A passing thought

This one was meant to go up on New Year’s Day, however …

It’s too early after a heavy night for a pondered, even ponderous, piece.

Even so, as Malcolm stirred in the late morning light, his eye passed over the guilt pile of books read and — hence the guilt — part-read or even unread.

For a start, he has to admit that December has been poor month for reading. It wasn’t so much one of those chronic reading blocks, but there was so much else happening — two major expeditions occupying three weeks of the month. Even so, there’s shame that Ian Rankin’s latest was carted to New Jersey and back, and barely opened, so is still squatting on recent life and conscience like Larkin’s Toad.

Too heavy, already

No: that’s becoming far more intense than New Year’s Day deserves. And the household rubbish needs to be decanted for the imminent arrival of the dust-cart on Wednesday morning.

Instead, prompted by that glance at the bedside books, overhung Malcolm settles for a reflection on recent gains and losses.

On the down-side he would list two disappointments:

• Lindsey Davis’s Master and God.

Now Davis’s Falco series has been a long-term delight: light, bright and witty. Somehow when she turns elsewhere the magic fades. Yes, this fictionalising — and humanising — of the appalling Domitian is well-researched and well-plotted, even well-written. It somehow seems soul-less, even predictable: a trite love-story wrapped around with shenanigans and machinations.

The book reads well, but — for Malcolm — lacks any lingering of warmed satisfaction. Malcolm found himself wondering on that: why? what does one expect from a piece of disposable reading? in there is the difference between ‘writing’ and ‘literature’?

Perhaps it is that reaching the end of a book is, in itself, an achievement — both for the author and for the reader. When the ending is so predictable — one is well ahead of Gaius Vinius Clodianus, the central character with his anachronistic PTSD (Davis’s own usage), long before the denouement — that terminal satisfaction is denied. Something is missing, and so some satisfaction is lacking.

• Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise.

Here’s another one, to which much of that previous comment might equally apply.

The score-plus-one of the Brunetti sequence has to stand as one of the major monuments of crime-fiction. Joyce claimed that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses. Leon might similarly boast that the visitor’s Venice has continuing existence through those novels: Brunetti’s amblings and meanderings across and around  his native city catch the light, the glamour and the squalor, the glories and the underlying filth of La Serenissima. Ahem! Have you ever observed a diver emerge from the cess-pits beneath those well-photographed buildings?

In The Jewels of Paradise Leon attempts to construct a different protagonist in the same environment. When Maureen Corrigan was reviewing the book she hit the buttons:

It may take a few chapters beforeDonna Leon’s avid readers get over their disappointment in her latest mystery. All looks molto bene at first: Venetian setting? Check. Insider descriptions of Italian food and architecture? Check. Corrupt officials and brutal criminal bottom-feeders? Check, check.

Throughout 21 novels, Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti has investigated . . . Holy Cannoli, there’s no Commissario Brunetti in this story! A Donna Leon mystery without Brunetti, at first, feels empty, as though a mischievous god had pulled the plug on the canals.

“The Jewels of Paradise” is Leon’s first stand-alone mystery, and, while it is undeniably strange to be wandering through Venice without the protection of Brunetti’s solid presence …

Unfortunately Corrigan then allowed herself to be taken in by:

the young heroine of this novel … so winning that readers should find themselves forgiving the commissario his absence. Native Venetian Caterina Pellegrini holds a recently minted PhD in music, with a specialization in baroque opera.

Yes, but Ms Pellegrini is so thin, and the plot so trivial, the thing doesn’t quite hang together. The novel ends in a typical Leon wrap-it-up-and go away fashion. Yet, unlike the Brunettis, it seems rushed, anticlimactic … and unsatisfying. Unlike the Brunettis, Leon has allowed her deep knowledge of Italian opera to take over and stifle the plot for the less committed and less musicological. And the later Brunettis all come laden with a convincing social conscience: something missing here.

Perhaps, if Dr Leon allowed Ms Pellegrini another outing or two, we might come to love her more. At the end of The Jewels of Paradise she has been despatched to sub-arctic Russia, and — presumably — fictional oblivion.

On the other hand …

Malcolm would wish, at greater length, to celebrate two discoveries — well, to be more accurate, one discovery and a rediscovery.

The rediscovery is William Boyd.

It has been a long while, some half of Malcolm’s adult reading life, since A Good Man in Africa. Malcolm’s edition — alas! — is not that first edition (as right). To be honest, there are a couple of previous offences to be taken into consideration:

• that Malcolm assumed Boyd was touching, if not taking on the mantle of Evelyn Waugh;

and

• that Malcolm found Ordinary Thunderstorms a trifle tough on the tooth.

And then came the prior publicity for the BBC TV production of an (abbreviated) Restless. Fair enough: half-a-dozen years from publication to adaptation is a decent interval; but it does require a re-reading from days-gone-by. And, in the cold light of a reappraisal it is a very, very good book:  a convoluted plot and an easy-reading (but not sanitised) writing.

And so to Waiting for Sunrise. OK, Mr Boyd: you did for WW2 in one book: now it’s time for WW1, and what a delight! And what an enigmatic ending! Here’s another which would provide a decent production company, with access to early twentieth-century wardrobes, another two-parter. Just wait and watch.

Above, Malcolm suggested one of the satisfactions of a novel is simply reaching the designed end. So read Waiting for Sunrise and define your own end and ending. It’s remarkably tormenting and satisfying.

On which ambiguous note, let us pass on from the guilt pile … (of which, we will doubtless hear more).

And the discovery is …

Christopher Fowler’s delicious, delightful, sparky and seductive Bryant and Webb series. Take it from the horse’s mouth: it takes something for Malcolm to scour the bookshops of North London to complete the sequence. But he did … and felt better for it.

And the pick of a very plump litter, by the narrowest of margins, is Full Dark House.

Say no more: Fowler’s website does it for one and all.

Disclaimer:

This post has done great damage to many worthy and worthwhile reads Malcolm has enjoyed in 2012. And has overlooked here.

Update on the guilt pile

No: it isn’t significantly reduced.

Things went into something of a deep groove as Malcolm ploughed through:

• Ian Kershaw on The End: Germany, 1944-45 

and

• Giles MacDonogh in  painstaking and excruciating detail over what happened After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift.

Together these are 1200+ pages, exhausting, exhaustive accounts of half-a-decade of human tragedy, human misery, human malevolence, and a modicum of human and humane muddling-through. They are damned hard work: Malcolm will testify to that — but they are essential to the period, and major works of historiography. Kershaw has never been Malcolm’s favourite history writer— not because he fails in any way as a historian; more because his prose lacks a certain “lightness of touch”. MacDonogh is gruelling, because — if anything — the horrors of the aftermath should be anticlimactic — and his methodical analysis of how the Poles took revenge on German refugees (among many other horrors) is disgustingly enlightening.

