Heathrow is the worst airport I have had to go through and I have a taken a vow to myself never to do so again. To go to Dublin a couple of years ago we went through Amsterdam instead. I said that recently and was challenged with a barrage of stories about other airports.
Gosh, we travellers are picky.
I stopped to think about my experiences at Heathrow, good and bad. Good is a shorter and less intensely-felt list so I will do it first. I include everything from cab drivers to the elevators because it is all part of the Heathrow experience, n’est pas?
The good.
I had a few painless check-ins that I can no longer remember. The more so since some of my passages were on business class tickets.
When it came at long last, the train to Paddington was wonderful. It reduced the pain from the distant airport a lot and it offered the first British train station I had ever seen that was not filthy.
Once when I was particularly discombobulated, turning left instead of right, I lined up in the wrong place at United, and was treated like a king. I expected to be sent back around the corner to the right place but instead I was checked in with a happy smile. The line I hit by mistake was one reserved for VIPs, a category that has never included me.
In 2004 we rented an Avis car for drive around and that was smooth, and while finding the car in a distant lot we watched a Concorde take-off: loud and burning a lot of oil. The Avis agent gave a few personal tips on petrol that we used.
Here is the best, once very early one morning in 1994 while waiting for a flight I saw a sign at 8 a.m. offering free tastings of Chateau d’Yquem at a bottle shop in the terminal. Yquem is worth lining up for any where and any time. So I lined up outside the door to wait for 8 a.m. to arrive, and it did, and I did taste five vintages of this nectar of the gods. I knew that Baron Rothschild used to drink half a glass at breakfast over ice instead of orange juice; I knew that locals genuflected as they passed the vineyard. Now I knew why. It was part of a sale of the stock from a very high-end restaurant that had gone into bankruptcy and the stock had to be sold by the end of the month.
I bought a bottle for about a £150 and carefully carried it back to Sydney. That was a lot of Australian dollars worth of pounds.
A dinner party was arranged and at the end of the banquet, the Yquem was produced and knocked us speechless. I genuflected. We still keep the now empty bottle in a place of honour. Well, in the garage but I found it and the original docket — stored within — as above.
I learned a trick to cook an egg over bread in a microwave once when we ate at a cafe in a terminal. We still refer to that as a Heathrow egg.
The Bad
Ironic.
Taking the Tube to Russell Square, while a struggle, was convenient and I did that many times because of the British Library. Happily the lifts and escalators worked there. Once out of the station I had to walk with the bags to the hotel, or if the bags were too much, then haggle with a taxi driver for a short ride around the Square, and that seemed to get more difficult each time I tried it. Sometimes a double fare was not enough to get the bags and me around the square to the hotel.
The worst single event was one morning waiting in line outside at an airport hotel for hours for the airport bus to arrive. I had gone to that hotel the night before for an early morning flight. There came no bus and no information as more and more travellers emerged from the hotel to join the queue. The line of patient waiters grew longer and less patient. No mobile phones then. That was the day the parking garage fell down. There was never any information but cab drivers bringing people from the airport spread the word and packed us up for the terminals. My Air France flight was delayed, cancelled, etc. Instead of arriving in Florence at 10 am to find my hotel in broad daylight, I arrived at 10 pm and it took some time since I was driving a rental car in the dark in an unfamiliar environment per Italian rules of the road.
In a logic that neither Mr Spock nor I understand, the left luggage office at a Heathrow terminal was on an upper floor. Cheaper floor space, I suppose. Leaving and later collecting luggage meant getting it to that floor. On one trip the lift to that office was out of order both when I left the luggage and later when I went to collect it, so it had to be man(me)handled up and later down the stairs. No explanation, no apology, no discount on the fee for the extra trouble. Just the usual snarl when I mentioned this fact to the attendant who had no doubt heard it all before, and it bounced off.
The most typical experience: to exit the aircraft and to walk through one corridor after another pulling the reluctant carry-on bag over layers of wrinkled and sagging carpet that velcros the wheels. I timed such a walk once and remember it to be 25 minutes through dim and dank corridors.
Then came, as always, the wait in line for the immigration stamp. Yes, I have timed that, too, and hit 45 minutes once. When at last I got to the officer, he was polite, pleasant, brisk, and efficient and the whole transaction lasted less than 30 seconds.
