is, many of us can relate to this to some extent, having worked for the boss who dislikes all assumptions or insinuations of superiority from underlings, and some of this applies to the way women have had to observe their lot in the patriarchy in the last, well, hundreds of years.
There's another good point made early on that with Finn gone missing presumed dead, and James the slave going missing at the same time, local folk might put two and two together and think those points might be connected, therefore it is in Jim's interest to ensure Finn stays alive so he doesn't cop the blame for his death and be hanged.
That said, I'm not sure Twain wouldn't make that point too, the book is not as racist as I'd originally thought.
James diverges from Huckleberry Finn in plot so it's gradually not the same story, even when you allow for Finn being an unreliable narrator. The character Finn never seems as objectionable here, and James indulges his pranking, he sees through it as he is the older man and Huck is a young teenager. Sawyer is referenced but never puts in an appearance thank goodness - I shuddered to imagine how that scene would have been depicted.
The final climax is somewhat rushed and not too plausible - it possibly resembles the ending of Django Unchained in which we may be invited to imagine that the hero is dead but what we see is a fantasy of what ought to have happened. In some ways it also resembles the final action scenes of a Bond continuation novel where the author is just looking to get over the finish line.
James is a highly readable book, a page-turner in the modern style. It's doesn't stay with you the way Huckleberry Finn does, however; the feel of it doesn't get into your bones, But this may be a commentary on most modern writing. I'm not sure we're ever invited to think, also, that its character James is ever an unreliable narrator; we're not invited to engage on that level.
To my delight I found from the 'also written by' page of the book that Percival Everett also wrote Dr No, a reinterpretation of Fleming's novel written from the point of view of No himself, of which I read a good review at the time, so that is now on my reading list.
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick
Huckleberry Finn sort of segues into this well-reviewed truncated bio of Elvis, after all its origins are in Memphis. It does make me wish that schooling was more organic, that when you read about a location, you are then signposted in other lessons more about the place so you can bind it all together. So if you cover Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, you also get to learn in Geography lessons a bit about the West Country and in History a bit of dovetailing there, too. Or might that not work, say, if you hated Hardy it might put you off everything else too? Anyway, I enjoyed looking at the map of the Mississippi at the start of Finn, adding to my knowledge a bit.
I suppose with his almost dirt poor background, sympathy with black people and hometown, Elvis might be a Huck Finn character. Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, well he might be a plantation owner or one of the tricksters Finn gets roped into helping out, the difference being that Finn does rumble his frauds early on and tries to get away, it's unclear in this narrative whether Elvis ever gets much of a clue.
Guralnick's book is about 500 pages long and takes Elvis up to his joining the Army, which more or less coincided with a family tragedy.
The book cover reminds me of that of Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard Album, taken by his brother Mike, all about those private moments before the world exploded.
Last Train to Memphis is very thorough, very fair. The author explains how he met someone who recalls seeing Elvis as a teen hanging round a drugstore where his cousin would work, just a lad before he got famous. And this formed the basis of the book: to find out who Elvis was and what he did on his road to fame. It's all about the small moments.
This may be just as well because the King wasn't known for witty comments or philosophical observations, unlike later pop stars. It's a moot point just how much we learn about, say, John Lennon from his own comments, or whether we learn more what he thinks of himself, and ditto with everyone. If I write two lengthy book reviews on the AJB website, is this because I'm a brilliant reviewer or because I like to think I am? But then again, Elvis is depicted as a phenomenon - like the Big Bang - all you can do is react to it, it has no consciousness of its own, that came later with bands like the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Stones etc. Elvis isn't that interesting on an immediate level in terms of what he says, but after a while you get more of a feeling about what he's about, certainly the contrast between his showbiz swagger and his humble, well-mannered and almost deferential private persona is interesting.
Like I say, the book is thorough so virtually every road trip or date Elvis went on goes in, it's not great for the casual fan, any more than Some Kind of a Hero would work for the causal Bond fan, it's kind of too much information, not that I'd change it. It's also very fair, unlike Philip Norman's Shout! a biography of the Beatles (Norman has subsequently admitted he was too snitty about McCartney). The footnotes in Last Train testify to that. also they are enjoyable in their own right. He will painstakingly explain how accounts differ on what happened in the studio on one occasion, and tries to explain how he can't be sure, but went with the most likely. Another book that is good at this is the bio of Who drummer Keith Moon, where in later editions there is a very detailed account of a fatality that occurred when Moon's Rolls Royce was being driven along the road of his mansion house, it goes into it in a conspiracy thriller kind of way; it is compulsive reading, real sleuthing.
That said, it would be unfair to call this 'dry' but the idea here is that the Elvis we read about is the guy who is down to earth, kind to his family, enjoys bumming around, listening to new LPs, fooling around with girls (the book is never explicit about this), going to the pictures etc and this kind of tone pervades the book, so even when he is selling millions of records, it is recounted as if he's taken a trip to the mall. It is devotedly unsensationalist to the point where you might yearn for the prose of Norman, or even the outlandishness of Albert Goldman's bio of the King. Unlike in Shout! I simply didn't quite feel that the world is exploding, the tone doesn't alter much even when he is selling huge numbers of singles. That is a stylistic choice by the author, however, and none other than Boby Dylan is quoted on the dust jacket saying the book is 'Unrivalled... Elvis steps from these pages, you can feel him breathe, this book cancels out all others'.
I did not read this from cover to cover but dipped into it. Parts of it resonated from the Elvis movie shown over Christmas, which @chrisno1 reviewed - I did see this but as ever was far gone with booze by that time so can't quite comment. Stuff like Elvis wearing eye shadow on his first gig it turns out were true, though not as outlandish as in the film, nor did the audience scream so hard on his debut, they more got going on his second, repeat showing that day. What annoyed me in that film was Tom Hanks' narration as Col Tom Parker - he sounded like JW Pepper's idiot brother - but yep, his 'Elma Fudd' voice is referenced here. Parker gets off lightly a bit, or maybe Guralnick just doesn't have that kind of spoon-feeding prose to make sure you get the point, sure he's a huckster but he is the guy helping to make Elvis, who, one senses, is a bit fly or opaque enough to go along with the Colonel's dealings with others, so Elvis doesn't need to do that himself. The author doesn't insert his own take on things too much but lets the many others involved in Presley's rise to tell the story, almost and in that sense it is a bit like the Bond book, Some Kind of Hero.
The book came out in 1994 however - before Pierce Brosnan was cast as Bond, to put in in 007 years. That is a shock to learn, and it is a shock to read that Colonel Tom is name checked as still being alive and in a position to contradict one account. (As Colonel Tom is the older man, the older generation, it brings it home just how young Elvis was when he died; when this book come out Elvis would have only been in his late 50s, I think, had he lived.) That said, you don't get the impression Colonel Tom is one person Guralnick engaged with at length in researching this. So that dates the book; it is off its time, when books were meant to be immersive, and when one of the lead players is still around to sue.
I’ve had this on my “to read” list for a long time - five years in fact, and I wish I hadn’t taken so long to read it. King has written crime before, but never as good as this. Billy Summers is a professional assassin and he’s after one last job, and as we all know, that one last job is not going to be as simple as it seems. King has a special knack in creating believable characters and portraying small town America. There is one small concession to TheShining which I didn’t think was necessary, and Summers writing his life story dragged a little at times but overall this was a satisfying read. Not just content with being the master of horror, King is showing so-called masterful crime writers the way to actually construct a novel.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
This is more of a "Next Book Read" post but for the Stephen King fans out there (and you know who you are), the final installment of The Talisman series will be released on October 6. The title is "Other Worlds Than These"a title that is sure to excite anyone familiar with King's works. More info and an excerpt here:
I've been neglecting my reading because I've been so hung up on my uni work, my next novel, an anthology I am editing and my own personal challenge of "Write One Poem A Week". That's not good because one way to continually develop as awriter is to read other writer's work. So, in passing at the Beeches rail station I spied on the book-swap shelves a copy of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, one of his lesser works, but one I remember from my days at W.H. Smith. I thought £1 was a decent charitable donation. I read it in two sittings.
BLACK DOGS – Ian McEwan (1992)
It is hard to believe Black Dogs is almost 25 years old.
Ian McEwan’s wonderfully evocative novella of misunderstanding still exudes all the confidence it did in 1992. McEwan’s prose directs us skilfully through a week with his protagonist, Jeremy, an orphan man who spends more time with his wife’s parents than she does, ostensibly to write their biography. As the action moves from a nursing home to the Berlin of 1990 and the Wall crashing down, and finally onto the Massif Centrale of France, it transpires the exercise for Jeremy is less of understanding the personalities of Bernard and June Tremaine, but the ideologies that have informed them, from politics to religion to human morals. The dream image of black dogs inhabits the tale from the beginning, wandering like heathen monsters across the minds of the three central characters with a hounding metronomic pulse. The revelation of the mysterious dogs is both shocking and unlikely, yet it conjures a deeper sense of spiritual unrest, that despite the decline of dictatorial evils across Europe, there still remains somewhere a ghostly manifest of evil – here the dogs, there a abusive father, somewhere else a gang of skinheads, or perhaps even a thoughtless husband and a non-communicative wife, “crossing the shadow line and going deeper where the sun never reaches… The evil [that] lives in us all… a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred.” There is of course a contemporary take on the novel, its themes relevant across eras and cultures and classes.
Brilliantly composed with a sureness of word and phrase and never slackening in pace or control, McEwan winds for us a revelation that we expect to be minor, an infringement of personal liberties perhaps, yet in fact he presents something truly macabre and, in a way, fearsome. The notes in the book are at pains to point out the related histories are entirely fictional with no basis on any wartime recollections, which may be a relief, yet doesn’t quell the underlying feeling of disgust towards the human stain that inhabits us all. A fantastic novel of much philosophy and glimmers of optimism among its dark unfolding narratives .
The 'T2 Trilogy' by S. M. Stirling comprises of three books:
T2: Infiltrator (2001)
T2: Rising Storm (2003)
T2: The Future War (2004)
This trilogy takes the original James Cameron / William Wisher story arc and incorporates into it, a parallel storyline which inter-meshes the films and novels into a very satisfying mix.
In T2: Infiltrator, John and Sarah Connor escape to Paraguay after the events of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, where they are hunted by a new cybernetic organism called the I-950 infiltrator. This intelligence gathering machine possess super human strength, hyper-agility and self-healing capabilities in addition to neural interlinks with Cyberdyne's A.I. system 'Skynet', which gives it up-to-date tactical information and wireless connectivity with other terminators and infiltrators in the region.
