GoodReads meta-data is 427 pages, rated 4.12 by 58 litizens.
Verdict: so so.
Caught up in the regime change from many gods to one with Pharaoh Akhenaten, diplomat Hani unravels the murder of an Egyptian vassal in the troubled borderlands with the Hittites who are not good neighbours. The plot is convoluted and characters are no sooner introduced than killed off. Much about the theology that has little resonance with a contemporary reader is reviewed. Ditto the geography which the author does not help the reader with and I seem to misplaced my map of ancient Egypt.
Does the vast conspiracy reach all the way to the top? If so, is it a conspiracy?
First in a series. Perhaps the latter titles are less overwrought.
GoodReads meta-data is 223 pages, rated 4.22 by 120 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Diverting.
It’s 1898 and Watson has been kidnapped by a criminal mastermind (no, not him) in a plot to start a European war. His rescue is facilitated by his niece, Lucy, and Sherlock. Oh, and the latter’s smarter brother. There is rich period description of the Orient Express. The plot is as complicated as one could want. One distinction is the evident corruption, not mere incompetence, of the London police.
This is number seven in the series heretofore unknown to me.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.48 by 54 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: charming.
Humble, long-suffering Inspector Ganesh Ghote is sent to a cool mountain hill station in southern India, far from the mean albeit colourful streets of Bombay (as it was then). There he finds a ghost of the Raj, the private Ooty Club whose members, British and Indian (who are more British than the British in their tweeds and wingtips).
Into this self-contained and closed community murder has intruded. The drunken and conniving servant Pichu has been stabbed to death on the…billiard table in the night. Ghote’s investigation is dogged by Surinder Mehta, retired ambassador and friend to prime ministers past and present, who is an avid reader of Agatha Christie novels and sets about helping Ghote with a running commentary from the Great Dame’s novels. (For a time Ghote wonders what a dog has to do with anything.)
This is the seventeenth title in the Ghote series and it is light, diverting, and interesting as the best of them. How did Keating do it?
GoodReads meta-data is 339 page rated 3.61 by 103 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Grüezi
Switzerland became a state with central government only in 1848, but it has never been a nation-state. The largest nation is German but there is also France, Italy, and Romansh in those mountains. By the way, the Alps, unlike most other mountains, yield no metal. That is important because it meant no great power ever had an incentive to conquer them for gold, silver, iron, or anything else.
In the early Fifteenth Century isolated alpine communities made defensive alliances against maundering intruders, like Magyars, Avon ladies, and Huns. Schwyz was one of the first communities to do so. This alliance expanded when larger threats loomed from France in the west and the Germany (Holy Roman Empire) in the east. In time the alpine alliances added trade, and with trade came some standardisation, e.g., weights and measures, and some law to resolve disputes. Neither language nor religion inhibited these practical agreements. Or so it seems.
The Hapsburg dynasty started in Switzerland but moved east to richer pickings, and when the lords were gone, the vassals started to acted autonomously. While Swiss mythology turns around William Tell and stout resistance to tyrants, the author suggests a more gradual change occurred largely due to the indifference of the Hapsburgs and the internal preoccupations among the French. Italians were so disorganised that they never posed a threat.
Those who resided in what is now Switzerland were as riven by religious strife as elsewhere in Europe. Catholics enjoyed murdering Protestants, and when the Catholics were unavailable Protestants happily murdered each other over split infinitives. All of this was justified by minute interpretations of disputed Biblical grammar. There was the Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War, the unnamed war, and more.
As long as these larger European conflicts raged, Swiss moderated their own internal disputes, and surprisingly did not try to draw in larger forces. Only when the pan European conflicts subsided did internal conflicts become more intense, proving they were quite capable of cultural suicide if given half a chance.