For a month they kept Malcolm off the hard stuff.

As a result he made several resorts to lighter stuff. Allow him to celebrate a few:

• Christopher Fowler: Bryant & May and the Invisible Code

The delight of the late summer has been discovering the Bryant and May sequence — so delightful that Malcolm is buying them in hard back and pre-publication. There’s a graphic novel, The Casebook of Bryant & May No.1, due shortly (and already overdue). Somewhere down the tracks under Kings Cross Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart is promised to be heading our way. If there isn’t a specific sub-genre of London sepia-noir, Fowler is inventing it. Beyond that, Fowler has one of the better author-websites around.

Incidently, Fowler’s not-quite-unpolitical asides are gems in themselves.

• Lindsey Davis: Master and God

Malcolm has been with Ms Davis ever since he hit upon The Silver Pigs, the first of her Marcus Didius Falco series. That, he realises with a recognition of age, was over two decades ago. We reached number twenty with Nemesis.

Actually, Malcolm now recognises he backtracked to Lindsey Davis’s first Roman effort with The Course of Honour, a sentimental account of the relationship of the Emperor Vespasian and his long-standing mistress, the former slave, Antonia Caenis. He was less enamoured of this one.

More recently Davis has clearly been attempting to break with the Falco/Roman recitals — we had Rebels and Traitors a couple of years back, using the Civil War as a backdrop. Now she is back to Rome, post-Vespasian, with yet another tale of frustrated love and the conflicts of decency and corruption in the time of Domitian. In Master and God she manages a balanced picture of Domitian — balanced because she has two viewpoints, the Praetorian Guard and the hairdresser (at one point she uses a house-fly as the point-of-view). And, of course, there’s the frustrated and interrupted love-story. Like it or loath it, it kept Malcolm awake into the dawning hours.

Now we see that Davis is moving on from Falco to use Flavia Albia (Falco’s adopted daughter in the later part of the sequence) as the main character. That will be next spring in The Ides of March.

Just when Malcolm ought to have been buckling down to the recent Ian McEwan or the new C.J.Sansom (both sitting immaculate on the upper reaches of the Guilt Pile) he hit on something else —

• Lyndsay Faye: The Gods of Gotham

For two evenings he was hooked. If Fowler’s Bryant and May are “London sepia-noir“, then Faye’s Timothy Wilde is the foulest sulphur of New York, the summer of 1845, on the cusp of Tweed and Tammany, as the Irish famine refugees start to arrive to rebuild the whole class-structure.

Indeed, there are echoes of Tweed here. Timothy Wilde’s brother, Val, is a hook-and-ladder man with a fire crew — and thereby a stalwart of the Democratic Party (the volunteer fire-companies had allegiances to gangs, politicians and ethnic groups). That is a dead ringer for Tweed of the Big Six volunteer company and the Seventh Ward. It is set just a few months before the prelude to Gangs of New York, in the same location of the Five Points, and just as violent.

Although it is a straight ‘historical detective’ story (the Wilde brothers are invested as the first ever New York police ‘copper badges’) it is also a remarkable pastiche of the social history of the lower depths: bar, brawls, brothels, prejudice, drugs, casual deaths and murders. It is also one of the most intricately plotted novels Malcolm has met of late.

He happily hopes Ms Faye will persist with the character of Tim Wilde.

And more …

Somewhere in there Malcolm found time to revisit George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe (a second impression, all the way from 1975, still with dust-cover intact) and Peter Berresford Ellis’s attempt at a biography of MacBeth. Note ‘MacBeth’, not Macbeth. Quite how he got there is a bit of a mystery to himself: he thinks it was a speculation (in Liv Kjörsvik Schei & Gunnie Moberg’s 1985 and out-of-printThe Orkney Story) that Mormaer MacBeth and Jarl Thorfinn Sigurdsson were one and the same.

Now it’s back to Nazi London, 1952, and Sansom’s Dominion.

Still breathing. Unstill itching. Still reading.

Now comes a real quandary.

Last evening, late, Malcolm polished off Christopher Brookmyre’s latest, When the Devil Drives.

Malcolm’s considerable enthusiasm for Brookmyre stalled somewhat when the author farmed out Jack Parlabane. The last two books, this one and Where the Bodies are Buried are developing a new series — and, in Malcolm’s reading, are a return to the accessible, hardly-straight, but bolied-hard neo-noir of Parlabane.

Were there any doubt we are meant to see these two as linked, there is the glaring visual clue of the covers. Then we find the two female characters are carried over: the senior and cynical policewoman, Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod, and the aspirant found PI, Jasmine Sharp. Also along for the ride, riding shotgun for Jasmine, is Glen Fallan, the Glasgow hardman who had topped Jasmine’s father.

This outing has Jasmine engaged to discover what had happened to actress Tessa Garrion, missing these three decades.

All of Brookmyre’s conventional hobbyhorses are allowed a quick trot: the corrupt aristocracy, drugged, drunk and disorderly, the Lowland Scots arty-literati and self-anointing bankers, the sub-insular non-nationalism (a deft reference to “Englandshire”, for one example), the debunking of mysticism and godliness in all its many forms, the left-field social commentaries:

Catherine’s hackles were well-risen by the time she had made it from the front entrance of the Royal Scottish Bank’s ostentatiously plush Edinburgh headquarters to the reception desk on the far side of the lobby, across an expanse of marble floor larger than her garden. Clearly not everybody was quite so struck by the building’s interior splendour as management would like, as there was scaffolding up on two sides as part of a controversial multi-million-pound refit. Having been bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of eleven figures, i their chastened state it was heartening to see the banks embracing a new era of corporate austerity. We were, let’s not forget, all in this together.

 Looking at the opulence of her surroundings, she couldn’t help but think of the condition of most police stations she’d been in recently, and more to the point the state of Duncan and Fraser’s school. It was a flimsy eighties-built one-storey structure that looked like a temporary building-site headquarters, an effect enhanced by a proliferation of men in hard hats who had concluded that the place was literally falling down.

Mustn’t go down that road, though, she thought. That’s the ‘politics of envy’. If anybody in this country eve deserved a slap in the dish with a dead salmon, it was whichever smug and spoiled little prick came up with that one. Execs were trousering bonuses of several million pounds, even for the years in which their companies had recorded a huge loss, while freezing wages down the line where they weren’t simply laying people off. But if you pointed out the inequality of this, that phrase was their catch-all comeback.

That is tailed by a version of the banker, Daily Mail reader, social worker (in this iteration, asylum seeker) biscuit joke.

Monday morning, 2 a.m.

The itch woke Malcolm, as it does each couple of hours.

Apply the itch-cream; reach for another book. The one to hand was, as noted previously, S.J.Parris’s Sacrilege. Before sleep returned Malcolm was a couple of chapters in, and looking good.