On a bad day.
When departing once, I disembarked from the bus between terminals at the door to find a queue out of the building. There was no attempt to manage or organise the line. It was raining, as always. and I was not dressed for it since I had assumed I would not be out in the weather. Was this the line to be in? I did not know but I could not otherwise get into the building so I waited, and in the end by some miracle it was the BA check-in, and once I got to the front it was quick, pleasant, and done. But it was an anxious wait, for if I was in the wrong line, by the time I realised it, it would be too later to find the right line for the trans-oceanic flight.
On a good day.
My briefcase split and spilled in the rain once going to a rental car. Well, it was a bad experience and it happened at Heathrow, so it is included. (It was the Japanese one that never seemed to hold anything, though it was heavy and large, there never seemed to be any room inside; it came full of lining, padding, inside pockets all of which precluded putting anything else in it.)
We stayed once in an airport Thistle Hotel at Heathrow. It may be the worst hotel I ever experienced. Faulty Towers would have been an improvement. Nothing brisk, efficient, or pleasant about it. There was no line but check-in seemed like a canto from Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ Getting the bags to the room, over lumps in the floor, sagging carpets, fire doors off the hinges… Communicating with the staff, well, it proved impossible. I say ‘may’ be the worst because we once stayed in a Thistle in London…
One taxi driver, having studied a year and a half for the license, took me to the wrong airport hotel. It was late and I was exhausted from a long flight, and in any event I did not know where the hotel was. There was no definitional argument here. The driver, when we pulled into the drive way, admitted this was the wrong hotel, not the one I had ever so slowly and clearly stated and he promptly turned off the meter and turned around and took me miles to the right hotel on the other side of the airport.
Once I opted for the Heathrow bus from Russell Square at 5 a.m. The pick up in the damp winter darkness at 5 a.m. was on time and that was the last time. Traffic gridlock started at the next intersection and it took hours to get there. I had allowed four hours and just barely made it.
This was the occasion, standing under the Heathrow bus sign waiting patiently, when a taxi driver pulled up and told me the bus was slow, uncomfortable, and he would gladly drive me to Heathrow and even reduce the fare. I said no thanks. He persisted, and I mean persisted. He mentioned prices and I kept saying ‘No, thank you.’ [Keep reading, the punch line is coming.] Finally, he had got himself worked up and said ‘Well what would you pay?’ and I said ‘Five pounds [which was the bus fare]’ and he exploded. Five pounds! I was a crook, a crazy man, and typical foreigner robbing the working man…. and off he went shaking his fist at me. What a home life he must have.
The bus was an improvement, apart from the time, over the Tube. Taking luggage on the Tube to and from Heathrow was… a great convenience and a major hassle. The more so in peak hour and when, pray tell, is not peak hour not the Tube.
Any reader who gets this far is invited to compose a line or two of their own experiences.
Author: Michael W Jackson
‘The Ivory Grin’ (1952) by Ross Macdonald
A gritty tale of unrequited love(s), madness, and sacrifice from the stylist of noir krimis. Raymond Chandler had a ear for dialogue, while Ross Macdonald has a jeweller’s eye for descriptive metaphors and images. Lewis Archer is his avatar.
While the novels obey all the conventions of the genre in its time and place, it also turns them inside out. The PI’s boredom counting flies on his office windrow is interrupted by a femine fatale, as required, but this one, despite the diamonds and furs is barely a femme at all. A very mannish woman is she. Archer’s emphasis on her lack of feminine qualities is partly the everyday sexism of the era but it also turns out to be a pivot in the plot.
As always with Macdonald, everything from the color of the sunset to the hats impart texture, reveal character, and unwind the plot. Nothing is ever wasted in his novels.
This is a triangle of three families, locked together by one of the offspring. Bess is literal when she says she loved him to death. Lucy, the loyal nurse, sees more than she ought and cannot get out of the vortex. That manly woman is normal compared to her brother, who has a gun. Assorted other lowlifes pass by, but the worst of the lot is the quiet suburban doctor.
Archer country
There are some innocent bystanders along the way, Alex the love-sick boy who pines for nurse Lucy and the love-sick girl Sylvia, who pines for playboy Carl, and who becomes in a convolution of the plot Archer’s client.