T2: Rising Storm outlines the early development of John Connor's resistance network against the machines and the attack on Cyberdyne's back-up facility in Montana. The last novel Final War depicts the global destruction caused by Skynet's 'Judgement Day'; a catastrophic nuclear counter-strike provoked by the artificial intelligence system, which leads to the death of 3 billion humans. We also get to read about Kyle Reese; how he was rescued by John Connor from a Skynet work camp and later sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor from a Cyberdyne model T-800.
FBI agent Jordan Dyson, brother of Cyberdyne's microchip engineer Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson, also makes an appearance in the first novel, where he seeks to bring Sarah Connor to justice for the death of his brother.
All in all, this is an excellent series of novels, which fans of the Terminator franchise will greatly appreciate.
The novels are available to read on the Internet Archive and can be borrowed with your Internet Archive account.
I've been dipping into one on my bookshelf - The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and The Demise of English Rock by John Harris. Actually, that sub-head isn't quite accurate; there isn't much about Blair in it well, okay a couple of chapters - and I suppose we had Travis (Scottish) and the Manics (Welsh) to suggest that English rock did indeed fall away once Oasis did but...
It's about Britpop. Starts off with Suade, then Blur, then Oasis, Elastica - Pulp get slightly sidelined, because nobody from the band seems available, though there are a good few quotes from Jarvis Cocker taken from other sources. A book like this is as good as its contributors and luckily the author has his ear bent by the garrulous, good-value Alex James, bassist with Blur, and Elastica's Justine Freischmann, who along with bandmate Donna Matthews, is good value,
The author's prose is terrific, it's the kind of book you can just pick up and delve into. Of Oasis' hanger-on Robbie Williams, whose lack of gigs meant he was swiftly putting on weight, he writes: 'it was his unlucky fate to be picked up like a petrol-station novelty, bent out of all recognisable shape, and then chucked from the tourbus'.
One observation however is that these books often have a finger-wagging Aunt Mimi tone to them, the sense that it will all end in tears, just you see. We got that with Philip Norman's book about the Beatles, Shout!, and Tim Stanley's excellent history of pop, the sense that, yes, a band may hit the heights, but what about after, eh? Rarely do they convey the sheer joy and abandon of the time, it would be contrary to the reflective tone of the piece.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick
In a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is tasked with hunting down six androids who have come to Earth illegally. Hoping to use the bounty money to buy a real living animal as a status symbol, Deckard finds himself questioning his profession and humanity as the line between android and human becomes increasingly blurred.
The core of the book deals with Deckard's struggle with his line of work. With each android (or Andy as they're called in the book) Deckard finds it harder and harder to do his job as he begins to develop empathy for his would be victims. The Andy's are the newest Nexus 6 models and they are capable mimicking complex emotions, making them harder to detect. They are also very clever, at one point almost convincing Deckard that he is a replicant himself.
The novel famously served as the template for the movie Blade Runner and I was surprised at just how much of the book actually made it into the movie. Many of the characters ring true to the text and some scenes such as the Voight Kampf empathy test were almost word for word to the book.
The book also has a lot of elements that never made it into the movie such as Deckard's wife, a religious movement and just a lot more details about the day to day life of the characters.
The book was a fun and quick read with a brisk pace and some interesting observations on humanity, emotions and religion. Definitely worth checking out, especially for fans of Blade Runner.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,057Chief of Staff
I listen to Stuart Maconie with Mark Radcliffe on the Radio6 Music weekend breakfast show…I also saw Stuart with Mark Lewisohn on the Beatles Evolver63 tour…Stuart is a great writer and has a brilliant, easy to read style…this book is obviously about the people around the Beatles that helped them in some way or other…whilst there is nothing revelatory, I did learn a couple of things I hadn’t known before.
A couple of Bond-inspired comic novels you might be interested in:
Starter Villain by John Scalzi.
This is about a former financial journalist who now works as a supply teacher and is divorced, living in his late parents' house that his older siblings now want to sell. The age thing is a bit off unless you lost both your parents in your late thirties. Anyway, when his estranged wealthy uncle dies one of his representatives suggests he should attend the funeral. It builds from there; he finds out his uncle was something of Bond villain with an HQ on an island, you also get talking cats and obstreperous dolphins. It gets a bit Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which is no bad thing, it's kind of cute especially if you're fond of cats. Not life-changing or that memorable but it has that wise-guy, liberal, East Coast kind of humour.
Dr No by Percival Everett
You may know this black writer from the film American Fiction which starred our own Jeffrey Wright, or from James which was an alternative take on Huckleberry Finn written from the pov of the slave, Jim. I thought this book would be the story of Dr No written from Julius' perspective but I guess the Ian Fleming Foundation would have something to say about that. This is about a lecturer who, as with the previous book I review above, is thrown into a supervillain's orbit and is soon out of his depth. If I recall he teaches philosophy and is recruited as an expert in 'nothing' - the book makes a play of the double meaning of 'nothing' which may amuse some but not others. After a deposit of several million dollars in his account, the FBI start to pay attention and tail him; the plot involves jetting around various countries while the black villain's trajectory takes us to Fort Knox. the narrator owns a one-legged dog who talks to him in his dreams. It's enjoyable, less than 300 pages long so worth ordering in to your local library. Though comedic it does somehow actually build some tension and a sinister atmosphere as it approaches the finale and feels more coherent and intelligent than some recent Bond continuation novels..
I can recommend Anti-Social: The Secret Diary of an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer by Nick Pettigrew, which I got out my library.
Both Kathy Burke and Frankie Boyle give praise on the dust jacket, and it turns out that Pettigrew has an occasional gig as a stand-up comedian, and it's the jokes that get you through this. It's done as a kind of diary entry over the course of a year as the author gives his account of having to deal with troublesome tenants in council housing, some of whom are a nightmare for their neighbours, many addicted to substance abuse and impervious to reason. He's not shy about revealing how the job gets on top of him - I have to say some of it reminds me of my time as a sub-editor which shouldn't have been depressing, but there's a sense that you are doing something useful but you wonder if that's not simply vanity and you get no thanks for it, anyway. Plus, people only notice when you get something wrong. The author charts his anti-depressant dosage at the beginning of each chapter/month. There's not much in the way of lovely prose here, it's not that kind of book but there's a joke on every page.
I listened to the audiobook novelization of Batman 89 on a long car trip. Narrated by Batman 66 and TAS villain alumni Roddy McDowall. It has the same plot points of the movie, just some scenes expanded, shortened or cut out entirely. Still highly recommended for reading or listening.
I also actually read a psychical copy of Wayne of Gotham. It was ok, a mystery that was hard to follow. Some extended cameos by classic Batman villains, but I wish that they had more of a bigger part in the final story. A modest recommendation, if you want a more mysterious Batman, you might like this book.
Two books of memoirs encompassing the 1960s-70s - The Father I Had by Martin Townsend, and Homework by Geoff Dyer.
Martin Townsend was the editor of the Express and also Hello magazine; he died last year and in his obit it mentioned this book, which covered his father's mental health problems which plagued his upbringing. My own father sometimes seemed to have a screw loose so I thought some of this might resonate. That all said, my father held down a very decent job as an optician on the south coast and never ever went into an asylum or got sectioned, really I suppose you could say he had some 'funny ways'.
Some of this well-written book is really an excuse for the author to take a trip down memory lane while pointing out some of the odd things a parent might do, that said Townsend does a fine job of summing up the ways, the tell-tale signs, that things were about to go wrong and that his father would get 'high' - not on drugs, but about to do his own thing. Like a hypochondriac ticking off certain symptoms, I did notice some similarities but to list them is to invite derision because taken alone they don't add up to much. Always striking out far afield, often on his bike, an admittedly impressive ability to build amazing things of ingenuity - my own Dad scaled the oak tree to install a garden swing, Townsend's built a garden pond and rockery, a love of Frank Sinatra, a need or really more a compulsion to strike up conversation with strangers and above all that sense that socially he might spoil the party or be life and soul of it, the tension lay in never knowing which it would be. Townsend does a very good job of highlighting the stress this kind of behaviour has on the wife and how it sets the emotional temperature of the household.
What is superb incidentally is how he manages to recreate family conversations at lengthy some decades on; to what extend it is made up I don't know but it is utterly authentic and makes the difference in a memoir.
It also recreates the feel of the UK in the late 60s early 70s - admittedly it evokes these social media accounts which show idyllic photos of UK in years gone by, possibly accounts created by Russian bots to demoralise the English, or Reform voters; by evening the tones changes and they become more obviously racist, with loaded comments such as 'Do you notice anything about this picture?' And I suppose the Express under Townsend's editorship might have been a more respectable paper back then rather than the hardline Tory tabloid it is now, I'm not sure. Anyway, this notwithstanding, all of this nostalgic writing is a joy to read.
As a teenager, Townsend is taken in by a local church - in many a memoir this would be the cue for something awful to happen but it doesn't thankfully and it is in tune with the book. I have to say that as if in payback for having had teenage years of stress, he life appears to have been one of blessed good luck the moment he left school.
The book aims to highlight the poor state of care for people with mental health problems, nowadays it is more care in the community but I'm not entirely sure what he thinks the solution is. Again, I can snipe and say I'm not sure any Tory Government would stump up the cash for it.
In the final pages, Townsend drops the insight into what it was that may have made his father have a breakdown - a tragic event that occurred in Germany when he was in the Army. Many call for a return to the call up but I do think the idea of having blokes all together in a masculine environment away from home can leave them skewed and mentally unable to withstand trauma. But the book often seems to touch on the suggestion that a good many middle-aged blokes back then could be a bit nuts; even his next-door neighbour at the time seems on the spectrum and you arguably see it on things like The Goon Show and even Morecambe and Wise; it was the relentless masculinity, the relentless jokes.
His final meet up with his father saw him take him - on the off chance - to the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium in the 1990s, though very much of the same generation as my father albeit a few years younger, I can't imagine taking my dad to see the Stones, though in his final fortnight (as it turned out), I jollied him along with the thought of a new Stones LP coming out, asking if he knew of them. 'Of course I know the Rolling Stones!' he replied. That said, my Dad being born in '28 and opposed to '33 was all the difference needed. Lapsed Stones fan @chrisno1 might appreciate Townsend's melancholy summing up of past countryside outings with a description of that gig: 'And all of those trips - taken in hope, taken in despair, mostly in the spirit of adventure - all of them to end on a strange, hard echoey afternoon in a vast, soulless stadium. Gone itself, now.'