Unfortunately …

The morning post brought a package from Amazon, and this is one Malcolm had been anticipating for some time.

Here, to hand, is the latest instalment of Jasper Fforde’s extraordinary imaginings. Short-hand is TN7: the seventh “Thursday Next” novel. In full that’s The Woman Who Died A Lot.

Now, which to read first?

As of this moment, it looks as if Tuesday is squeezing Bruno back to the guilt-pile.

Watch this space.

Scottish folk dancing 2

The conspiracy theorists’ Schottische

Malcolm is currently awaiting the delivery of his pre-ordered copy of The Impossible Dead.

It looks as if the inventive Mr Rankin is managing to spin a whole dinner-service of plates with this one.

At the most obvious level he is reviving a few characters from previous outings.

He is doing a now-and-then split-scene narrative.

He bodes to be trespassing on the territory staked out by Christopher Brookmyre‘s Jack Parlabane novels.

Stories from the olden days

All that is guesswork, based on “informed leaks”, such as the extensive one, penned by the man himself, in yesterday’s Sunday Times (and not in the Culture section, either). It begins with a statement of “old news”:

On the morning of April 6, 1985, two Australian tourists were driving along a desolate stretch of the A87 in northwest Scotland. They saw that a maroon-coloured Volvo had come off the road. There was a man in the driving seat, alive but in bad shape.

They flagged down another car, which happened to contain a doctor as well as a Scottish National party (SNP) councillor. The councillor recognised the man in the Volvo as Willie McRae, a fervent nationalist who had run for the SNP leadership in 1979. An ambulance was summoned and McRae was taken to hospital in Inverness, before being transferred to Aberdeen.

It was here that a nurse washed his head wound and noticed something startling: a bullet hole. At this stage, McRae was still alive, but had suffered massive brain damage. The following day, with his family’s consent, his life support was turned off.

His car, meantime, seems to have been removed from the scene of the crash, only to be resited by police once they knew about the shooting. A search was made, and a handgun eventually found some distance away. The gun, a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver, belonged to McRae. He had taken to carrying it with him. Why? Because he was afraid.

Rankin is keen to place that apparently-unsolved death in the paranoia of the mid-1980s. McRae had been, it seems, not just “respectable” SNP, but also out in the weird-and-wonderful fruitcake fringes of the “Scottish National Liberation Army”:

The SNLA had come into being as a result of the “failed” devolution referendum of 1979. By 1981 it was collecting anthrax samples from the mainland near the west coast island of Gruinard. Gruinard features on few maps. During the second world war, anthrax was seeded there as an experiment, the thinking being that it might prove useful if dropped over Germany. It was certainly useful to the SNLA.

There were arrests, however, and some SNLA members fled to Ireland. But the campaign continued. A letter bomb was sent to John Nott, then defence secretary. The Conservative and Labour HQs north of the border were damaged by fire, as was an Edinburgh army barracks. An attempted arson attack on the Glasgow MP Roy Jenkins was botched. Hoax threats disrupted government and commercial enterprises in Britain and America. The SNLA experimented with ricin but found it wanting.

Rankin notes that the SNLA were still in operation as late as 2002, and gives a hat-tip to David Leslie’s on-line account of the SNLA — and gripping stuff it is. At over 60,000 words, it fulfills Rankin’s description as a “book”.

His other acknowledged source is “a non-fiction book called No Final Solution published in 1994 by the journalist Douglas Skelton”. This would seem to be out-of-print, and currently a single second-hand copy available on Amazon. What Rankin says there is:

According to Skelton, McRae was alleged to have been the SNLA’s “paymaster”, but was also (so friends said) writing a book on the nuclear industry and had found something important.

McRae’s death occurred only a year after that of Hilda Murrell, an anti-nuclear campaigner who had been found in woods near her ransacked home. McRae had told friends his home and office had been broken into and paperwork rifled.

Knowing Rankin’s ability to shift books, this will start a merry dance.

However, Malcolm suspects a bit of disingenuous spinning by Rankin: can he really have been as ignorant of the McRae episode as he says?

Willie McRae was a figure of some standing in academic law, and has a substantial entry on wikipedia.

The story of his mysterious death has been recycled at regular intervals over the years.

Five years ago The Scotsman had contact with the (for such events) statutory ex-policeman who conveniently recalled a mysterious commission:

A FORMER policeman has rekindled a 20-year mystery surrounding the death of Willie McRae, a former vice-chairman of the Scottish National Party, by claiming to have spied on him shortly before his death.

… Iain Fraser, who worked as a private investigator after leaving the police, has revealed he was asked by a mystery client to spy on Mr McRae just three weeks before he died.

Then the Daily Record was at it a couple of years back (presumably around the time Rankin was buckling down to this creation). This item adds significant details, including (if the conspiracy theorists needed it):

No one has ever seen the post mortem report. The procurator fiscal inInverness has refused to comment on the case, citing the Official Secrets Act.

When Madame Ecosse, Winnie Ewing, carried out an investigation for the SNP she was bluntly denied access to the Crown Office papers in spite of giving the customary legal guarantee of confidentiality.

So, to save time and trouble, here’s Malcolm’s short-list of the usual suspects:

• the nuke boys (well, natch);
• who were in bed with the Wicked Witch of the South — shudder! — Margaret Thatcher herself;
• other elements in the nationalist movement: the second car on the scene of McRae’s death just happened to be a SNP councillor; but — more to the point — there are suggestions McCrae was running a rival operation, the “Army For The Provisional Government” which may (or may not) also have been the “Tartan Army” and the “Border Clan”.
• the run-of-the-mill spooks: McCrae seems to have spoken fluent Urdu and Hindi, and — according to one’s taste was either an ardent supporter of Indian independence or an intelligence operative who had penetrated the nationalist movement. If he had done it in India, why not later in Scotland?
• Something with an Irish connection? If the Provos were around (and they liked to have fingers in as many pies as possible) then a couple of Special Branches (London and Dublin), MI5 and G2 of the Irish Defence Forces wouldn’t be too far behind.

Alternatively, Bacofoil do a nice line in headwear.

Anyway, anything by Ian Rankin will be well worth the effort. Expect Malcolm’s considered response eleewhere.

Avast! ye lubbers!

Malcolm wasn’t doing very well with this week’s Culture supplement of the Sunday Times. For our foreign readers: it’s the TV guide, all tarted up with any piss-elegant revoos for piss-elegant people (© a sage of Bartley Dunne’s, early ’60s).

Anyway, as the late and unlamented Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring didn’t say: When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my Browning. That would be neat, ironic, and appropriate for the only flicker of intellect and — yes — “culture” in the Nazi hierarchy, except Hanns Johst got it out first.