I still have the paperback copy of this I read In the 1970s but I re-read it on the Kindle. I turned to it to find something to read after a series of misfires with annoying, self-indulgent, padded, and pointless krimis. If only Jane Austen knew what she had spawned when she told would-be writers to to write about what they know. Far too many only know the IKEA catalogue. Why continue the search for quality when I know right where it is.
Sometimes Macdonald’s metaphors and images come so thick and fast that they create a traffic jam in the reader. Sometimes the psychologizing gets in the way of the momentum of the story. But these are the prices of admission.
Archer is named for Sam Spade’s deceased partner, Miles Archer, who believed in fifty dollar bills.
Macdonald’s krimis are hard boiled in that they are unsparing In word and deed. The villains are villainous with little of no veneer. Often the mystery is less who dun it than why dun it. That is the psychological depth that distinguish his works.
Ross Macdonald, who spelled his name with a lower case ‘d’ though the spellchecker disagrees.
This one is the fourth of eighteen Archer novels over a thirty year period.
At least one of his krimis had a rave review on the front page of the ‘New York Times.’ The book was ‘The Underground Man’ in 1971 and the reviewer was that southern novelist of note Eudora Welty.
Yet none of his novels was ever awarded a paramount krimi prize like the Edgar. Figure that out, Mortimer.
Had I to pick one, it would be ‘The Blue Hammer’ in 1976, his last completed novel. I recall still how eager I was to get it and to read it, taking it with me when I went jogging to read a few pages while catching my breadth.
A mature work. in it he is not trying so hard to crowd in metaphors and there is less speculative psychologizing by Archer, while retaining the descriptive richness, the psychological depth, the ambiguity of motivations, and the equilibrium of the moral balance. In his books, unlike life, the world bends towards justice of a kind.
Perhaps Macdonald wrote one book eighteen times, as has been said, the same story of twisted love, divided loyalties, wayward offspring, mental imbalance, irresponsible parents, each magnified by a the glare of money in the prism of California sunshine that blinded the individuals to their own deeds.
By volume eighteen the biggest mystery is Lewis Archer himself about whom the reader learns almost nothing. He is a lens that reveals the story of those around him. By his actions we can see he is an inveterate loner, but one who warms readily to some women he meets for their physical and intellectual charms and vulnerability; he is dogged, and hard working. He wears a hat which he sometimes takes off. In one story we note he drives a light blue car, in contrast to his dark blue mood. At least he has a name, unlike Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op.
There is less about Archer in the eighteen titles than there is about Philip Marlowe in one of Chandler’s books. Archer has no backstory. The reader is not manipulated into feeling sorry for him. Why should I, he certainly does not feel sorry for himself.
Archer reports on the dirt under the carpet of the American Dream in the golden sunshine of Southern California, and it is very dirty. Yet he meets honest people whom he likes, and some he even admires. Say in contrast to the BBC’s Christopher Foyle whose world is populated entirely by liars, cheats, and murderers, often dressed in gold braid with aristocratic titles and important government jobs, Foyle’s is a world without hope, but Archer’s world has hope, and that is what keeps him going.
‘The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Inter-dimensional Insurance Agent’ (2016) by Larry Correia.
The title alone was irresistible, and my resistance is futile, quite often.
It opens with the destruction of Earth and then it gets worse!
Fortunately, Earth had an All-Catastrophe policy, no exemptions and no deductible, with Stranger and Stranger Insurance, and Tom Stranger appeared in time to put things right, dragging in his wake one very reluctant intern. (President John Wayne took out the policy and arranged for eternal payment of the premiums.)
Tom offers the best customer service in the universe, and he means that literally. Anything less than a ten our of ten is failure, and Tom does not fail, not even when confronted with dinosaurs sporting Nazi insignia. (Part of a Trump delegation.)
The intern thought a six-month stint in insurance would be, like you know, easy. As a Gender Studies major he had not actually bothered to read any of the print, fine or actually otherwise, but, like, was waiting for the movie, actually, like, so he had no idea, like, actually what he had signed on for actually. Well ‘no idea’ might be a generalisation. ’Thought’ is not the right word. No thinking occurred. The intern is a thought-free zone.