By 2010 Switzerland remained insular but no longer isolated from broader currents in Europe and the world from AIDS to the GFC. The world had come to Switzerland, leaving it little choice but to integrate itself more with the world in trade, finance, migration, defence, health, and more. Watches are not enough, though the introduction of the Swatch was controversial in Switzerland for pandering to the market. Banking secrecy inhibits trade. The population is declining. The once sacred army is eating the budget to no discernible purpose. Swissair subsidies were bottomless. All of these have had to change.
Swiss isolation was useful to the major European powers, making it a source of agricultural produce, mercenaries, leather goods, and so on. Note that neutrality was a novel concept when it came later, and Switzerland more less invented it, and to affirm it worked hard at mediating conflicts among others and hosting organisations like the Red Cross, and later UN agencies and non-government humanitarian agencies.
How Switzerland stuck together remains a mystery to me, when other polyglot countries like Belgium, Canada, and Czechoslovakia have had so much conflict along language lines. The Swiss say their country is Willed. Does that mean that the television talk shows hum with ponderous opinions on ‘What it means to be Swiss?’ the way they do with ‘What it means to be Canadian on the CBC?’ Willed, often OK, but surely not always, and not ever to a same degree among the dominant Germans and minority French and Italians. The manifest expression of that Will are the numerous ‘votations’ (a term I had never come across before) in direct democracy and the concurrent majorities in the cantons, which they author does not spell out. The discrepancies in these votes show just how divided the country is just beneath the surface, but the author does not scratch this surface.
Randolph Head
There is an interesting sidebar here. The Swiss became a state without ever having had a royal ruler. One result of that absence was that the Swiss never had a queen, never had a queen who acted in public, never had a queen who mothered a king, never had a queen who acted as regent for a successor, never had a queen who succeeded a king even briefly, and so was one the few European countries in the Twentieth Century with no experience whatever of women near to or in a public and powerful position. That lacuna cast a long shadow over succeeding generations of women in Switzerland. Even when in 1979 women got the vote in Swiss national elections, they were still denied it in the local elections of many cantons. When the first woman took a seat on the Federal Council (cabinet) some other members quit rather than serve with her, and she was subject to a very blatant and hostile media campaign for abandoning her family…. Think Pox News and you have it. No blow is too low. No lie is too old. No distortion too fantastic.
Personal disclosure. I spent a fortnight in Switzerland a long time ago (1983) and found the smug complacence palpable.
GoodReads meta data is pages 292 rated by 3.93 by 4110 litizens.
Genre: thriller
Verdict: No thank you.
Set-up: Dresden December 1944. Max is a police officer with a gimpy leg from a World War I wound at Ypres. The privations of the war increase every day, but Max soldiers on, as does his wife Karen (a hausfrau without a personality). Their two sons are in the Wehrmacht and a constant source of worry, but there is no communication.
There follows the first of a series anatomical murders of a young woman. Others follow. The police chief is a Nazi zealot and does not care about the murders of these slatterns. He is pure cardboard, sent to stymie and annoy both Max and the Reader.
A police procedural follows as Max slowly traverses the highways and byways of Dresden after clues, thwarted by his Cardboard superior. There is a lot of Dresden, and even more on the human tide from the east as the Red Army surges ahead. Suppressed panic is the atmosphere.
More anatomical murders follow. Max stays at it as the world around him disintegrates. Karen spends all day scrounging food and fuel for the apartment.
Then it gets worse. The fire bombing occurs and there are gruelling descriptions with more anatomical details. These are well done but not to my taste. One injured and distraught woman Max encountered wandering through the rubble after raid of 13-15 February 1945 cries out, ‘Why are these devils doing this to us.’ Why indeed? Meanwhile, the few remaining Jews are eliminated along with anyone else whose Hitler salute is not crisp enough.
I had hoped for more on the cognitive dissonance of the last days, but there isn’t much aside from references to wonder weapons and innate superiority of Germans. Then it was over.