So back to the Sunday Times:

•  Malcolm remains totally unconvinced that those industrial sheds at Margate, with its Polish skleps and unemployed itinerant residents, can introduce a higher consciousness into that bit of Kent. You name an art gallery after a painter of whose work you have a single, unremarkable example … mind-boggling time.
• Does one need yet another self-puffing of the hit-and-miss Terry Gilliam and his send-up of Berlioz?
• How many variations on the Fall of the Soviet Empire can the Murdoch counter-empire … err … cultivate? So, no: Владимир Ипполитович Ветров wasn’t the onlie true begetter.

So, by the time Malcolm reached Christopher Hart’s more-than-slightly sour review of Betty Blue Eyes (which almost every other opinion has as very tasty indeed), Malcolm was distinctly jaundiced. Anyway: yes, Mr Hart (of whom more in a mo’) — you can’t do your Murdochian/Ayr Randian thing with:

In the wider world of the Attlee-Cripps regime, as Evelyn Waugh called it, there’e the birth of the welfare state, increasing intrusion into people’s private lives, and other rotten ideas.

and get away with it.

If Hart doesn’t get it (and Alan Bennett most definitively did), after war-time and post-war rationing, there were many Brits who yearned for comfortable shoes, a slice of thick fatty bacon, a chiropodist, and survived on BBC-unapproved lavatorial humour. Well, Hart, you won’t get away with as long as Malcolm’s generation persists to point you the error of your ways.

After all, the whole point of a musical is to make:

a big song and dance about it, with brassy show-stopping numbers … , much energetic leaping and twirling, and even some pink feather boas.

On with the motley …

Once among the books (page 40), things picked up.

Slightly smug, Malcolm noted he had knocked off two of the Top Ten fiction best-sellers last week:

• Donna Leon’s Drawing Conclusions(first week in)

and

• Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man (eleven weeks on, dropping fast).

Hint: go for Leon every time — nobody else manages the embroidery of a ‘teccy with so much social observation and social relevance. The Mankell looks very much like a Reichenbachfall moment: may we expect Inspector Wallender’s past career to be revived when sales figures, and TV tie-ins, demand?

Thus encouraged, Malcolm pressed on; and he soon found that Christopher Hart had redeemed himself with a review of David Cordingly’s Spanish Gold. The review is well worth ripping from behind the pay-wall:

Until 1973, the Bahamas had as its motto the splendidly blunt Expulsis piratis, restituta commercia (Pirates expelled, commerce restored), which sounds like a British Army telegram. Today the country’s motto is the rather wet “Forward, Upward, Onward Together”, which sounds like something by Nick Clegg — on a good day.

The man behind the Bahamas’s old anti-piratical boast is the subject of David Cordingly’s rousing and colourful book about the cut-throats and buccaneers who infested the Spanish Main during the 18th century. Captain Woodes Rogers was a classic example of poacher turned gamekeeper: a “privateer” himself before the British authorities realised that it was a man of just such experience who could be turned against the pirates, and appointed him governor of the Bahamas.

Around Rogers’s two governorships, running from 1718 to his death in 1732, Cordingly spins many a vivid and hair-raising tale. Before Rogers took control of the Bahamas, the Caribbean was a truly lawless and violent place — although as Cordingly usefully reminds us, so was Finchley. In October 1717, the Irish mailcoach was held up on Finchley Common by five masked highwayman, and one poor lady within was stripped not only of her gold watch and rings, but her “clothes, smock and all”, so that the coachman was obliged to lend her his greatcoat to protect her modesty. Four of the five highwaymen were later caught and hanged.

From the statistics quoted by Cordingly, it appears that a Caribbean pirate in those days also had a strong chance (at least 50%) of ending his life on the gallows. Rogers certainly achieved a higher clear-up rate than one of his predecessors, Colonel Cadwalader Jones, who took up the governorship in 1690, and was officially described as “whimsical”. Really not the kind of man to tackle pirates such as Edward Teach — better known as Blackbeard. His regular toast was “Damnation to King George!”, he had at least 14 wives, and wore lighted matches stuck under his hat during battle.

Another notorious figure was Bartholomew Roberts, said to have coined the phrase “a merry life and a short one”. Not so merry for Roberts’s victims. Some Dutch seamen who resisted an onslaught from Roberts’s crew for four hours were later almost whipped to death, had their ears cut off or were “fixed to the yardarms and fired at as a mark”. Roberts was killed in 1722 in an encounter with the Royal Navy, hit in the throat by grapeshot. He died festooned in buccaneer bling, wearing a crimson damask waistcoat, a red feather in his hat, and a diamond cross hanging from a gold chain around his neck. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy dress style.

There were even women among the privateers, “pirates in petticoats”, though by no means the first of their kind. As Cordingly points out, the earliest known example is one Alwilda, “the daughter of a Scandinavian king who had taken command of a company of pirates and roamed the Baltic in the 5th century AD”. She eventually became Queen of Denmark, and Vivaldi even wrote an opera about her.

Her most notorious counterparts in the 18th century were Anne Bonny and Mary Read. A contemporary illustration depicts them with long flowing locks, bare breasts alluringly peeking out from unbuttoned blouses, for all the world like Georgian page 3 girls. After brief but bloodthirsty careers, Bonny and Read were caught and sentenced to be hanged, but pleaded, truthfully, that they were both “quick with child”. The sentence was suspended, though Mary died of prison fever. But there is some evidence that Bonny later moved to Charleston, South Carolina, married and had eight children, and lived to the ripe old age of 84. You can’t help wondering what tales she told her grandchildren. “My granny was a pirate!”

Cordingly is particularly good on the causes and economics of piracy. For decades the British government had tacitly encouraged the privateers to attack their French and Spanish enemies, much like the West arming the mujaheddin. Then came the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which brought to an end the war of the Spanish succession, and put thousands of sailors and marines out of work. Joining the privateers — now redesignated “pirates” — was an obvious career choice for the wilder among them. And as with drug smuggling today, the profits could be mind-boggling. A single Spanish treasure fleet in 1715, for instance, carried gold and silver coins, gold bars, gold dust, pearls, emeralds, silks, spices and Chinese porcelain, amounting in today’s terms to a colossal £135m. Almost enough to pay a single day’s interest on our national debt.

Spanish Gold is a fine mix of such hard-headed history and a richly evoked atmosphere, with its murderous characters, exotic locations and fabulous cargoes of treasure. There is even a walk-on part for the real-life Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk. It’s entertaining to learn that, having been stranded in peaceful solitude for four years on the Juan Fernandez islands off Chile, dining on crayfish and roast goat, watercress and parsley, he was in notably better health than his ship-bound saviours, and at first showed a marked reluctance to be rescued at all, and “would rather have chosen to remain in his solitude, than come away”.