Moreover, this Gender Studies intern was from…yes, it gets worse, Chico State, where beer stains on tee-shirts are, well, like, cool, way cool actually.
Tom would like to return his intern from whence he came, but duty calls and redeeming a Gender Studies major from Chico State, now that would be a challenge of inter-dimensional magnitude.
But first, Tom and the intern find themselves in Nebraska where they must battle the ultimate evil. Gulp!
Tom is rated at 104.3 Bear Grylls while the intern is a puny, 0.4 BG. The Bear Grylls rating refers to what it would take to kill BG. It is an inter-dimensional standard. [Love it!] Tom can man-up, or rather Bear-up, to the ultimate evil there among the corn fields, but he will have to shelter that puny intern who is less than half a Bear Grylls.
Larry Correia
NO SPOILER.
It is two hours of spoof, like a long skit from SNL in its heyday, read by Adam Baldwin who manages all the inter-dimensional voices, including Muffie back head office. Discerning readers may remember Adam Baldwin as Animal in ‘Full Metal Jacket.’ It is high octane all the way.
The corporate speak, the obsession with the customer experience ratings while ignoring customers, the constitutional inability of an insurance company to pay a claim, the CVs of the policy-holding political leaders encountered along the way, the numb brain of the intern, all of it rings true. How can this be fiction in a world where Donald Trump is reality? Go figure that out.
It has been a while since I used Audible so I had another look and found this corker. I listened to it while pumping iron and pushing pedals at the gym. I call it a krimi because there are plenty of crimes, but in a boring old book store it would be sci-fi.
‘Four for the Boy’ (2005) by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer
The fourth in a series set in Sixth Century in the Constantinople of Justine and Justinian, emperors of Nova Roma. Our principal is John, whose mercenary background has brought him to Constantinople … a slave. He bristles at his status but makes the best of it.
Amid much palace intrigue John, as the Emperor Justin is passing the rule, reluctantly, to his nephew Justinian, is assigned to an excubitor. Felix, he from the Teutonic woods, to investigate the blatant murder of a rich citizen in a church. The Emperor Justine designates them, perhaps more to slow, than speed the investigation for John is after all a slave, and no citizen is required to speak to him. Felix has only a middle rank, poor Latin, and is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The city’s Prefect resents their intrusion and fobs them off with other duties.
Justinian.
On their fools’ errand, they go here and there in Constantinople from the Hippodrome to the Golden Horn, to the Bosphorus, to Constantine’s column, to the Great Palace. Each time I shout out, ‘I’ve been there!’
Constantine’s column as it was and and it is today.
Two such low level functionaries have little access to the great and good, and the few they meet are quick to tell them that. But they do have more access to the panoply of slaves and servants of the great and good, from door men, to kitchen hands, to fishermen who supply the food, to prostitutes. While many of these humble folk are too careful not to say much, sometimes what they do not say, is itself noteworthy. That is the conceit of the work.
I have read two other entries in this series. Each is packed with period detail which is salted throughout the work. There are no long expositions, just everyday asides and comments. Felix is an excubitor and we learn as we go that means he is a palace guard. We are spared an exposition of the nature, organisation, and origin of excubitors that would be inserted by some other writers to discharge their learning. Here the hand is light and the exposition is slight; the emphasis is always on the matters at hand.
However, John’s backstory lingers more than it should for this reader. We would be better off to find out what kind of man he is through his actions, pace John Stuart Mill, than be prompted by his unfortunate biography. My empathy for such contrivances is zero these days.
The title makes sense in the end, though the villain springs from no-where. But it does tie up all the loose ends.
Eric Mayer
Mary Reed
While this is a foreign and, in many ways, a repellant world, the authors do not attempt to explain or justify it, they just present it in its own terms. There are the fantastically rich and the poor who live on the streets, just as in Reagan’s America, and in Obama’s too. Indeed we have such dwellers in Sydney these days. All in all, the authors bring to life a cast of characters from mute beggars, clever scientists, vain artists, working stiffs, court intriguers, wealthy fops, as well as Emperor Justine and soon-to-be Emperor Justinian and she who will be obeyed, Theodora.