The book messes up the dates for the final two chapters so his dad's death when it comes is a bit incongruous because as you start to read it, you think, okay, so this is before the Wembley gig then...
What is also amazing - to me - is that his dad was born in 33 and died in 96 or thereabouts; my mother was born in 33 and died with Parkinson's in 2017, I mean that is a huge difference, we as a family were lucky in that respect. That said, Townsend also died in his 60s like his old man, though untroubled thankfully by mental health problems. So no matter which way your life goes, you never can tell.
I encountered Mr Townsend briefly when I was working on, oh, I think it was Okay magazine actually, back in the day; he seemed a nice, unassuming bloke. That said, Rebekah Wade, as she was then known, seemed a low-key character too to me, so what did I know?
On to Geoff Dyer's highly acclaimed Homework but I'm afraid I didn't read this cover to cover, I dipped into it. Now, our resident scribe @chrisno1 sometimes says he worries his pieces are overwordy or overblown - well, I don't think that, so long as he inserts some paragraph breaks, and nor does anyone else here; I get the impression someone he knew told him that once, and he took it to heart. Well, suffice to say that Dyer writes in the sort of way that our ajber sometimes worries he does - but doesn't, I hasten to add. It's a bit much, Dyer went to Oxford Uni, well good for him, I applied twice and didn't get in but reading his books does make me realise I'm not Oxford material - fair enough but not quite the feeling I want to enjoy when reading. I mean, I'm watching Simon Schama's superb History of Britain re-run on BBC4 and I'm not made to feel like any of it is out of my reach.
Dyer wrote that short book about Where Eagles Dare a few years ago, you may remember it; probably a good stocking filler but some Amazon reviews of that suggest he does take the highbrow approach a bit too much.
That's not to say there aren't some good, witty lines here: 'These [day] trips... had the quality of adventure even if my dad had the knack, not of ruining but always slightly letting the fun out of things, like a very slow, hard-to-identify puncture.' He is also good on his dad's compulsive meanness with money, which seems to have been a generational trait.
But he doesn't have Townsend's way with rattling off conversations at length and seemingly from memory. He doesn't seem able to edit himself. At the end he bangs on about finding some Thunderball trading cards in the family loft and goes on about a couple of numbers that were missing, he devotes a lengthy paragraph to this, honestly I'm a Bond fan and I found it boring. Earlier in the book he tells how he never saw another Bond film after You Only Live Twice and thinks they're all rubbish anyway, well cheers chum!
And I'm not sure if ChrisNo1's occasional nostalgic forays or mentions of past girlfriends during his film reviews would be enhanced if, like Mr Dyer, he included the occasional adolescent blow job received - but if he were to write it up in the same joyless, perfunctory style as we find here, then I doubt it. I did honestly wonder at times if Geoff Dyer isn't a touch of the autistic spectrum; he relates a lot of this in a kind of trainspotting detail that is formidable but generally lacking the requisite joy, love, wonder or wistfulness that makes a memoir really sing.
But the book has a wonderful cover, somehow evoking the 1970s, and has plenty of plaudits, so what do I know.
Following up from my post oin the book covers thread, I thought I ought to at least read one of the Hammond Innes books I scuppered away:
THE STRANGE LAND – Hammond Innes (1954)
Hammond Innes was the author of The Wreck of the Mary Deare, which after twenty years of solid sales, launched him on the way to superstardom. The Strange Land precedes it by a couple of years and is a solid entry into his canon, although like his contemporaries Victor Canning and Desmond Bagley, there is a greater emphasis on intrigue and story building, essentially involving the major character and little else. Thrills come, but they seem leaden in the breadth of description and don’t make one’s pulse race. I enjoyed the settings. The landscapes of French-occupied Morocco, the Atlas Mountains and the wastelands of the Western Sahara are excellently realised. So too the souks, streets and musty hotels of Casablanca and Tangiers. The story kicks off in a dingy bar near Tangiers’s harbour and evolves quickly into a seashore rescue, a case of mistaken identity, a Czech scientist fleeing the Soviets and a dodgy claim on an old Berber fort located in the desert hills. While the mystery kept me turning the pages, I wasn’t exactly rivetted. I read The Strange Land in two extended sittings. I was pleased the climax at least had some brio to it, although every incident seems stretched beyond belief. A little more editing might have made the book more impulsive. Innes is a decent writer, but this book isn’t doing much for me. The new thriller writers of the age, like MacLean, Gavin Lyall and our own Ian Fleming chose to do so much more with their characters, creating visceral (un)realities that grip and fascinate. There is enough here to keep me reading, but The Strange Land isn’t a rip-roaring success. If I am being kind, it shows its age.
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande was recommended in the Times Review a few weeks ago, so I ordered it in to my library.
It talks about the better ways to care for the elderly, in particular end-of-life care and how to approach it.
The dust jacket has praise from Malcolm Gladwell and the book perhaps has some similarity in that it's easy to read, and I like it, but when you go on to summarise its key points, they do seem a bit simple and obvious.
Early chapters explain how mortality has changed - in previous centuries people would get ill and just die. They would just fall off a cliff, fall off the graph, say in their 50s or so on. Thanks to better nutrition, lack of wars and hospitals, now they/we have a tendency to just go on, so the downward curve is gradual. Even with a significant illness, it is relatively rare that anyone falls off a cliff, it is managed decline. This was my own parents' experience; my mother with Parkinson's - she got it aged 69, she died aged 84, my father with all manner of things but ultimately I guess dementia, along the way he had a hip replacement, heart murmur and pacemaker installed, cataracts, wrote off the car, was dogged by the occasional urinary tract infection or low sodium levels which can drive a person temporarily mad - the former is swiftly cured by antibiotics, the second by a couple of days on a drip in hospital, he also had some kind of epilepsy which led to a mad kind of fainting or zoning out that we mistook for a stroke, with dreaded sedatives prescribed which was a harbinger of the end, also the dreaded fall which is often enough a precursor of death, it might be a few years off or it might be mere days; I keep intending to do a post about this on the Obituaries thread. That all said, Dad could be conversational in the last year of his life in a way my mother certainly wasn't, his batteries just ran down, rather like a garden hose that springs new leaks after you patch other holes up.
The next few chapters offer examples of how care homes should be improved, with all manner of stimuli for the residents. Two things here: the book is American, so I'm not sure how it translates to over here, also it was written ten years ago anyway, when the world seemed a nicer place and before austerity kicked in. And it doesn't have much to say about folk like my parents who could hang on but became less conversational and unable to give an opinion on things beyond the very basics (but could enjoy meals and music etc). It is odd and misleading to say that in the last few years of my mother's life we never really had a conversation, but we had a strong rapport and she could respond or engage with things. I'm not sure Gawande has anything to say about this category, all the case studies cited concern elderly who have physical ailments that are generally terminal but who are sharp enough mentally to outline how they want to see out their inevitable end.
This is a depressing book not because it is miserable but because it forces the reader to face up to things about themselves or their still alive parents that they would rather not; you have a choice whether to wing it in life and put off such thoughts - which is an enjoyable strategy, don't get me wrong - or face up to what lies ahead and be better able psychologically to later meet it head on.
The final chapters are good about what it is to have a good end, that when we look back on events we judge according to their very worst moment and then its final moments - that these define how you feel about it as a whole, citing the not-quite-right example of a football match which fans enjoy minute by minute - all overridden should a goal be conceded in the final minutes, affecting one's view of the afternoon. That doesn't quite work as an analogy, it's a bit Malcolm Gladwell. After all, fans bemoan a last-minute goal if it means they lose points or the entire match, it's a practical thing, it's not simply because the ending itself is disappointing. A better example might be a movie where the finale depends on whether we call it a happy or sad film; that said critic Pauline Kael scorned Dr Zhivago for its final scene 'Then it's a gift!' where a rainbow is bestowed on events, as if that in itself compensated for the millions of Russians sent to the gulag.
Gawande explains why a hospice can assist the terminally ill and have them live a bit longer than the alternatives, as if by facing up to your situation you can better ride it out, a bit like facing facts and engaging with a Govt-approved debt advice agency rather than just hoping a decent job comes up. He also cites 'geriatrics' as a good thing, making it sound like a neat way of getting a classic car all the TLC it needs to stay on the road, ironing out repairs along the way. But with my mother with advanced Parkinson's, I got the impression she'd have but weeks if she went into a hospice, it wouldn't be a long stay. It's similar to so-called palliative care; in seven care homes in the same number of years I never heard of anyone being on long-term palliative care, it was a contradiction in terms. You were down to just days, it meant 'we are giving up on their treatment' from what I could see. When I heard someone suggest palliative care, I only heard 'Can we kill your mother now?' and nothing I saw over the years or in conversation contradicted that view.
And nobody wants to engage with something called 'geriatrics' - a shame, because a lot of what he advises is about future-proofing your situation, heading off future peril. Winging it is okay, and facing up to a grim future can feel like you are inviting the flood waters to come in, it depends how you see it. It can feel like tempting fate.
In any case, at the time of writing, 'geriatric' wards are being shut down in the US and this mirrored austerity in the UK at that time. From then on I got the impression that those in my mother's condition were being euthanised by the State - as far as I'm aware, even though the notorious Liverpool Care Pathway was made illegal in 2014, it carried on just under another name or euphanism. Passive euthanasia is legal in the UK anyway so if you find your parent in a care home dehydrated, well, that will be no accident most likely, that's how they do it, and families who raise concerns may find themselves on the receiving end of smears and abuse by the care home, as advised by the local Council's social services, lurking in the shadows, as we found out. (The press is very shy about exposing this, there seems to be a superinjunction in place, but if you read of allegations of dehydration in a care home news story, that is what they are hinting at, that's as far as they can go with it.) In hospitals, opiates can be used to finish folk off - this is illegal but as with so many other things, if they get away with it, is it really?
Set against this backdrop, it is a fanciful book to outline the ways care homes might be made more user-friendly - there are some tall tales in here; each care home resident given a bird in a cage to look after - given that many care homes are frankly tasked with bumping them off on the quiet - and if they jump the gun with some residents, well, they won't get into trouble because dead bodies save the State money in terms of prescriptions, pensions and death duties. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them get kickbacks for placing residents on end-of-life care; it may be the reason more than one care home were mad with fury at our attempts to check Mum out and take her somewhere else, two of them attempting to nix the attempt by calling in social services against us, and almost succeeding. The idea is, look, you can make money out of these people to the tune of £2k a week and once it becomes too troublesome, you have permission to bump them off. We'll look elsewhere.