This will — yes, will — be a fair addition to Malcolm’s reading, and subsequently his shelves. Cordingley has a useful career as a historian of the maritime chaos that was the period from the late 17th through the 18th century, until first the United States and then the Europeans cracked down on the doings of the sea-robbers and the people-traffickers (that latter item took the Americans a wee bit longer). His biography of Cochrane (Malcolm has the US edition) is no bad effort.

In the meantime, Malcolm has 1,500 pages of Neal Stephenson to relish.

The even tenor of Malcolm’s way was severely disturbed by turning up a paperback of Quicksilver. How had something so sumptuous passed him by? He is now well into The Confusion (any novel that starts at the siege of Drogheda has a fair chance of being taken to the conclusion). And there’s still The System of the World sitting on the bed-side table.

That’s all part of the delight surviving as a superannuated pensioner. As Aldous Huxley rendered it:

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

Malcolm should feel guilty. Alas: he can’t.

Brown Windsor

For reasons that involve the mellifluously-fluting Lucinda Lambton and a rather special doll’s-house, the Lady in Malcolm’s life and the Pert Young Piece were in Windsor yesterday afternoon.

Malcolm arranged to meet them after their tryst with Perry Worsthorne’s missus. That gave him the opportunity of exploring the public transport system a bit further: the senior travel pass (one of the many benefits Gordon Brown finagled for ordinary Brits) should mean the journey could be done for free.

There are numerous ways of travelling from Malcolm’s perch in Norf Lunnun to Windsor. On this occasion Malcolm got it seriously wrong.

Out of Redfellow Hovel soon after 3 p.m. It was a 43 bus to Holloway Road, catch the Piccadilly Line. Then a long trundle through the western suburbs to Heathrow.

Gripe the first

Heathrow was, is and (unless a miracle ensues) always will be a aeronautical slum. There are several ways of getting to and from:

• One can be scalped by the cab drivers (who have a hell of a time anyhow, so not all the blame is theirs).
• Just below that 24-carat extravagance comes the Heathrow Express, allegedly mile-for-mile the most exorbitantly-overcharged rail journey in the world, as well as having the most complex fares structure.
• Just below that again is the stopping train out of Paddington: it does exactly the same trip as the Heathrow Express at half the price, and takes all of ten minutes or so longer.

The problem with both those latter options is Paddington, which (Marylebone apart) is the terminus least accessible from central London. That, we are assured, may improve with the Crossrail project; but not until the back-end of this decade.

• Beyond that it’s the ‘Dilly line, where we are truly at one with our neighbour: at rush-hours sardines have more personal space. The near forty-year-old rolling stock was due for replacement in a couple of years’ time, but became embroiled in the collapse of Tube Lines, and so one of the first of the Tory-led coalition cuts.

To add to the Heathrow mess, there is the continuing confusion of terminals, particularly when airlines with a smaller presence seem perversely to switch from one to another.

Terminal Five

After teething troubles, very well-publicized, the monster seems to have settled into a good operating condition. Passengers seem almost happy.

It certainly is an impressive structure. The medievals built cathedrals: we build airport terminals. We’re almost getting good at doing so. Those medieval cathedrals coped with a few thousand annual ”foot-falls”. Terminal Five is prepared to deal with 35 million.

The last stage of Malcolm’s odyssey was from the Cave of the Winds (see below) on the other 77 bus (there’s the better-known 77 from Tooting to Waterloo).

Gripe the second

Terminal Five’s bus terminal is ground level and out the back (vaguely in the direction of the Sofitel hotel). Perhaps the original intention was to have a drive-through for jumbo jets. It is a vast, open tunnel of a soul-less place. Particularly so when, as Malcolm, you just missed the previous bus and it’s a half-hour wait, with a chilling draught through the tunnel.

Not in Kansas any more …

Suddenly the buses are Slough (actually First Group) blue.

A bus is a bus is a bus. This one’s route takes the sightseeing Malcolm through the delights of twilit Slough:

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough
The cabbages are coming now
The earth exhales.

Those cabbages are likely to be found in the ginormous Sainsbury’s supermarket passed along the route. Immediately followed by as sprawling a Tesco’s. Concrete and glass find a spiritual home here. Beautiful it is not.

Once out and under the M4 the 77 speeds up, and fairly shifts through the old watermeadows around Eton. Then it’s across the bifurcated Thames to the Maidenhead Road roundabout, past the “artisan’s cottages” of Arthur Street, and, with a bit of juggling, into the bus stop at the marvellously-named Peascod Street (“It used to be all fields round here, you know!”).

Something like three-and-a-half hours, end to end, time passed courtesy of an Irish Times (read thoroughly, an excellent edition) then 100+ pages in the chilling company of Harry Hole. The reading was the only consolation of an afternoon thoroughly wasted.

The Carpenters Arms

Things were about to improve considerably: Malcolm was pledged to meet aforesaifd Lady in his Life and the Pert Young Piece in the Carpenters Arms in Market Street (and that’s as close to the main gate of the Castle as any good republican would wish to be).

Better believe it: there are pubs in Windsor which are not dedicated to fleecing every passing day-tripper; and are worth the visit. They just need hunting out. Pride of place in this select list has to be the Carpenters. It cannot be just a quiet(ish) evening in February that gave the instant impression of a well-run and well-patronised place. It’s a Nicholson’s house, which should convey an atmosphere of well-bred, late-Victorian solidity, moving adequately but not precipitately with the times. Nicholson’s probably buy their (old-style) Brasso by the tanker-load.

Malcolm was late in arriving: fortunately the females were later still. On the pumps five ales. Apart from the reliable stand-bys (London Pride and Doom Bar) there were three exotics (as right).

As a general rule Malcolm is none too keen on frolicksome beers, be they Belgians dunking cherries and strawberries or attempts at imitating foreign stuff. That quickly eliminated the Ginger Beer and the Vicious IPA: had he been in any doubt, two guys at the bar anxiously dissuaded him from either (they had obviously been that way before). One of them was on Pride: fair enough. The other wasn’t.

Malcolm was hesitating between the Fuller’s and the Sharp’s: London Pride or Doom Bar? It was the dark, beyond-brown-to-black contents of the second guy’s pint glass that made Malcolm look closer at that third exotic: Thornbridge Wild Holly.

Thornbridge is a craft brewery, based in Bakewell, Derbyshire, with a growing reputation. There’s been a small surge of these heavy winter ales in the last year or two. Once upon a time “winter warmers” were universal, and by late February are on their last knockings. Most are worth a second go. Malcolm gave Wild Holly a first go; and happily came back for more.

When the women arrived (Doom Bar for the Pert Young Piece, a well-raised child, and a decent Chilean red for the Lady), it was rib-eye steaks all round; and damn the consequences.

By general consent, the Carpenters Arms ticked all the boxes. Very highly recommended.

Home, James, …

… and don’t spare the horses.