Then the war ends and Russians take over. The murders continue. The Russians are amused that Germans have been reduced to killing each other. When some Russian soldiers are living up to the stereotype and Max pleads with his Russian liaison officer to stop them, the Rusky has a good retort that silences Max. Partly it is mismatched buddy-story as Max and Rusky work together.
Frank Goldammer
I never did fathom the complications of the plot. Cardboard superior, zealot though he was, hid his one or was it two moronic (think drooling Republican congressmen and you have it) sons and…. Then there is kindly doctor upon whom no suspicion falls. Well, you know who dun it. Many others have things to hide and it all gets tangled. Why did Doctor and Zealot stay? No idea. Explanations are given but they don’t compute.
Both Max’s sons survive to give us a happy ending. Although the sons do not communicate with their parents each knows where the other is: One in a Russian POW camp and the other in a French prison. Telepathy?
It is rich in descriptions of wartime Dresden and daily life as the world ends. There is a continuous narrative and not the chopped and changed discontinuous narrative that thrillers have all too often instead of a plot. But it is over-plotted and almost incomprehensible because of that.
There is no mention of the countless French POWs worked to death in war factories in Dresden, nor any reference to the manufacture of poison gas in Dresden for use in the death camps. It was a key transportation hub east to west. There were also USA POWs there, too, namely Kurt Vonnegut and company. And one scene in these pages takes place in a slaughterhouse. Of David Irving’s exaggerations, fabrications, distortions, and more nothing will be said here.
Some time during my You Tube browsing, lately after three hours of physiotherapy, I came across DUST, a You Tube channel. Recommended. It features science fiction short films from five minutes to twenty-five minutes or so. Some are quite good, but not all.
The good ones have a story to tell and use some of the conventions of SciFi to do so. Some of the stories are imaginative, though not all. In the imaginative ones the SciFi element is central to the situation, the conflict, the paradox, …whatever.
I have scanned a lot of them, sometimes with the mute on without keeping track of the titles. But some of the good ones were these.
One concerned Nikolas Tesla’s discovery of time travel in nine minutes. Very amusing with the punch line at the very end. There are many films on DUST with Tesla so it will be hard to find. Found it : Room 88.
A second concerned an interminable traffic jam which executes population reduction without discrimination by random harvesting of motorists. Think of the Spit Bridge without warning raising at random times and all the cars and occupants on it are vaporised and you have it. This one I think was Danish. The Bridge?
Third, while most of the shorts are serious, some dead serious, and others worse, I came across one that was humorous, Alientologists. with tap dancing blue aliens. Great fun.
Four, Hashtag about the ephemeral nature of celebrity on social media. This one cuts to the bone.
Finally one concerned two astronauts exploring a dead world only to find skulls. Slowly we come to realise this desolate planet is in fact the Earth and the astronauts, despite the biped appearance and easy banter, are not human. The title is Unearthed.
All of these and many others are far superior to the overblown, CGI trash, incomprehensible, deafening, and pretentious marathons that come from Hollywood starring the same handful of actors. Yes, I am thinking of Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre. Among others.
Most of the dozens of shorts I have scanned lack a story. Many are shoot-em ups of one kind or another, and others are just talk, talk, talk, and more talk. They have the cinematography and the CGI down pat, but they have nothing to communicate except to display the technical ability of the producer. Perhaps they are film school projects. In any event, they are all form and no content, leaving it to viewers to interpret. Beyond the gates of film schools most viewers want the film to do the work of imagination.
Length is irrelevant some of the five minute ones have a story and some of the twenty-five minutes do not. Then there are the two and half hour flightless turkeys from Hollywood. More is no indicator of better.
DUST has an extensive web site for those interested.
IDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 44 minutes rated 7.0 by 8882.
Genre: Pastiche.
Verdict: Whoosh!
Fantômas is a supervillain with a vast criminal organisation headquartered in an underground lair equipped with all mod villainy cons of 1964: intercoms, sliding doors, closed circuit TV, ear-popping elevators, hot and cold-running thugs, a dungeon, and the mandatory femme fatale. He only leaves home to pull off spectacular heists. Oh, he is also a man of a thousand faces, but when relaxing at home torturing victims he looks like a bald, blue alien. That look is never explained.