That all said, I recommend the book's opening and closing chapters.
More Than Likely - the memoirs of TV and movie legends Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.
As I mentioned on the Weekly Bond Movie thread, where I talk about their account of helping out the script of Never Say Never Again, the title is a reference to their 1960s sitcom The Likely Lads and the even better belated follow-up in the early 1970s, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, often reshown on telly these days; they also did the sitcom Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
But I didn't know that they did a whole load of other stuff too: The Commitments, Billy - the John Barry-penned musical based on Billy Liar, starring Michael Crawford, for instance. By the stroke of serendipity that affects memoirs, Billy was namechecked in the recent book I reviewed upthread, The Father I Had - even the very same performance, opening night, which had a bomb threat. I understood that Barry's Billy had been a bomb, I don't know where I got that idea from, maybe a revival, but Clement and La Frenais are very pleased about its success so maybe I will dig out the LP soundtrack I bought many years ago and never got round to playing.
The prose isn't very good, it doesn't evoke any sense of atmosphere and the anecdotes seem formed on the cruise ship lecture tour or Director's Commentary of a DVD. The story alternates between chapters allocated to either Dick or Ian. The pair don't mind talking about projects that never came to fruition, be it with Richard Burton or Peter Sellers (though other projects they did for them did materialise). I've dipped into it - one surprise is that Likely Lads' James Bollam already notably disliked his co-star even before filming began on Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, but put it to one side once he'd heard the pitch over dinner.
I can recommend The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giulioano da Empoli, which I picked up at my local library based on its cover.
It's a novel about a Russian journalist who wonders what happened to Putin's long-term PR man Vadim Baranov; he seems to have fallen off the radar or gone to ground after giving up his job.
Following some cryptic social media messages put out there, he receives an invite to Baranov's place out in the forest where he is taken at night in a limo. There he gets the chance to hear Baranov's story, and it reads similar to the story over dinner a Bond villain relates to our hero, or maybe that of Kerim Bey in the novel From Russia With Love.
Gradually you come to realise that the whole book is in fact about the rise of Putin and an insight into modern Russia as told from his insider perspective - it is not a novel in which it then reverts to a plot involving the journalist; Baranov takes over as narrator.
This is enjoyable but I found I could put it down for a fortnight and resume reading later. It's all about what makes Putin tick and the building blocks to fascism. It ends before the Ukraine War really gets going. I think @Number24 would enjoy this. I was surprised to find it was made into a film with Jude Law as Putin, it got mixed reviews.
The book has some lovely observations about life but I don't feel moved to go through it to find them again.
Comments
The Mouthless Dead by Anthony Quinn. Quinn also wrote Curtain Call, recently made into a film (The Critic) with Ian MacKellan. If his gets made into a film it should also be renamed as I've no idea why it is called that. Is it a quote from something else?
I ordered this in at the library after a glowing review in the FT. Unable to sleep at 2am or so I picked it up and didn't put it down until 50 pages in.
It's based around the real-life Wallace murders in Liverpool in 1931 in which a nondescript middle-aged man was accused of killing his wife, the case became a cause celebre at the time and subject of much comment; it was the sort of case that prompted Agatha Christie's writing I guess, all in the context of the time. The writer pulls the trick of having two narratives, both seen through the eyes of a fictional copper who briefly knew the suspect via his chess club and watches appalled as the wheels of justice move against him; and the same character retired in late 1940s, having cause to reflect on the case years later.
It's the soap opera trick, neither plot lines necessarily that interesting on their own, but by jumping back and forth, they appear to be and allow the author to end a chapter on a cliffhanger. GoldenEye employs that method but most Bond films prefer the three-card trick of having different things on the go to distract and engage.
A creeping unease is felt by merging fact with fiction, it does seem in bad taste nearly 100 years on even so, then again like the Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently doing the breakfast rounds to dismiss claims of a leadership coup, claiming he also didn't shoot JFK and knew nothing about [the missing famous racehorse] Shergar, it seems some conspiracy theories are cosier than others - if he'd referenced the Fiat Uno and Princess Diana or TV presenter Jill Dando's doorstep murder, or 9/11, he'd have most likely have had to resign.
I looked up the Wallce murder after reading this, here is a website:
It's very comprehensive though the phrase 'too much information' comes to mind; it seems there's an ongoing, cult-like fascination with the case though we can't talk, being devoted to a James Bond website. But reading it in the early hours, again, I felt disquiet as it appears to be a propaganda piece for the Liverpool Police, explaining how they got it right all along. It's like the State tries to maintain a kind of papal infallibility - maybe in 60 years they'll be a website devoted to how South Yorkshire Police were right on Hillsborough all along, and that a couple of fans were a bit tipsy and sang rude songs, so they had it coming. Or a site defending the Post Office cases against their staff - do you know, one or two of them really were involved in embezzlement, after all? Or that Lucy Letby really did kill those babies. There is something mad and chilling about it, this deep-seated, enduring determination to hold the line. Don't get me wrong, it's well written and one section called Armchair Critics pours scorn on amateur sleuths applying their talents, giving not necessarily wrong psychological reasons why they feel the might like to 'best' the police, but come on... It's as if the police are never corrupt, right? Just as well a few armchair critics had another look at the jailing of the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six or they'd have stayed longer in jail - but if you worked for Surrey Police, you might not mind if they did!
There is conjecture that there was a police coverup to let one suspect off the hook, due to his connections. So the whole thing is very murky.
Later on in the novel the policeman makes a reference to how husbands can arrange to have their wives just 'disappear' by rehousing them in asylums for a fee and consultation with the family GP, it's just dropped in, in a horrifying way - I think that would deserve a novel in itself. I think Charles Dickens did this to his wife and the late writer Edna O'Brien narrowly avoided such a fate as a young woman.
Because of all this, the read is a bit dispiriting and depressing not withstanding some get nuggets of terrific descriptive and observational writing. It reminded me of another book I read this year, it's on the previous page, I can't recall the title, set in London in the 20s I think and featuring a middle-aged, somewhat depressed policeman as a key character.
Unfortunately half way through the lead character, the policeman, is revealed to have done things both in the past and present plot strands that are out of character and strains credulity past breaking point, from thereon despite various surprises, one is just reaching for the end and as it turns out a slightly silly final denouement in the last sentence. That all said, I read this book in just a few days and enjoyed it so on that basis for me it was a success. But I'd like a lighter happier read at some point.
Annoyingly, there is no epilogue of the kind we see at the end of the Sharpe or Flashman novels in which the author as himself talks about the case and what bits of the novel are true and which are speculation.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
NEVER FLINCH (2025) by Stephen King
Another Holly Gibney thriller. Although starting off very well the story drifts into ho-hum territory as Kate McKay hires Holly Gibney to protect her during her tour crusading against anti-abortionists, whilst Holly also helps police officer friend Izzy with her serial killer case. The two strands are inexorably heading towards each other for the climax, which by the time it happens has become uninteresting and lacks tension. I like the Holly character, but this one seems forced, I don’t think she would have taken the job of a bodyguard. Siblings Jerome and Barbara return, and not only has Barbara become a famous published poet, but in this one she becomes a backing singer for a old time diva. It’s all too much to believe and King’s writing is seriously off key. I think King has taken these characters far enough and needs to get back to basics.
Not my favourite King, in fact not even my fave of his Holly tales. The ingredients are mostly there, though there's a definite sense of something missing and yes, please, can he stop it with these characters? I get that he's been enjoying this series but it's beyond time to go back to his normal thing.
IN TOO DEEP by Lee Child and Andrew Child
This is the fifth Reacher book as a joint exercise from the Child (Grant) brothers. It is, by far, the worst of the bunch to date. I would imagine that Lee gave Andrew the opening scenario of Reacher waking and finding himself handcuffed to a bed and then telling him to go from there (in itself a standard Reacher set up). Andrew has not got to grips with the Reacher character, it’s someone else pretending to be Reacher. The story is boring, Reacher makes un-Reacher-like decisions. The book was a struggle to get through, and indeed I scanned through the final dozen or so chapters to end the suffering quickly. Lee should have ended the series with a bang writing his own last book, I understand that the publishers will have given a very lucrative deal to continue, but sometimes money isn’t everything, and Lee is a wealthy man, he shouldn’t have sold out the soul of Reacher when it’s clear that he has little input into the books anymore.
I’m saddened but not surprised 😕 since Andrew ‘took over’ these stories have nosedived…Reacher used to only kill when necessary but he seems to kill with complete disregard now - and that just jars with the character…I haven’t read this one or the last one and I don’t think I will…
You won’t miss anything, unfortunately, Sir Miles ☹️
I feared as much 😕 such a poor way for Reacher to go…I can’t blame either Child (Grant) for taking the money though…
My Life as a Mankiewicz by Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane (2012). Unique, I think that Tom Mankiewicz was more like James Bond than certain people realize. Simply replace the vodka martini, shaken not stirred, with a big bottle of Jack Daniels. He also slept with just about any woman that he could. He lived an interesting life, on and off screen. His dad, Joseph Mankiewicz accepted nothing but perfection from his children, particularly Tom. He had a hard life growing up, his mother was bipolar and committed suicide when he was a teenager. There was also a family death that may have influenced the NYC car crash in LALD.
As for the interesting Bond behind the scenes facts, there really isn't he says that we don't already know. I give him credit for leaving and not taking the easy route of just writing Bond for most of his career. He had a few opinions on other Bonds (not his) in his book. He didn't view Lazenby as much. He wished that Dalton would have done more than two. For Brosnan, he said he simply played Bond. He stated that this wasn't a good or bad thing. As for Craig, he apparently got tailed by Barbara Broccoli on a highway. They pulled over. He simply said he loved CR, and Craig had a bright future. He didn't like QOS, and that was the last Bond movie he got to see. She thanked him for his help on the series.
More interesting was some of his Superman stories. He said that Marlon Brando was fun, and was proud of the movie. Another interesting story of his was the top choices for General Zod. Albert Finney was the first choice, Christopher Plummer was the second, and Christopher Lee was the third. He (and I) were happy that Terence Stamp got the part in the end. He also said that Richard Donner is arguably one of the few directors who got fired for directing a successful movie. He said he and Donner got along partly because he was a drunk and Donner was a stoner. There are more fun Hollywood stories from him, but I'll let you read to find out.