The return journey, in less than half the time of the outward one, was Windsor and Eton Riverside to Waterloo, by South West Trains, then Northern Line.

Malcolm may be long-suffering; but he is no masochist.

Fey teccies?

A fair part of the Redfellow Hovel attic is occupied by shelved detective novels, to which Malcolm is addicted. When he goes on his last trip to Golders Green Crem, a skip (US translation, purely for Zach’s benefit: dumpster) will be needed to cart away a lifetime spent in futility.

Once, right at the start of his blogging, Malcolm considered producing an authoritative history, only to find others had done it pretty thoroughly already. To name just the one, Maxim Jakubowski.

A new departure?

Is there, though, something new under the sun?

Malcolm ventures this thought when he noted that there was a sub-genre developing:

1. Is it fair to group disparate writers in this way?
2. Is it peculiarly British?

The evidence:

The thought came as he was finishing Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (again, for US consumption, this will be retitled Midnight Riot). Only when Malcolm was polishing this draft did he discover Orion were  pushing this one on the “sf’/fantasy” page.

Aaronovitch has been round the block a couple of times, and the coincidence of surname with the Times columnist isn’t (they are brothers). His previous stuff has been mainly tv scripts and novelisations; but he seems to have hit the mark with this one.

The premiss is a cross-over from two established types of populist fiction: the police procedural and the tale of the “other dimension” of ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night. So newly-minted Metropolitan Police Constable Peter Grant is about to be consigned to back-office duties in the Crime Progression Unit, who:

do the paperwork for the hard-pressed constable so that he or she can get back out on the street to be abused, spat at and vomited on. Thus will there be a bobby of the beat, and thus shall crime be defeated and the good Daily Mail-reading citizens of our fair nation shall live in peace.

No, this is not too-over-serious stuff.

Fate intervenes , as inevitably happens around (as here) page 29, in the form of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Nightingale is the sole member of the Met’s ghost and ghoulie squad. Peter Grant is immediately adopted as his apprentice. Traditionalists sigh with recognition at Nightingale’s:

Jag, a genuine Mark 2 with the 3.8 litre XK6 engine.

The in-joke, presumably, being that Morse’s Jag in the tv adaptations was, in fact, a tarted 2.4 Daimler (in the books, of course, it’s a Lancia).

So begins the pursuit of the killer of William Skirmish, neatly beheaded (on CCTV, of which the West End is rife) under the portico of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden. That leads into two parallel threads: the Punch and Judy show, and the warring Thames family. Read the rest for yourself: it’s worth the trip.

As an aside, anyone looking for yet another addition to the all-devouring vampire literature will find Aaronovitch allows pages 124-133 for such nonsense, all the way sarf’ uv de riva in:

Purley, famous place, Purley, know what I mean?

Cognoscenti will recognise a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?

Two No. 80 W[hite] P[hosphorous] Gren[ades], courtesy of the London Fire Brigade:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we deal with vampires in Old London Town.

An incident at Eel Pie Island  (the adjacent White Swan at Twickenham, a worthy riverside pub, gets a name-check) introduces the feuding Thames deities. On the way, Constable Grant and Inspector Nightingale pause at Richmond Bridge for a piece of PC-demolition:

‘I’m just going to have a chat with this troll,’ said Nightingale.

‘Sir,” I said, ‘I think we’re supposed to call them rough sleepers.’

‘Not this one we don’t,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’s a troll.’

I saw movement in the shadow of one of the arches, a pale face, ragged hair, layers of old clothes against the winter cold. It looked like a rough sleeper to me.

‘A troll, really?’ I asked.

‘His name is Nathaniel,’ said Nightingale. ‘He used to sleep under Hungerford Bridge.’

‘Why did he move?’ I asked.

‘Apparently he wanted to live in the suburbs.’

Suburban troll, I thought, why not?

Neat in itself, incidental, and a useful plot device at this point:

I asked Nightingale whether Nathaniel the troll had been helpful.

‘He confirmed what we suspected,’ he said. That the boys in the boat had been followers of Father Thames, had come downstream to raid the shrine at Eel Pie Island and been caught by followers of Mother Thames… Downstream the Thames was the sovereign domain of Mother Thames, upstream, it belonged to Father Thames. The dividing line was at Teddington Lock, two kilometres downstream from Eel Pie Island.

That is also the limit of the tidal Thames (and, if Malcolm’s memory serves aright, the end of the Met Police Thames Division’s beat — of which Malcolm’s dear old Dad was once a member).

Aaronovitch develops this conceit: Mama Thames:

‘ … came to London in 1957 … I wasn’t a goddess then. I was just some stupid country girl with a name that I have forgotten, come to train as a nurse… I failed all my exams …

‘I was so heartbroken,’ said Mama Thames, ‘that I went to kill myself … So I went to Hungerford Bridge to throw myself into the river. But that is a railway bridge, and the old footbridge that ran along the side — very dirty in those days. All sorts of things used to live on that bridge, tramps and trolls and goblins. It was not the sort of place a decent Nigerian girl wants to throw herself off. Who knows what might be watching?

By a process of elimination she ends with (old) London Bridge. She makes the leap, and becomes one of  the:

‘Genii locorum,‘ … ‘The spirit of the place, a goddess of the river, if you like.’

Around her are her daughters (the tributary streams of the Thames):

as fine a collection of middle-aged African women as you’d find in a Pentecostal church … Seated incongruously among them was a skinny white woman in a pink cashmere twinset and pearls, looking as perfectly at home as if she’d wandered in on her way into town and never left.

This bourgeoise, we discover, is Ty (short for Tyburn) and the one who knows people who matter. Ty lives in fashionable Fitzjohns Avenue, Hampstead:

The house was a tall gothic confection with a mock tower at each corner and sash windows painted white.

Oh dear. Malcolm has amorous twangs about just that location (well, directly across the road), circa 1967.

Aaronovitch uses this device for a bit of social satire, and he knows his London: look at the map and find Shepherd’s Path, the small lane that links Fitzjohns Avenue and Lyndhurst Terrce. This is the supposed source of the Tyburn Stream. Similarly, at the very end of the story, near Heathrow, we have mention of The River Crane … Last one [of the sisters] this side of the river:

‘She’s never in the country … She’s always flying of somewhere, sending us text messages from Bali and postcards from Rio. She went swimming in the Ganges, you know …’

When we encounter Father Thames, he is bucolic:

He was short, with a pinched face dominated by a beaky nose and a heavy brow. He looked old, in his seventies at least, but there was a sinewy vigour in the way he moved, and his eyes were grey and bright. He wore an old-fashioned, double breasted suit in dusty black, the jacket unbuttoned to show off a red velvet waistcoat, a brass fob watch and a folded pocket handkerchief the bright yellow of a spring daffodil.