Fantômas is very concerned about his public image and beats up a journalist whose reports on his doings have been disrespectful. Ouch. He doubles down on Journalist by kidnapping his girlfriend and committing an audacious crime disguised as Journalist. Energetic Inspector Clouseau puts un et une together and pursues Journalist because he IS Fantômas. The last hour is all chase.
In the end Journalist is exonerated and girlfriend rescued, but Fantômas gets away. In an explicit parody of the last scene in Dr No (1962) Journalist and Inspector are floating away in a rubber raft bickering with each other.
Jean Marais stars as both Journalist and beneath the make-up Fantômas. By train, motorbike, helicopter, automobile, submarine, speed boat he pursues himself who is always one step ahead of him. Is this post-modern or what?
The End.
It is high octane and totally silly as they zoom around Paris, the Ile France, and the Med. The humour is broader than in Dr No and the pace is faster.
I also watched Fantômas Unleashed (1965) and Fantômas against Scotland Yard (1967). More slapstick, more chase, and ever more make-up.
Prior to World War I two journalists, Marcel Alain and Pierre Souvestre, cranked out thirty-two books featuring the ruthless, murderous, diabolical arch-villain Fantômas. They were snapped up by the nascent film industry and rendered as Gothic horror films wherein Fantômas was portrayed as a shadowy figure with arms stretched overhead about to swoop on a victim. Both the books and the films were very popular. They are much darker and more macabre than these 1960s films.
Marais was a writer, sculptor, stuntman, and actor who was Beast in Jean Cocteau’s ethereal Beauty and the Beast (1946). He is completely without ego in his willingness to act in concealing make-up as Beast or Fantômas. No Hollywood A-lister would have done that.
Good Reads meta-data is 202 pages 4.0 by 24 litizens
Genre: krimi
Verdict: arthritic.
Very Englishman Ludovic Travers is on his twenty-first outing in this title. Our hero gets embroiled in the art scene in Paris. Because he is so handsome, so charming, so rich, so smart, speaks such perfect French he makes friends easily. Meanwhile his personality-zero wife shops.
The book is padded with lengthy courtesies, accounts of taxi rides, and the praise heaped on Ludo by one and all. It an inflated short story. The prose is laborious and leaden. There nothing for everyone: no action, no characters, no description of time or place, no police procedural, just people praising Ludo for being handsome, charming, rich, smart, Francophone, and more.
It does have a plot twist. SPOILER. The renown artist is presenting as his own work that of drunk whom he keeps on the sauce. Or something like that.
Here’s another SPOLER for Sy fy readers: there is no donkey and no donkey flies.
Christopher Bush
The back story is slightly more interesting than the novel. Bush wrote and published the first title in this series in 1926 and quit his job as a civil service clerk to write, thereafter cranking out sixty-two (62!) novels in which Ludo is praised by one and all. The last appeared in 1968! One is enough for this reader.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 4.16 by 153 litizens.
Genre: Thriller.
Verdict: Good.
In late 1944 the Allied armies in Northern Europe reeled from the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Though much of Belgium had been cleared of Nazis, the Germans remained nearby.
In particular Peenemunde was seventy miles from British lines in Belgium. Hitler had latched onto the rocket program as a wonder weapon that would yet win the war and poured resources into it, despite the doubts of the scientists and the objections of hard-pressed generals. Fictional Willi Graf is one such scientist, second only to Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) in the rocket team.
The V1 (doodle bug) had been superseded by the Vergentungswaffe 2, that is Vengeance Weapon 2. We learn some of the complications of operating, building, conceiving of such a rocket, and the humanity of those who worked on it, all through Graf’s eyes. None of the scientists and engineers are good Nazis but they are committed to the rocket as end in itself. Von Braun had joined the SS and made good use of that in this story to protect his team.