Many unusual terms like excutor are used and there is a eight-page glossary at the end for those who must know before turning the page.
‘The Shadow Walker’ (2006) by Michael Walters.
An exotic krimi set in Mongolia as it emerged from the Red World in the 1990s.
Where is Mongolia? Having seen so many episodes of Eggheads with contestants who do know where their elbows are, this map is included.
A series of murders, each more terrible than the previous one, in Ulaan Bataar galvanises attention at the highest level, the more so when a British technician is one of the victims in a five star tourist hotel, and then a senior police officer.
Genghis Khan, a landmark mentioned several times in the novel.
The minister of justice dispatches the one man he can trust to co-ordinate the police efforts, Nergui, he of one name. Into this brew steps a British police officer, Drew MacLeish, sent, as a sop to the slain technician’s family back home, to contribute to the investigation.
Ulaan Baatar
It is a nice context and premise. There is some travelogue in and around Ulaan Bataar, and the Gobi desert. The centrifugal and centripetal forces of the ancient traditions and new opportunities for wealth are portrayed. All of this was interesting reading.
Ulaan Baatar
The exposition is far too wordy for this reader. Too many long speeches about either the perils of modernity in Mongolia or the backstories of the principals, which always bores me to tears. In this case Nergui’s backstory is laid on with a trowel; he a man among men, a gentleman and a scholar, a preternatural athlete…. Oh hum. Sainthood can only be a matter of time.
The Gobi Desert
Let’s get to the plot and as it unwinds we better learn of the characters. I almost wished for Mike Hammer, so appropriately named. You always know where you stand with Mike, under his heel. He spent no time talking about anything but the beating he was giving you.
The author cleverly turns the language barrier into an opportunity. When Nergui speaks to natives in Mongolian, Drew studies the expressions and body language and makes inferences from those observations. The conceit is that body language and face expressions cross the cultural barrier. Perhaps they do not. Likewise, Nergui uses the presence of the British chief inspector Drew as a lever to secure cooperation from officialdom, both Mongolian (in the ministry) and British (in the embassy).
Michael Walters
Much of the tension springs from some tired clichés about politics and politicians. The unscrupulous behaviour attributed to politicians in general in these pages can be found in any middle to large organization. There is, surprise, nothing unique about politics, except its ready exposure to such clichés. I did not find any explanation of the title.
The denouement is deus ex machina. [Look it up, Mortimer!]
Intensity, Democracy, … and Brexit.
Democracy has always been about counting the votes and all the votes are equal. That is a given. So given that few stop to think about what it means. It means the minority, the losers may lose a lot unless the scope of voting is limited.
Though all votes are equal, not all outcomes are permitted. Huh? Human rights are sacrosanct, that is, they cannot be voted away by a majority. Certain other liberties and many institutions are put beyond voting, like a high or supreme court. Although many students have told me that such reservations were elitist and anti-democratic. Surely a vote for the Australian High Court would put Derryn Hinch on the bench.
Whoa! Too fast? Better stop for an illustration. X may vote ‘Yes’ and Y may vote ‘No,’ but the result matters far more to Y, if the vote is about Y’s life, limb, family, or property, than it does to X. Yet their two votes count the same. This is the problem, no account is taken of the intensity each has.
Interest is often, usually, entwined as vine to fence with intensity. I may not much care where the new distant freeway goes but those near it do care, a lot. Yet my vote equals, and cancels, one of theirs. Interest is this case refers to the immediate and material.
Intensity may also be ideological as well. Within ideology we shall include for purposes of this discussion religion, though to some adherents it is as material as snowfall. What consenting adults do in the privacy of a home is of no interest to me, but some ideologues may feel soiled by knowing of the possibility of some such activities. Indeed they may be so intense about such activities that privacy is a lesser value to be breached in the interest of policing such activities. Think bathrooms. Be that as it may.
In a polity where voting is free, that is, voting is not compulsory, turnout is one indicator of intensity. Those that care about the result are more inclined to go and to vote, even if that requires advanced registration, and on the day the weather is foul, the wait in line is long, the polling place is distant, the officials are hostile.
Intense voters go to vote, rain or shine.
More than that, intense voters round up like-minded others and take them along to vote as well, and most will then vote as the opinion leader does.