In his final reflection as he was dying, he predicted his fears for the future of cinema. And sadly a lot of them have come true. Fair payback for Quentin Tarantino for all of his bashing lately: TM said that QT never made a movie about a fair human being, other Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I to a degree can agree with his QT criticisms. I think he would be happy to know that Steven Spielberg is directing decent movies. He was arguably blacklisted in his later years, which is why he slowed down. I won't spoil anything, as he was like his writing: truly witty, and as flawed as it could be, he was a generally entertaining writer, on screen and in his book.
Thanks @DrMaxMGold that's a good read, I may look that one up. Though the QT sentence at the end doesn't read well in terms of meaning.
Hucklebery Finn by Mark Twain
I feel a bit sheepish writing this review, firstly because it's late in the day for me to have read this classic for the first time, and because I come across as a bit thick in the reviewing.
There were rave reviews for a new book, James by Percival Evereret, who also penned American Fiction (the book has a different title) with our own Craig era Felix Leiter actor (my brain seems a bit shot these days). James retells the story of Huckleberry Finn from the first-person perspective of his runaway friend and accomplice, the slave Jim. The idea is to show things from a different, more enlightened point of view. So I thought I would read HF first, to know what he was satirising.
So I ordered in HF from the library, it took months to arrive presumably because folk had read the review of James and had the same idea as me. Eventually it arrived and the first thing it says is 'you probably have read about my adventures in the book Tom Sawyer from a while back' or words to that effect, well, no I hadn't read Tom Sawyer so I returned HF to the library and ordered that in instead.
So it was the best part of a year before I got round to reading that and HF and I could start on James.
Now, Huckleberry Finn picks up some time after Tom Sawyer and indeed was written the best part of a decade later, it wasn't an immediate sequel. As with such sequels, it has to unpick the happy resolution of the previous novel to have a premise, though in fairness Sawyer didn't quite end on a happy-ever-after note for Sawyer's mate Finn, who was more of a white trash character who had less going on in his life, more of a wayward vagabond character who could just take off down the river and be gone.
A plot device means this is indeed the situation Finn is thrown into, and it is at this point he happens upon runaway slave Jim who is hiding out on the same island on the Mississippi and the two, who already know each other, forge a bond in escaping and evading the authorities.
This is the nicest part of the book and there is a real sense of pleasure in reading about their escapades, it has a Lost Boys in Peter Pan vibe and I am stretching a point but I'll make in anyway in saying that the comradeship they experience finds happy echo in films like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard where the white guy bonds with the black guy and it feels like all is well in the world.
But the book is written with Twain as the narrator but in the first-person by Finn, so the writing is less agreeable, given it has to be filtered via his uneducated vernacular. There won't be any of Twain's smart, philosophical observations on life here. That said, ingeniously, something of Twain's writing still comes through occasionally, his prose in describing a plantation (I think) and the deadness of the vibe, is poetic but it's like a magic trick; it still manages to sound convincing coming from Finn's mouth. You could argue that PG Wodehouse did a similar thing with Bertie Wooster, who is meant to be a chump but comes up with some fabulously witty lines that would be beyond someone like that, these lines are all Wodehouse, of course. And you get this with many comic characters - I mean, nobody wants to be Basil Fawlty (funny how that name is in autocorrect), he is awful of course - but then again, sometimes, when he is pouring articulate scorn on the old battle-axe played by Jean Sanderson, you are cheering him on, you want to be him. And this is the thing with the best comic characters, from Will Hay onwards - even if they are idiots, there are times when they are surrounded by bigger idiots, so you never know which way the humour is going to go, you are on tenterhooks waiting to see. ( A character like Citizen Khan, from the unloved titular sitcom, failed imo because he was only ever an idiot, he lacked this breaking of the fourth wall from what I could see.)
It's said by others than me however that Huckleberry Finn takes a turn half way through where it feels like a different book and it feels a bit sour. Until this point, I couldn't see what leeway Everett might have in sending up Finn's selfishness as he doesn't seem such a bad guy, but then we learn that for all their bonding, Finn is considering handing over his mate Jim to the authorities because, after all, he is a runaway slave and doing his owner out of significant money.
Now, normally I avoid reading the preface to a book for fear of spoilers but in this case I really wish I had because there is a subtext to the novel that I didn't pick up on, and this is where I feel a bit thick. I was just reading it as a romp.
So I'd advise you read the preface of this edition which I picked up from the library.
For one thing it advises that Mark Twain is not merely a pseudonym but a fictional character in itself, the name taken from a navigational term used by the great steamers on the Mississippi. (BTW did you know that the steamer used in Culture Club's 1983 video for Karma Chameleon in which the band expose an onboard cardsharp is the one seen moored at Kingston-up-Thames in Surrey, and it was filmed along the river?)
The other thing is that the story is a satire on the treatment of the black man by the United States at that time and that is what the plot is getting at. Possibly when Huck and Jim are co-opted by a couple of conmen, one pretending to be descended from English royalty, the other from French royalty, it is a comment on British and French colonialism, and both the American and the black man's escape from those shackles. Not having read the preface, all I saw when Tom Sawyer improbably returns for the final reel is that the whole novel has gone to pot, not only that but given its time of writing, the steady and depressingly repetitive use of the 'n' word, while authentic, just seemed an example of the racism of the times and I struggled to get through the book. Though another reason being, most chapters are 20 pages long and it's a case of one chapter before turning in for the night, it aims to be a satisfying read, not a page-turner like today's books.
The term Honeychile in Dr No I now see comes from the then black way of calling another 'honey' or 'Chile' as Jim uses it a lot to Huck.
Sawyer's reappearance is the most outraging aspect as he sees fit to put a captured and imprisoned Jim through all manner of trials to make his escape, secured by Sawyer and Finn, more satisfyingly romantic, Finn is nonplussed at this but goes along with it, but it is painful to read. This however is meant to be the author's satire on what the blacks had to go through to win emancipation. This is all very well but I prefer this kind of stuff to work both on the surface as a narrative with the clever subtext there if you look for it. Similarly, from a Bondcentric universe, Skyfall is a clever Bond movie when you look at the subtext (the British Empire's chickens coming home to roost) and that would have been clear had the pre-credits been set in India, as it originally was, rather than Turkey, which I'm not sure - I could be wrong - was never a British colony or at least never associated with that), the whole Bond rebirth/recinarnation thing which I found implausible might have worked better in India too. Likewise his disrespectful attitude to the natives makes sense with this subtext (contrast how polite he is with the commuters on his Tube chase in London), then you have Dench who played Queen Victoria of course as M, and the film may have been timed with Queen Elizabeth's death too, and the end of Empire (okay, she went on for a good many more years.) So the subtext of Empire in Skyfall is simply brilliant, better than any Bond film - problem is, I stand by my assertion that the superficial narrative of the film is complete nonsense and wholly unconvincing.
Anyway! I got on to reading James by Percival Everett after this. It is written in the first person perspective of James, the runaway slave. The gag is that he and other black slaves don't really speak in that vernacular but in fact like educated white folk. This is a one-note gag, similar to that of the stuttering, inarticulate jailors in the Life of Brian, or the standing cows in the Gary Larson cartoon who know to get down on all fours when they see a car coming, and not plausible but it works very well because it introduces a note of jeopardy into any scene where James the slave is in the company of a white man, which is most of the time.
There is a brilliant bit where James is training another slave into informing his white master that the house is on fire - you have to phrase it properly, never, 'Hey, grab some water, there's a fire!' combining both instruction and information, which would be deemed impertinent and worthy of a whipping. Instead it has to be something like, 'Lordy, master, what is going on there?!' in that wide-eyed way of the black stereotype. Thing is, many of us can relate to this to some extent, having worked for the boss who dislikes all assumptions or insinuations of superiority from underlings, and some of this applies to the way women have had to observe their lot in the patriarchy in the last, well, hundreds of years.
There's another good point made early on that with Finn gone missing presumed dead, and James the slave going missing at the same time, local folk might put two and two together and think those points might be connected, therefore it is in Jim's interest to ensure Finn stays alive so he doesn't cop the blame for his death and be hanged.
That said, I'm not sure Twain wouldn't make that point too, the book is not as racist as I'd originally thought.
James diverges from Huckleberry Finn in plot so it's gradually not the same story, even when you allow for Finn being an unreliable narrator. The character Finn never seems as objectionable here, and James indulges his pranking, he sees through it as he is the older man and Huck is a young teenager. Sawyer is referenced but never puts in an appearance thank goodness - I shuddered to imagine how that scene would have been depicted.
The final climax is somewhat rushed and not too plausible - it possibly resembles the ending of Django Unchained in which we may be invited to imagine that the hero is dead but what we see is a fantasy of what ought to have happened. In some ways it also resembles the final action scenes of a Bond continuation novel where the author is just looking to get over the finish line.
James is a highly readable book, a page-turner in the modern style. It's doesn't stay with you the way Huckleberry Finn does, however; the feel of it doesn't get into your bones, But this may be a commentary on most modern writing. I'm not sure we're ever invited to think, also, that its character James is ever an unreliable narrator; we're not invited to engage on that level.
To my delight I found from the 'also written by' page of the book that Percival Everett also wrote Dr No, a reinterpretation of Fleming's novel written from the point of view of No himself, of which I read a good review at the time, so that is now on my reading list.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick
Huckleberry Finn sort of segues into this well-reviewed truncated bio of Elvis, after all its origins are in Memphis. It does make me wish that schooling was more organic, that when you read about a location, you are then signposted in other lessons more about the place so you can bind it all together. So if you cover Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, you also get to learn in Geography lessons a bit about the West Country and in History a bit of dovetailing there, too. Or might that not work, say, if you hated Hardy it might put you off everything else too? Anyway, I enjoyed looking at the map of the Mississippi at the start of Finn, adding to my knowledge a bit.
I suppose with his almost dirt poor background, sympathy with black people and hometown, Elvis might be a Huck Finn character. Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, well he might be a plantation owner or one of the tricksters Finn gets roped into helping out, the difference being that Finn does rumble his frauds early on and tries to get away, it's unclear in this narrative whether Elvis ever gets much of a clue.
Guralnick's book is about 500 pages long and takes Elvis up to his joining the Army, which more or less coincided with a family tragedy.
The book cover reminds me of that of Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard Album, taken by his brother Mike, all about those private moments before the world exploded.
Last Train to Memphis is very thorough, very fair. The author explains how he met someone who recalls seeing Elvis as a teen hanging round a drugstore where his cousin would work, just a lad before he got famous. And this formed the basis of the book: to find out who Elvis was and what he did on his road to fame. It's all about the small moments.