In parallel there is British Aircraftwoman Kay who studies aerial reconnaissance photographs in a London bunker as the RAF tries to find the launch site(s) so as to bomb them. Meanwhile, the Germans have learned to use mobile launchers to escape detection, and to launch mostly under cloud cover.
Kay survives not one but two V2 explosions in London and begins to take it personally. Meanwhile, Willi’s wife is killed in an RAF bombing raid that hits everything but the V2s.
Though the V2s are pinpricks in the bigger picture of 1944, they are dreadful and so a dedicated effort is assembled to target and destroy them. Kay and her slide rule are recruited to a team of RAF Aircraftwomen to go to Belgium and calculate the point of origin of the missiles by using radar signals of the launches correlated with impact locations in England. For this calculation to guide bombers to the target it has to be done in six minutes, which allows time for the RAF to strike before the Germans have dismounted the launch equipment and hidden everything in the forest.
We get more of Willi’s backstory than Kay’s, principally his long comradeship with von Braun and their mutual enthusiasm for space flight with rockets, spiced with some technical details. There is, what seemed to this reader, a pointless sidebar with a local prostitute, too.
Thanks to some (rather unbelievable) loose lips, the Nazis learn of the calculators in Belgium and target one V2 to hit them. It is Kay’s third brush with V2 death.
Unknown to each other, Kay computes angles to find Willi and company for the bombers, and Willi devises more ingenious ways to disguise the launch sites and shorten the dismounting time, while targeting one rocket to hit Kay and her squad of pencil pushers. They each have some near misses.
In the summer of 1945 they meet at a debriefing, and realise that they had been – in their own ways – trying to kill each other. The end.
About 3000 V2s were launched, half at London and half at Antwerp (the major seaport through which Allied armies were supplied). In London they killed about 3000 civilians, and injured far more. The destruction of the V1 and V2 explosions was the prime cause of homelessness in London after the war, effecting as many as 80,000 people. No doubt something similar in Antwerp was true. In producing the rockets between 12,000 – 20,000 slave labours died, either being worked to death, murdered, or hit in RAF raids on the production plants.
After the war both German generals and Allied analysts concluded the vast materiel and labour that went into the rockets detracted from the German war effort to no strategic or tactical gain. While Harris does not speculate, it is possible that Hitler’s desperate demand for wonder weapons and the resources devoted to them might have distorted German arms enough to shorten the war to some extent.
Most of the action takes place in the woodlands near Den Haag where I spent a semester in 1983. Indeed the nearest village is Wassenaar which was exactly where I was at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. I walked through some of those woods near the seaside.
The moon is mentioned a couple of times as the goal of the rocketeers, but I thought their goal always was Mars with the Moon as an interim step, not a final goal. That is not hinted at in these pages.
In an afterword Harris says the text was written during the 2020 pandemic lockdown over some weeks. It was released on 17 September and I got it on that day via a Kindle order. Now that is a technology von Braun did not anticipate. He did however live to see a man on the moon.
The book raises the question of the morality of the rocket men, and also of the race to acquire them. In these pages they are technocrats like those that built the atomic bombs or tank chassis. Though in this case they also aimed and fired the weapons. Are they war criminals? Should they have been punished? In any event thanks to the wily von Braun, who, though he is seldom on the page, dominates the story, planned ahead and traded their technical knowledge for salvation so that more than hundred of his team were transplanted to the USA with no penalty.
Wernher von Braun at NASA
And if they were war criminals for targeting civilians, then so was most of those who served Bomber Command which started the so-called City Busting bombing campaign in 1942 and continued it long past any justification, including Dresden, except vengeance. The implicit indictment of Bomber Command in Freeman Dyson’s essay ‘The Children’s Crusade’ comes to mind.