There is no question this is a well-constructed story, nor that the writing is somewhere beyond competent. Nor, too, that Malcolm is a customer for the remainder of the already-promised trilogy. It is also notable that, and this is no afterthought — Malcolm has a thing about it — Gollancz/Orian have turned out a decent production: the dust cover, for example, uses Stephen Walter’s inventive graphic map of London (clip, above).

And yet …

Mixing the worlds of gods and men is hardly original. Pretty well everyone from here, via Thornton Wilder, via Milton, via Shakespeare, all the way back to Homer himself, has had a go. Then there is one precise antecedent: consider Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

This is a fantasy of the underworld of London:

… a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Now refer specifically to the introduction (dated 28 July 2005):

I don’t write sequels. Still, the world of Neverwhere is one that I hope, one day, I’ll return to. In a book called The Lost Rivers of London, I read about a brass bed, found one day in a sewer. To this day, nobody knows where it came from or how it got there.

Ummm …

One further thought …

Such crossover fiction, the hybrid of fantasy and the crime novel, has become something of a British literary meme. There’s Malcolm Pryce knocking out those excellent Louie Knight stories (number six due later this year). Jasper fforde has the sixth of his Thursday Nexts dropping pre-ordered through Malcolm’s door this weekend. fforde encapsulates the issue:

It is a time of unrest in the Bookworld. Only the diplomatic skills of ace literary detective Thursday Next can avert a devastating genre war. But a week before the Peace Talks, Thursday vanishes. Has she simply returned home to the Realworld or is this something more sinister?

But all is not yet lost. Living at the quiet end of Speculative fiction is the written Thursday Next, who is attempting to keep her own small four-book series both respectful to her illustrious namesake and far from the grim spectre of being remaindered.

On the other hand, you see:

• you know where you are with Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole,

and

• Michael Connelly, be he giving us Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller (or both at the same time).

Down these mean streets a man must go … The Los Angeles legacy bears hard on writers from those parts,

• just as Robert B. Parker’s Spenser was fixed in Boston);

and we would not for a moment wish it any different.

Similarly

• Ian Rankin contains his Rebus adequately within the genre and largely to Edinburgh: to the extent that Rankin is rapidly becoming a public face of Edinburgh.
• Colin Bateman’s Dan Starkey is not just of Belfast, but even (in part) confined to a non-fictional fictional bookshop specialising in crime fiction: Bateman, though, has surrealistic longings on him.
• Even more so, Christopher Brookmyre’s Jack Parlabane has broken out of the envelope into political thriller, even into political satire and political rant (there’s a further instalment due this summer): by the way, Malcolm reckons Brookmyre’s opening of Quite Ugly One Morning is truly, repulsively, very, very funny.

So, if there is a British genre-blurring, it reverses the American’s criticism of British science fiction: “Here we are, trying to get off the planet, and you can’t even get off the island!”

The downside of that is the way the more “fey” British crime-writers become, the more they seem to be “comfortable” (the Pert Young Piece of Redfellow Hovel opines that it can all be blamed onLewis Carroll and that damned rabbit-hole).

But … about the worst insult anyone can throw at this genre is the term “cosy”.

Long time, no C (or A or B)

First  familial visitations, then Hogmanay in Edinburgh. Result: an absence of blogging.

So, to the recent scrapbook.

Where better to start than Steve Bell’s retrospective for The Guardian; and that iconic cartoon of 12th January 2010:

Bell’s own caption-comment takes that into the sublime:

This cartoon marked a turning point, in that I’d been trying out various ways of doing Cameron, from man boobs through to jellyfish, and this seemed a natural development. It said a great deal about his smoothness, but opened up a lot of new, symbolic and rubbery possibilities. By way of a bonus, Cameron does not favour the depiction. He came up to me at a Spectator party at the Tory conference in October, and asked me how long I was going to carrry on with it, before advising me: “You can only push a condom so far”.

Then, also in The Guardian and this very day, Polly Toynbee nails that rubberoid jelly to the wall:

Far more shocking is the spectacle of Cameron and Osborne’s unabashed, barefaced and premeditated mendacity. Begin with the great broad questions about which they so reassured voters. Three days before the election, Cameron said on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, “any cabinet minister … who comes to me and says ‘Here are my plans’ and they involve frontline reductions, they’ll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again”. Yet £81bn in cuts now rain down on frontline services.

Would VAT rise? A month before the election, Cameron said: “Our plans involve cutting wasteful spending … our plans don’t involve an increase in VAT.”

As for the NHS, “We will stop top-down reorganisations of the NHS,” said the coalition agreement, yet now what health secretary Andrew Lansley calls his “revolution” rolls in. The coalition promise that “we will guarantee that health spending increases in real terms” has gone the same way. Two months before the election, Cameron eulogised universal child benefit: “I wouldn’t change child benefit, I wouldn’t means test it, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” On education maintenance allowances, Michael Gove said, just before the election: “Ed Balls keeps saying that we are committed to scrapping EMA. I have never said this. We won’t.” On tax credits, the promise was to cut them only for families on £50,000, but the budget book shows families with an income of just £30,000 lose all credits. Liam Fox promised “a bigger army for a safer Britain“, but it now loses 7,000 soldiers.

The People’s Polly has been regaining her stride in recent weeks; and here is in devastating form. Her devastating word there is “mendacity”. For which, let’s pause for thought:

From the Latin: mendax. “Prone to tell falsehoods, untruthful. Giving a false impression, deceiving. That falsely affects to be or masquerades as.”

In the dictionary (pages 1097-8) between memoria, “the collective memory of the past” and mensularius, “a banker, money-changer”.

Required reading

At this time of the year, the gloom of mid-winter imposing a seasonly-affection reading disorder, Malcolm is typically looking for something on the light side. Having run out of Henning Mankell’s Wallenders, Malcolm thought to have a go at Jo Nesbø. The Devil’s Star worked a treat for a taster. Then into The Redbreast. Much grimmer, more complex stuff than Malcolm had anticipated; but crime should be sordid, not glamorised. So far, so good. The Snowman was the one Malcolm had been sharpening his teeth for, and widely applauded as one of the genre’s great reads of 2010.

So, into Edinburgh’s Waterstones, conveniently half-way between the palatial Wetherspoon’s at The Standing Order (once the Union Bank, a classical Victorian extravaganza) and the delightfully seedy Oxford Bar, hidden away in Young Street. The world and his wife fill the former to capacity; lonely souls come looking for Inspector Rebus and his makir in the latter. In both they find relief and respite in Deuchars.

Three-for-two

So, The Snowman is heaped high: take one. Ah, it’s one of those three-for-two offers. So what else to go with it? Well, let’s try the early Zafon, The Prince of Mist, and … err …

Well, any port in a storm. Neil Oliver’s A History of Scotland? Why not? Malcolm has a small shelf of Scottish histories. This one won’t add to the sum of human knowledge; and it’ll be fun picking up the errors.