This may be just as well because the King wasn't known for witty comments or philosophical observations, unlike later pop stars. It's a moot point just how much we learn about, say, John Lennon from his own comments, or whether we learn more what he thinks of himself, and ditto with everyone. If I write two lengthy book reviews on the AJB website, is this because I'm a brilliant reviewer or because I like to think I am? But then again, Elvis is depicted as a phenomenon - like the Big Bang - all you can do is react to it, it has no consciousness of its own, that came later with bands like the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Stones etc. Elvis isn't that interesting on an immediate level in terms of what he says, but after a while you get more of a feeling about what he's about, certainly the contrast between his showbiz swagger and his humble, well-mannered and almost deferential private persona is interesting.
Like I say, the book is thorough so virtually every road trip or date Elvis went on goes in, it's not great for the casual fan, any more than Some Kind of a Hero would work for the causal Bond fan, it's kind of too much information, not that I'd change it. It's also very fair, unlike Philip Norman's Shout! a biography of the Beatles (Norman has subsequently admitted he was too snitty about McCartney). The footnotes in Last Train testify to that. also they are enjoyable in their own right. He will painstakingly explain how accounts differ on what happened in the studio on one occasion, and tries to explain how he can't be sure, but went with the most likely. Another book that is good at this is the bio of Who drummer Keith Moon, where in later editions there is a very detailed account of a fatality that occurred when Moon's Rolls Royce was being driven along the road of his mansion house, it goes into it in a conspiracy thriller kind of way; it is compulsive reading, real sleuthing.
That said, it would be unfair to call this 'dry' but the idea here is that the Elvis we read about is the guy who is down to earth, kind to his family, enjoys bumming around, listening to new LPs, fooling around with girls (the book is never explicit about this), going to the pictures etc and this kind of tone pervades the book, so even when he is selling millions of records, it is recounted as if he's taken a trip to the mall. It is devotedly unsensationalist to the point where you might yearn for the prose of Norman, or even the outlandishness of Albert Goldman's bio of the King. Unlike in Shout! I simply didn't quite feel that the world is exploding, the tone doesn't alter much even when he is selling huge numbers of singles. That is a stylistic choice by the author, however, and none other than Boby Dylan is quoted on the dust jacket saying the book is 'Unrivalled... Elvis steps from these pages, you can feel him breathe, this book cancels out all others'.
I did not read this from cover to cover but dipped into it. Parts of it resonated from the Elvis movie shown over Christmas, which @chrisno1 reviewed - I did see this but as ever was far gone with booze by that time so can't quite comment. Stuff like Elvis wearing eye shadow on his first gig it turns out were true, though not as outlandish as in the film, nor did the audience scream so hard on his debut, they more got going on his second, repeat showing that day. What annoyed me in that film was Tom Hanks' narration as Col Tom Parker - he sounded like JW Pepper's idiot brother - but yep, his 'Elma Fudd' voice is referenced here. Parker gets off lightly a bit, or maybe Guralnick just doesn't have that kind of spoon-feeding prose to make sure you get the point, sure he's a huckster but he is the guy helping to make Elvis, who, one senses, is a bit fly or opaque enough to go along with the Colonel's dealings with others, so Elvis doesn't need to do that himself. The author doesn't insert his own take on things too much but lets the many others involved in Presley's rise to tell the story, almost and in that sense it is a bit like the Bond book, Some Kind of Hero.
The book came out in 1994 however - before Pierce Brosnan was cast as Bond, to put in in 007 years. That is a shock to learn, and it is a shock to read that Colonel Tom is name checked as still being alive and in a position to contradict one account. (As Colonel Tom is the older man, the older generation, it brings it home just how young Elvis was when he died; when this book come out Elvis would have only been in his late 50s, I think, had he lived.) That said, you don't get the impression Colonel Tom is one person Guralnick engaged with at length in researching this. So that dates the book; it is off its time, when books were meant to be immersive, and when one of the lead players is still around to sue.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
BILLY SUMMERS (2021) by Stephen King
I’ve had this on my “to read” list for a long time - five years in fact, and I wish I hadn’t taken so long to read it. King has written crime before, but never as good as this. Billy Summers is a professional assassin and he’s after one last job, and as we all know, that one last job is not going to be as simple as it seems. King has a special knack in creating believable characters and portraying small town America. There is one small concession to The Shining which I didn’t think was necessary, and Summers writing his life story dragged a little at times but overall this was a satisfying read. Not just content with being the master of horror, King is showing so-called masterful crime writers the way to actually construct a novel.
This is more of a "Next Book Read" post but for the Stephen King fans out there (and you know who you are), the final installment of The Talisman series will be released on October 6. The title is "Other Worlds Than These"a title that is sure to excite anyone familiar with King's works. More info and an excerpt here:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a70269081/stephen-king-peter-straub-the-talisman-other-worlds-than-these-excerpt-2026/
Good news, I'll be buying that one.
I've been neglecting my reading because I've been so hung up on my uni work, my next novel, an anthology I am editing and my own personal challenge of "Write One Poem A Week". That's not good because one way to continually develop as awriter is to read other writer's work. So, in passing at the Beeches rail station I spied on the book-swap shelves a copy of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, one of his lesser works, but one I remember from my days at W.H. Smith. I thought £1 was a decent charitable donation. I read it in two sittings.
BLACK DOGS – Ian McEwan (1992)
It is hard to believe Black Dogs is almost 25 years old.
Ian McEwan’s wonderfully evocative novella of misunderstanding still exudes all the confidence it did in 1992. McEwan’s prose directs us skilfully through a week with his protagonist, Jeremy, an orphan man who spends more time with his wife’s parents than she does, ostensibly to write their biography. As the action moves from a nursing home to the Berlin of 1990 and the Wall crashing down, and finally onto the Massif Centrale of France, it transpires the exercise for Jeremy is less of understanding the personalities of Bernard and June Tremaine, but the ideologies that have informed them, from politics to religion to human morals. The dream image of black dogs inhabits the tale from the beginning, wandering like heathen monsters across the minds of the three central characters with a hounding metronomic pulse. The revelation of the mysterious dogs is both shocking and unlikely, yet it conjures a deeper sense of spiritual unrest, that despite the decline of dictatorial evils across Europe, there still remains somewhere a ghostly manifest of evil – here the dogs, there a abusive father, somewhere else a gang of skinheads, or perhaps even a thoughtless husband and a non-communicative wife, “crossing the shadow line and going deeper where the sun never reaches… The evil [that] lives in us all… a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred.” There is of course a contemporary take on the novel, its themes relevant across eras and cultures and classes.
Brilliantly composed with a sureness of word and phrase and never slackening in pace or control, McEwan winds for us a revelation that we expect to be minor, an infringement of personal liberties perhaps, yet in fact he presents something truly macabre and, in a way, fearsome. The notes in the book are at pains to point out the related histories are entirely fictional with no basis on any wartime recollections, which may be a relief, yet doesn’t quell the underlying feeling of disgust towards the human stain that inhabits us all. A fantastic novel of much philosophy and glimmers of optimism among its dark unfolding narratives .
T2 Trilogy
The 'T2 Trilogy' by S. M. Stirling comprises of three books:
T2: Infiltrator (2001)
T2: Rising Storm (2003)
T2: The Future War (2004)
This trilogy takes the original James Cameron / William Wisher story arc and incorporates into it, a parallel storyline which inter-meshes the films and novels into a very satisfying mix.
In T2: Infiltrator, John and Sarah Connor escape to Paraguay after the events of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, where they are hunted by a new cybernetic organism called the I-950 infiltrator. This intelligence gathering machine possess super human strength, hyper-agility and self-healing capabilities in addition to neural interlinks with Cyberdyne's A.I. system 'Skynet', which gives it up-to-date tactical information and wireless connectivity with other terminators and infiltrators in the region.
T2: Rising Storm outlines the early development of John Connor's resistance network against the machines and the attack on Cyberdyne's back-up facility in Montana. The last novel Final War depicts the global destruction caused by Skynet's 'Judgement Day'; a catastrophic nuclear counter-strike provoked by the artificial intelligence system, which leads to the death of 3 billion humans. We also get to read about Kyle Reese; how he was rescued by John Connor from a Skynet work camp and later sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor from a Cyberdyne model T-800.
FBI agent Jordan Dyson, brother of Cyberdyne's microchip engineer Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson, also makes an appearance in the first novel, where he seeks to bring Sarah Connor to justice for the death of his brother.
All in all, this is an excellent series of novels, which fans of the Terminator franchise will greatly appreciate.
The novels are available to read on the Internet Archive and can be borrowed with your Internet Archive account.
(Links below)
I've been dipping into one on my bookshelf - The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and The Demise of English Rock by John Harris. Actually, that sub-head isn't quite accurate; there isn't much about Blair in it well, okay a couple of chapters - and I suppose we had Travis (Scottish) and the Manics (Welsh) to suggest that English rock did indeed fall away once Oasis did but...
It's about Britpop. Starts off with Suade, then Blur, then Oasis, Elastica - Pulp get slightly sidelined, because nobody from the band seems available, though there are a good few quotes from Jarvis Cocker taken from other sources. A book like this is as good as its contributors and luckily the author has his ear bent by the garrulous, good-value Alex James, bassist with Blur, and Elastica's Justine Freischmann, who along with bandmate Donna Matthews, is good value,
The author's prose is terrific, it's the kind of book you can just pick up and delve into. Of Oasis' hanger-on Robbie Williams, whose lack of gigs meant he was swiftly putting on weight, he writes: 'it was his unlucky fate to be picked up like a petrol-station novelty, bent out of all recognisable shape, and then chucked from the tourbus'.
One observation however is that these books often have a finger-wagging Aunt Mimi tone to them, the sense that it will all end in tears, just you see. We got that with Philip Norman's book about the Beatles, Shout!, and Tim Stanley's excellent history of pop, the sense that, yes, a band may hit the heights, but what about after, eh? Rarely do they convey the sheer joy and abandon of the time, it would be contrary to the reflective tone of the piece.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick
In a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is tasked with hunting down six androids who have come to Earth illegally. Hoping to use the bounty money to buy a real living animal as a status symbol, Deckard finds himself questioning his profession and humanity as the line between android and human becomes increasingly blurred.
The core of the book deals with Deckard's struggle with his line of work. With each android (or Andy as they're called in the book) Deckard finds it harder and harder to do his job as he begins to develop empathy for his would be victims. The Andy's are the newest Nexus 6 models and they are capable mimicking complex emotions, making them harder to detect. They are also very clever, at one point almost convincing Deckard that he is a replicant himself.