I enjoyed this book a lot and read it in two nights, the more so for the resonance of the location with my own experience, but I did find it a little thinner than some of Harris’s other historical novels. It relied more on the technical details than the emotional lives of the characters. Willi’s ambiguity comes too easily and the loss of his wife does not quite seem real. Von Braun dominates the events but remains a cipher.
The SS officer sent to raise morale is emphasised and then lost in the story. When he appears the reader takes him for pivotal figure and invests in him, only to find him both cardboard and inconsequential.
GoodReads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.91 by 78,875 litizens.
Genre: Bibliomania.
Verdict: Crackerjack.
In the morning 29 April 1986 smoke issued from air vents in the Central Library of the Los Angeles Library system. There soon followed a conflagration that required half of the City’s fire department to contain. The fire and subsequent water damage destroyed 600,000 books and damaged a like number, some of them rare, a few unique, but all representing the work, thoughts, and hopes of the individuals who wrote them and of those who read them.
The Library Book chronicles the origin and development of the Los Angeles central library with something of its branch libraries throughout the SoCal sprawl. There is a colourful cast of characters among the librarians from would-be writers, showmen, and suffragettes. This backstory is interspersed with an account of the fire and the recovery, as well as the investigation into the cause of the fire.
The fire began in one of the four closed stack silos and reached 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the steel shelves, injuring more than thirty firefighters, and cracking three-foot thick walls. More than ten percent of the drinking water of the greater Los Angeles areas was pumped onto it, least it leap to other buildings. While books do not burn easily, they do burn at 451 F-degrees as all science fiction readers know. There is an amusing description of the author burning a book to see what it is like. Which book? Well it had to be that one written in this very building by Ray Bradbury. (If you don’t know that book, tant pis).
The building by the way was designed by the same architect who had earlier done the Nebraska state capitol building with its edifying accoutrements.
The response of the library community was remarkable. When the Fire Marshall declared the site safe, volunteers (some 5000 in number) went to work pulling books out of the debris. In her words:
“They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”
Overnight local businesses found 15,000 cardboard boxes, and fish processing plants combined to free an enormous freezer warehouse to hold the damaged books until they could be assessed and restored. (Mould is a book killer when exposed to water, and freezing prevents mould.) The success rate on restoration of damaged books is low, around ten percent. For maps and art work there was no chance whatever. Plates on glossy paper and magazines have no hope.
The fire investigators concluded it was arson and pursued leads and suspects for years with no result. Despite the reassuring world of detective fiction, in fact, arson is hard to detect, harder to prove to a legal standard, and almost impossible to prosecute with a clearance rate, according to insurers, of about 1%. Caught in these investigations was one hapless Harry Peak whose strange manner of existence is, per Orlean, most likely to be found in LA where make-believe is even more common than reality. Insurance investigators were not so sure about arson, and gave up the chase. The building was fifty plus years old and full of old and new wiring for electricity, telephones, and computers, most of it installed after it was completed. Then there are all those electrical appliances from coffee machines, sewing machines for binding repair, and more.
Loved her descriptions of Los Angeles: “The sidewalks in Hollywood sagged under the weight of all the handsome young men who flocked there, luminous with possibility.”
[Hope and ambition] “are in the chemical makeup of Los Angeles; possibility was an element, like oxygen.”
For the young who come to find fame and fortune “moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open.” They are “lifted by the continuous supply of hope and sun.”
Everywhere you look there are “over-groomed busboys…and gym-trim extras.”
There are also many love songs to books and libraries embedded with the pages as she traces the history of the library and librarians up to the fire and then the recovery. Savour a few:
“a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.”
“the whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”
“the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.”
“The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”
“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
‘There is a human mind behind every book waiting to meet the reader.”
“Libraries are the home of our oldest friends.”
The last word is this:
Heinrich Heine’s warning: “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”
The book is so well written I am tempted to read other of hers just to revel in the exact prose and the positive attitude that propels it. Chapeaux!