When the very expensive BBC TV series, of which this is a natural spin-off, was developing, there was a small tsunami of dissent among Scottish historians. The treatment was too ”anglocentric” and Oliver, as front-man was too populist. Which, with that £2 million plus of investment in the series, both amount to no-brainers. As audience-figures have shown.

The book of the TV series of the history of the country

So that is what Malcolm, in requiring TLC and a bit of light relief, has been reading these last days. He has to confess he enjoys it greatly.

Take, for example, Oliver’s warm-up to chapter 7, King Jesus, on the volcanic and self-destructive religious feudings of the seventeenth century:

A Scottish Presbyterian man is headed for a new life in Australia when his ship hits an uncharted reef and sinks. Alone of all the passengers and crew he survives the wreck and swims to a little uninhabited island. Twenty years later another liner is blown off course by another storm and onto the same reef. This time a handful of survivors make it into a lifeboat and they row themselves to the Scotsman’s island.
He greets them warmly and takes them on a tour of their new home. They soon realise he has worked hard to create a comfortable, civilised life for himself.
‘This is my house — complete with running water,’ he says, walking them past a well-built timber building with a roof of palm leaves.
‘Here’s my garden and my vegetable plot,’ he says, smiling broadly. ‘I can grow fruit as well, anything I want — the climate is so wonderful.’
‘And over there — slung between two palm trees — is my hammock, where I like to watch the sun set each evening.’
One of the survivors takes a minute to gaze around and then poijnts to a stone building on a nearby hill.
‘And what’s that?’ he asks.
‘Oh, that’s my church,’ says the Scotsman.
Another survivor points to an almost identical building right beside the first one.
‘And that?’ he asks.
“That?’ says the Scotsman. ‘Oh … that’s the church I don’t go to.’

Immediately we see why Oliver must be the despair of professional historians: anecdotal, irreverent, readable, and not a footnote or sociological multi-syllable in sight.

Oliver adds:

You almost have to be a Scot to get the joke.

It works quite nicely in Northern Ireland (perhaps the whole of Ireland) too.

Rolling the yule log

It’s that time again: the seasonal book lists, “best books of 2010″, “what we read this year”.

So, immediately after signing off that previous post:

Some pretensions to literacy: just like Malcolm

the reality came back to haunt him.

He picked up the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement and started through its Books of the Year (just don’t forget those authoritative capitals). Some sixty-five eminent bods (it says here, and seems to tally), over seven pages, expiate on what turned each one on. There is repetition:

I very much enjoyed and admired Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto)

says A.S.Byatt. Jonathan Bate is more effusive:

Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto) is a beautiful piece of writing, mixing family memoir, cultural history, travel narrative and nuanced observation of miniature curiosities (his inherited collection of netsuke) in a style suggestive of Sebald without the gloom.

Among others, Michael Howard (no, not the political one) joins in and goes overboard for this as:

the book, not of the year, but of the decade.

Harrumph! Anyone for navel-gazing, however nuanced, and suspenders for Japanese pouches?

What really gave Malcolm the glooms, Sebaldian or not, was his growing recognition of seemingly how little he had read of such recent worth. He had missed out, among others, on Felipe Fernández-Armemesto’s choice:

the chef Fabio Picchi’s Senza vizi e senza sprechi (Monddadori) — a culinary memoir that makes most British celebrity cooks look like idiots.

Funny that: Malcolm hadn’t realised it needed Italian comparisons to demonstrate so self-evident a truism. Indeed, Malcolm had reached D for Richard Davenport-Hynes and F for Roy Foster before he found points of recognition.

Davenport-Hynes is boosting Graham Robb’s Parisians: An adventure history of Paris. Now, in Maclolm’s ‘umble opinion that really is a juicy read. It’s not just the information and the opinion it provides, there’s the entertainment value on top — delicious pastiche of literary periods and forms. It’s already out in paperback, and deserves to sell in truckloads.

Foster starts where he is best, on the island:

A disastrous year for the Irish economy, but a very good one for Irish poetry. Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain (Faber) was dazzling: full of three-word lines that light up like a flick of a switch, conveying a haunting preoccupation with the borderlands between this world and the next.

Why the past tense (“was dazzling”), Roy? Later on in this catalogue of wonders, Bernard O’Donoghue also gives Famous Shamus a nod. Somewhere between those two, G for Peter Green devotes his three paragraphs to Donna Leon and Commissario Brunetti’s latest Venetian outing (number nineteen, and Malcolm has every one, in sequence, on a garret shelf) in A Question of Belief. Amid all this pretentiousness and log-rolling, Green comes on like a boy scout’s simple good deed in an affected world:

… the stench of the canals in a broiling August carries its miasma of judicial corruption, homophobia (leading to murder), and red tape. Smooth-talking astrologers prey on elderly ladies. While his delightful family cools off on an Alpine vacation, Brunetti himself (reading Marcus Aurelius) is recalled to sweat out the murder investigation and what lies beneath its surface. Leon’s unique mixture of sadly cynical realpolitik and heartfelt moral compassion has never been shown to better effect. She is a truly fine novelist, period, and should be acclaimed as such.

Cheers to that, says Malcolm.

Leon’s spring annual is a treat to be anticipated. Malcolm will have it on pre-order.

Fiction seems in small regard among the stratospheric literati, with an exception for Peter Carey (that regular Booker-listee). Do these great minds at the TES not take time off for faux-simple joys such as Leon? If so, they might then extend to the likes of Philip Kerr and his Bernie Gunther in their diet. Why (excluding the obvious objection of being “popular”), as far as Malcolm can see, did le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor or C.J.Sansom’s Heartstone not make someone’s list?

Clearly, Malcolm knows little about art, but he knows what he likes.

The book and its cover 1

For decades Malcolm buttered his bread by teaching literature. One exercise might be the distribution of snippets for critiquing: genre, content, style, and a stab at the author and dating.

Here’s one that nicely would fit the task:

North Philly, May 4, XXXX. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a threedollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.

Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up thebuyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office.

Easy! Typical hard-boiled 1920s/1930s noir, straight out of Black Mask magazine. Hmmm: locale East Coast, but that apart, only point at issue is whether to opt for Hammett or Chandler …

Then, insert the sickener: that “XXXX” reads “2001″ in the original. OK: a parody of the above, but quite a convincing one. So, trick question: next?

What is interesting is the source and the author:

ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

PENNSYLVANIA v. NATHAN DUNLAP

Indeed. The Chief Justice of the United States has a bit of personal fun in offering a lone-voice dissent against the Bench.

And if Malcolm had not been reading Linda Greenhouse’s adulatory piece on Justice Sotomayor he would have missed it.

Good show all round.