The novel famously served as the template for the movie Blade Runner and I was surprised at just how much of the book actually made it into the movie. Many of the characters ring true to the text and some scenes such as the Voight Kampf empathy test were almost word for word to the book.
The book also has a lot of elements that never made it into the movie such as Deckard's wife, a religious movement and just a lot more details about the day to day life of the characters.
The book was a fun and quick read with a brisk pace and some interesting observations on humanity, emotions and religion. Definitely worth checking out, especially for fans of Blade Runner.
I listen to Stuart Maconie with Mark Radcliffe on the Radio6 Music weekend breakfast show…I also saw Stuart with Mark Lewisohn on the Beatles Evolver63 tour…Stuart is a great writer and has a brilliant, easy to read style…this book is obviously about the people around the Beatles that helped them in some way or other…whilst there is nothing revelatory, I did learn a couple of things I hadn’t known before.
A couple of Bond-inspired comic novels you might be interested in:
Starter Villain by John Scalzi.
This is about a former financial journalist who now works as a supply teacher and is divorced, living in his late parents' house that his older siblings now want to sell. The age thing is a bit off unless you lost both your parents in your late thirties. Anyway, when his estranged wealthy uncle dies one of his representatives suggests he should attend the funeral. It builds from there; he finds out his uncle was something of Bond villain with an HQ on an island, you also get talking cats and obstreperous dolphins. It gets a bit Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which is no bad thing, it's kind of cute especially if you're fond of cats. Not life-changing or that memorable but it has that wise-guy, liberal, East Coast kind of humour.
Dr No by Percival Everett
You may know this black writer from the film American Fiction which starred our own Jeffrey Wright, or from James which was an alternative take on Huckleberry Finn written from the pov of the slave, Jim. I thought this book would be the story of Dr No written from Julius' perspective but I guess the Ian Fleming Foundation would have something to say about that. This is about a lecturer who, as with the previous book I review above, is thrown into a supervillain's orbit and is soon out of his depth. If I recall he teaches philosophy and is recruited as an expert in 'nothing' - the book makes a play of the double meaning of 'nothing' which may amuse some but not others. After a deposit of several million dollars in his account, the FBI start to pay attention and tail him; the plot involves jetting around various countries while the black villain's trajectory takes us to Fort Knox. the narrator owns a one-legged dog who talks to him in his dreams. It's enjoyable, less than 300 pages long so worth ordering in to your local library. Though comedic it does somehow actually build some tension and a sinister atmosphere as it approaches the finale and feels more coherent and intelligent than some recent Bond continuation novels..
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I can recommend Anti-Social: The Secret Diary of an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer by Nick Pettigrew, which I got out my library.
Both Kathy Burke and Frankie Boyle give praise on the dust jacket, and it turns out that Pettigrew has an occasional gig as a stand-up comedian, and it's the jokes that get you through this. It's done as a kind of diary entry over the course of a year as the author gives his account of having to deal with troublesome tenants in council housing, some of whom are a nightmare for their neighbours, many addicted to substance abuse and impervious to reason. He's not shy about revealing how the job gets on top of him - I have to say some of it reminds me of my time as a sub-editor which shouldn't have been depressing, but there's a sense that you are doing something useful but you wonder if that's not simply vanity and you get no thanks for it, anyway. Plus, people only notice when you get something wrong. The author charts his anti-depressant dosage at the beginning of each chapter/month. There's not much in the way of lovely prose here, it's not that kind of book but there's a joke on every page.
I think @Barbel would enjoy reading this.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I listened to the audiobook novelization of Batman 89 on a long car trip. Narrated by Batman 66 and TAS villain alumni Roddy McDowall. It has the same plot points of the movie, just some scenes expanded, shortened or cut out entirely. Still highly recommended for reading or listening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9517Miwosco&t=175s
I also actually read a psychical copy of Wayne of Gotham. It was ok, a mystery that was hard to follow. Some extended cameos by classic Batman villains, but I wish that they had more of a bigger part in the final story. A modest recommendation, if you want a more mysterious Batman, you might like this book.
Two books of memoirs encompassing the 1960s-70s - The Father I Had by Martin Townsend, and Homework by Geoff Dyer.
Martin Townsend was the editor of the Express and also Hello magazine; he died last year and in his obit it mentioned this book, which covered his father's mental health problems which plagued his upbringing. My own father sometimes seemed to have a screw loose so I thought some of this might resonate. That all said, my father held down a very decent job as an optician on the south coast and never ever went into an asylum or got sectioned, really I suppose you could say he had some 'funny ways'.
Some of this well-written book is really an excuse for the author to take a trip down memory lane while pointing out some of the odd things a parent might do, that said Townsend does a fine job of summing up the ways, the tell-tale signs, that things were about to go wrong and that his father would get 'high' - not on drugs, but about to do his own thing. Like a hypochondriac ticking off certain symptoms, I did notice some similarities but to list them is to invite derision because taken alone they don't add up to much. Always striking out far afield, often on his bike, an admittedly impressive ability to build amazing things of ingenuity - my own Dad scaled the oak tree to install a garden swing, Townsend's built a garden pond and rockery, a love of Frank Sinatra, a need or really more a compulsion to strike up conversation with strangers and above all that sense that socially he might spoil the party or be life and soul of it, the tension lay in never knowing which it would be. Townsend does a very good job of highlighting the stress this kind of behaviour has on the wife and how it sets the emotional temperature of the household.
What is superb incidentally is how he manages to recreate family conversations at lengthy some decades on; to what extend it is made up I don't know but it is utterly authentic and makes the difference in a memoir.
It also recreates the feel of the UK in the late 60s early 70s - admittedly it evokes these social media accounts which show idyllic photos of UK in years gone by, possibly accounts created by Russian bots to demoralise the English, or Reform voters; by evening the tones changes and they become more obviously racist, with loaded comments such as 'Do you notice anything about this picture?' And I suppose the Express under Townsend's editorship might have been a more respectable paper back then rather than the hardline Tory tabloid it is now, I'm not sure. Anyway, this notwithstanding, all of this nostalgic writing is a joy to read.
As a teenager, Townsend is taken in by a local church - in many a memoir this would be the cue for something awful to happen but it doesn't thankfully and it is in tune with the book. I have to say that as if in payback for having had teenage years of stress, he life appears to have been one of blessed good luck the moment he left school.
The book aims to highlight the poor state of care for people with mental health problems, nowadays it is more care in the community but I'm not entirely sure what he thinks the solution is. Again, I can snipe and say I'm not sure any Tory Government would stump up the cash for it.
In the final pages, Townsend drops the insight into what it was that may have made his father have a breakdown - a tragic event that occurred in Germany when he was in the Army. Many call for a return to the call up but I do think the idea of having blokes all together in a masculine environment away from home can leave them skewed and mentally unable to withstand trauma. But the book often seems to touch on the suggestion that a good many middle-aged blokes back then could be a bit nuts; even his next-door neighbour at the time seems on the spectrum and you arguably see it on things like The Goon Show and even Morecambe and Wise; it was the relentless masculinity, the relentless jokes.
His final meet up with his father saw him take him - on the off chance - to the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium in the 1990s, though very much of the same generation as my father albeit a few years younger, I can't imagine taking my dad to see the Stones, though in his final fortnight (as it turned out), I jollied him along with the thought of a new Stones LP coming out, asking if he knew of them. 'Of course I know the Rolling Stones!' he replied. That said, my Dad being born in '28 and opposed to '33 was all the difference needed. Lapsed Stones fan @chrisno1 might appreciate Townsend's melancholy summing up of past countryside outings with a description of that gig: 'And all of those trips - taken in hope, taken in despair, mostly in the spirit of adventure - all of them to end on a strange, hard echoey afternoon in a vast, soulless stadium. Gone itself, now.'
The book messes up the dates for the final two chapters so his dad's death when it comes is a bit incongruous because as you start to read it, you think, okay, so this is before the Wembley gig then...
What is also amazing - to me - is that his dad was born in 33 and died in 96 or thereabouts; my mother was born in 33 and died with Parkinson's in 2017, I mean that is a huge difference, we as a family were lucky in that respect. That said, Townsend also died in his 60s like his old man, though untroubled thankfully by mental health problems. So no matter which way your life goes, you never can tell.
I encountered Mr Townsend briefly when I was working on, oh, I think it was Okay magazine actually, back in the day; he seemed a nice, unassuming bloke. That said, Rebekah Wade, as she was then known, seemed a low-key character too to me, so what did I know?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
On to Geoff Dyer's highly acclaimed Homework but I'm afraid I didn't read this cover to cover, I dipped into it. Now, our resident scribe @chrisno1 sometimes says he worries his pieces are overwordy or overblown - well, I don't think that, so long as he inserts some paragraph breaks, and nor does anyone else here; I get the impression someone he knew told him that once, and he took it to heart. Well, suffice to say that Dyer writes in the sort of way that our ajber sometimes worries he does - but doesn't, I hasten to add. It's a bit much, Dyer went to Oxford Uni, well good for him, I applied twice and didn't get in but reading his books does make me realise I'm not Oxford material - fair enough but not quite the feeling I want to enjoy when reading. I mean, I'm watching Simon Schama's superb History of Britain re-run on BBC4 and I'm not made to feel like any of it is out of my reach.
Dyer wrote that short book about Where Eagles Dare a few years ago, you may remember it; probably a good stocking filler but some Amazon reviews of that suggest he does take the highbrow approach a bit too much.
That's not to say there aren't some good, witty lines here: 'These [day] trips... had the quality of adventure even if my dad had the knack, not of ruining but always slightly letting the fun out of things, like a very slow, hard-to-identify puncture.' He is also good on his dad's compulsive meanness with money, which seems to have been a generational trait.
But he doesn't have Townsend's way with rattling off conversations at length and seemingly from memory. He doesn't seem able to edit himself. At the end he bangs on about finding some Thunderball trading cards in the family loft and goes on about a couple of numbers that were missing, he devotes a lengthy paragraph to this, honestly I'm a Bond fan and I found it boring. Earlier in the book he tells how he never saw another Bond film after You Only Live Twice and thinks they're all rubbish anyway, well cheers chum!
And I'm not sure if ChrisNo1's occasional nostalgic forays or mentions of past girlfriends during his film reviews would be enhanced if, like Mr Dyer, he included the occasional adolescent blow job received - but if he were to write it up in the same joyless, perfunctory style as we find here, then I doubt it. I did honestly wonder at times if Geoff Dyer isn't a touch of the autistic spectrum; he relates a lot of this in a kind of trainspotting detail that is formidable but generally lacking the requisite joy, love, wonder or wistfulness that makes a memoir really sing.
But the book has a wonderful cover, somehow evoking the 1970s, and has plenty of plaudits, so what do I know.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks for the tip, NP, I might do just that.
Following up from my post oin the book covers thread, I thought I ought to at least read one of the Hammond Innes books I scuppered away:
THE STRANGE LAND – Hammond Innes (1954)
Hammond Innes was the author of The Wreck of the Mary Deare, which after twenty years of solid sales, launched him on the way to superstardom. The Strange Land precedes it by a couple of years and is a solid entry into his canon, although like his contemporaries Victor Canning and Desmond Bagley, there is a greater emphasis on intrigue and story building, essentially involving the major character and little else. Thrills come, but they seem leaden in the breadth of description and don’t make one’s pulse race. I enjoyed the settings. The landscapes of French-occupied Morocco, the Atlas Mountains and the wastelands of the Western Sahara are excellently realised. So too the souks, streets and musty hotels of Casablanca and Tangiers. The story kicks off in a dingy bar near Tangiers’s harbour and evolves quickly into a seashore rescue, a case of mistaken identity, a Czech scientist fleeing the Soviets and a dodgy claim on an old Berber fort located in the desert hills. While the mystery kept me turning the pages, I wasn’t exactly rivetted. I read The Strange Land in two extended sittings. I was pleased the climax at least had some brio to it, although every incident seems stretched beyond belief. A little more editing might have made the book more impulsive. Innes is a decent writer, but this book isn’t doing much for me. The new thriller writers of the age, like MacLean, Gavin Lyall and our own Ian Fleming chose to do so much more with their characters, creating visceral (un)realities that grip and fascinate. There is enough here to keep me reading, but The Strange Land isn’t a rip-roaring success. If I am being kind, it shows its age.
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande was recommended in the Times Review a few weeks ago, so I ordered it in to my library.
It talks about the better ways to care for the elderly, in particular end-of-life care and how to approach it.
The dust jacket has praise from Malcolm Gladwell and the book perhaps has some similarity in that it's easy to read, and I like it, but when you go on to summarise its key points, they do seem a bit simple and obvious.
Early chapters explain how mortality has changed - in previous centuries people would get ill and just die. They would just fall off a cliff, fall off the graph, say in their 50s or so on. Thanks to better nutrition, lack of wars and hospitals, now they/we have a tendency to just go on, so the downward curve is gradual. Even with a significant illness, it is relatively rare that anyone falls off a cliff, it is managed decline. This was my own parents' experience; my mother with Parkinson's - she got it aged 69, she died aged 84, my father with all manner of things but ultimately I guess dementia, along the way he had a hip replacement, heart murmur and pacemaker installed, cataracts, wrote off the car, was dogged by the occasional urinary tract infection or low sodium levels which can drive a person temporarily mad - the former is swiftly cured by antibiotics, the second by a couple of days on a drip in hospital, he also had some kind of epilepsy which led to a mad kind of fainting or zoning out that we mistook for a stroke, with dreaded sedatives prescribed which was a harbinger of the end, also the dreaded fall which is often enough a precursor of death, it might be a few years off or it might be mere days; I keep intending to do a post about this on the Obituaries thread. That all said, Dad could be conversational in the last year of his life in a way my mother certainly wasn't, his batteries just ran down, rather like a garden hose that springs new leaks after you patch other holes up.
The next few chapters offer examples of how care homes should be improved, with all manner of stimuli for the residents. Two things here: the book is American, so I'm not sure how it translates to over here, also it was written ten years ago anyway, when the world seemed a nicer place and before austerity kicked in. And it doesn't have much to say about folk like my parents who could hang on but became less conversational and unable to give an opinion on things beyond the very basics (but could enjoy meals and music etc). It is odd and misleading to say that in the last few years of my mother's life we never really had a conversation, but we had a strong rapport and she could respond or engage with things. I'm not sure Gawande has anything to say about this category, all the case studies cited concern elderly who have physical ailments that are generally terminal but who are sharp enough mentally to outline how they want to see out their inevitable end.
This is a depressing book not because it is miserable but because it forces the reader to face up to things about themselves or their still alive parents that they would rather not; you have a choice whether to wing it in life and put off such thoughts - which is an enjoyable strategy, don't get me wrong - or face up to what lies ahead and be better able psychologically to later meet it head on.
The final chapters are good about what it is to have a good end, that when we look back on events we judge according to their very worst moment and then its final moments - that these define how you feel about it as a whole, citing the not-quite-right example of a football match which fans enjoy minute by minute - all overridden should a goal be conceded in the final minutes, affecting one's view of the afternoon. That doesn't quite work as an analogy, it's a bit Malcolm Gladwell. After all, fans bemoan a last-minute goal if it means they lose points or the entire match, it's a practical thing, it's not simply because the ending itself is disappointing. A better example might be a movie where the finale depends on whether we call it a happy or sad film; that said critic Pauline Kael scorned Dr Zhivago for its final scene 'Then it's a gift!' where a rainbow is bestowed on events, as if that in itself compensated for the millions of Russians sent to the gulag.
Gawande explains why a hospice can assist the terminally ill and have them live a bit longer than the alternatives, as if by facing up to your situation you can better ride it out, a bit like facing facts and engaging with a Govt-approved debt advice agency rather than just hoping a decent job comes up. He also cites 'geriatrics' as a good thing, making it sound like a neat way of getting a classic car all the TLC it needs to stay on the road, ironing out repairs along the way. But with my mother with advanced Parkinson's, I got the impression she'd have but weeks if she went into a hospice, it wouldn't be a long stay. It's similar to so-called palliative care; in seven care homes in the same number of years I never heard of anyone being on long-term palliative care, it was a contradiction in terms. You were down to just days, it meant 'we are giving up on their treatment' from what I could see. When I heard someone suggest palliative care, I only heard 'Can we kill your mother now?' and nothing I saw over the years or in conversation contradicted that view.
And nobody wants to engage with something called 'geriatrics' - a shame, because a lot of what he advises is about future-proofing your situation, heading off future peril. Winging it is okay, and facing up to a grim future can feel like you are inviting the flood waters to come in, it depends how you see it. It can feel like tempting fate.
In any case, at the time of writing, 'geriatric' wards are being shut down in the US and this mirrored austerity in the UK at that time. From then on I got the impression that those in my mother's condition were being euthanised by the State - as far as I'm aware, even though the notorious Liverpool Care Pathway was made illegal in 2014, it carried on just under another name or euphanism. Passive euthanasia is legal in the UK anyway so if you find your parent in a care home dehydrated, well, that will be no accident most likely, that's how they do it, and families who raise concerns may find themselves on the receiving end of smears and abuse by the care home, as advised by the local Council's social services, lurking in the shadows, as we found out. (The press is very shy about exposing this, there seems to be a superinjunction in place, but if you read of allegations of dehydration in a care home news story, that is what they are hinting at, that's as far as they can go with it.) In hospitals, opiates can be used to finish folk off - this is illegal but as with so many other things, if they get away with it, is it really?
Set against this backdrop, it is a fanciful book to outline the ways care homes might be made more user-friendly - there are some tall tales in here; each care home resident given a bird in a cage to look after - given that many care homes are frankly tasked with bumping them off on the quiet - and if they jump the gun with some residents, well, they won't get into trouble because dead bodies save the State money in terms of prescriptions, pensions and death duties. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them get kickbacks for placing residents on end-of-life care; it may be the reason more than one care home were mad with fury at our attempts to check Mum out and take her somewhere else, two of them attempting to nix the attempt by calling in social services against us, and almost succeeding. The idea is, look, you can make money out of these people to the tune of £2k a week and once it becomes too troublesome, you have permission to bump them off. We'll look elsewhere.
That all said, I recommend the book's opening and closing chapters.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
More Than Likely - the memoirs of TV and movie legends Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.
As I mentioned on the Weekly Bond Movie thread, where I talk about their account of helping out the script of Never Say Never Again, the title is a reference to their 1960s sitcom The Likely Lads and the even better belated follow-up in the early 1970s, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, often reshown on telly these days; they also did the sitcom Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
But I didn't know that they did a whole load of other stuff too: The Commitments, Billy - the John Barry-penned musical based on Billy Liar, starring Michael Crawford, for instance. By the stroke of serendipity that affects memoirs, Billy was namechecked in the recent book I reviewed upthread, The Father I Had - even the very same performance, opening night, which had a bomb threat. I understood that Barry's Billy had been a bomb, I don't know where I got that idea from, maybe a revival, but Clement and La Frenais are very pleased about its success so maybe I will dig out the LP soundtrack I bought many years ago and never got round to playing.
The prose isn't very good, it doesn't evoke any sense of atmosphere and the anecdotes seem formed on the cruise ship lecture tour or Director's Commentary of a DVD. The story alternates between chapters allocated to either Dick or Ian. The pair don't mind talking about projects that never came to fruition, be it with Richard Burton or Peter Sellers (though other projects they did for them did materialise). I've dipped into it - one surprise is that Likely Lads' James Bollam already notably disliked his co-star even before filming began on Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, but put it to one side once he'd heard the pitch over dinner.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/newsbrief/index.html?record=5862
Possible reading for me.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/indiana-jones-marvel-reprint/
Another set of stories for me to read. I hope Crystal Skull is there as well.
I can recommend The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giulioano da Empoli, which I picked up at my local library based on its cover.
It's a novel about a Russian journalist who wonders what happened to Putin's long-term PR man Vadim Baranov; he seems to have fallen off the radar or gone to ground after giving up his job.
Following some cryptic social media messages put out there, he receives an invite to Baranov's place out in the forest where he is taken at night in a limo. There he gets the chance to hear Baranov's story, and it reads similar to the story over dinner a Bond villain relates to our hero, or maybe that of Kerim Bey in the novel From Russia With Love.
Gradually you come to realise that the whole book is in fact about the rise of Putin and an insight into modern Russia as told from his insider perspective - it is not a novel in which it then reverts to a plot involving the journalist; Baranov takes over as narrator.
This is enjoyable but I found I could put it down for a fortnight and resume reading later. It's all about what makes Putin tick and the building blocks to fascism. It ends before the Ukraine War really gets going. I think @Number24 would enjoy this. I was surprised to find it was made into a film with Jude Law as Putin, it got mixed reviews.
The book has some lovely observations about life but I don't feel moved to go through it to find them again.
Roger Moore 1927-2017