That the wind and rain in Britain may have reduced the turnout in the Brexit vote is another reminder of intensity. The Leave voters voted.
I wrote my first seminar paper in graduate school on ‘Intensity in Democratic Theory.’ It opened with the following epigram:
‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
From ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
My last undergraduate class had been English poetry, famed of 8 a.m. on Saturday mornings in McCormick Hall with Dr Harwick. These lines seemed a fitting perspective on democratic theory, but it irritated the political science professor who read it. He was likewise irritated when in the next paper I opened with Robert Frost and ‘Mending Wall’ to start a discussion of political institutions.
Robert Frost
I also quoted Saint-X, further betraying my literary side.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
‘Let a man but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world,’ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in ‘Terre des Hommes’ (Wind, Sand, and Stars) (1939). The burning man, by the way, was Adolf Hitler. Saint-X died in 1944 while flying for the Free French in North Africa.
For further reading, the sources I can recall from that intensity exercise are these.
Robert Dahl, ‘A Preface to Democratic Theory’ (Chicago University Press 1956).
Willmore Kendall and George W. Carey, The “Intensity” Problem and Democratic Theory, ‘American Political Science Review,’ Vol. 62, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 5-24.
Giovanni Sartori, ‘Democratic Theory’ (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962).
Today I did have a look at the Web of Knowledge and found a few more recent sources, but none that claimed or seemed to be definitive, all of which cited these three as foundation texts on the subject.
J. E. O. Screen. ‘Mannerheim: The Years of Preparation” (1970)
The greatest Finn, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim (1867-1951), spoke nearly no Finnish. That is just one of the paradoxes of the man and the state and nation he made.
Mannerheim’s family traced back to German Hanseatic traders who settled first in Sweden when it was a dominant power and then among the Finns where there were commercial opportunities. Mannerheim is a derivation from Mannheim, as the spell-checker keeps insisting. Mannerheim had no interest in that Teutonic past and came to view Germany as an enemy. Yet late in life he made an alliance with the devil himself in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, to save Finland from a worse fate. On that. more later.
Let’s slow down and get back to the beginning. He was one of many sons in a very well off family. His grandfather had been a Count and his father was a Baron, and Mannerheim himself was a Baron. That sounds grand but in the hierarchy of his time and place it was near the bottom of aristocracy, money or no.
As a boy he was unruly, as children may be, and loved the outdoor life, especially with horses. He was sent to military school for the discipline and Mannerheim liked the idea because of the sports and horses in the cavalry and eventually entered one.
For centuries the Finns, together with Norway and Denmark, were ruled by Sweden from distant and imperious Stockholm. This Greater Sweden eventually lost a war to Russia in 1809, and Finland was created as a dependency of Russia. In fiction it was an independent Grand Duchy, whose duke just happened to be the Czar. By that fiction local freedoms and practices continued. For example, Russia made no effort to impose military service on Finns, and permitted local militias to keep the peace. Censorship and taxation were light. The Grand Duchy of Finland served as a buffer to any future Swedish aggression, and a staging ground should Russia take the initiative.
Mannerheim’s family was Swedish, that was the maternal language, though resident among Finns for centuries when he was born. (Swedish remains an official language in Finland today.) He grew up speaking Swedish as did most of the resident aristocracy.
After several false starts, he entered military school in Russia, and there he stayed for the next thirty years. (Let that sink in. Thirty years a Russian.)
Young Mannheim, riding crop at hand.
He made a career in the Czar’s Russian army. While many Russian officers took their place by birthright, Mannerheim worked for his, and once there, he worked at it, unlike so many others. Accordingly, he rose through the ranks. He was, remember, a Baron, and there was no social barrier to promotion.
When Nicholas II was crowned, Mannerheim was selected as one of four officers who stood an honour guard on the steps of the church, a singular honour for someone who spoke Russian poorly with a heavy Swedish accent. The one barrier he faced in the army was speaking Russian, but he worked at that with the same application he showed to much else.
He married a Russian aristocrat who soon found him boring and took herself off to the south of France with their two daughters. There was little subsequent contact. She had supposed they would live in St. Petersburg while he became a staff officer, but to be promoted he had to have field commands, in one back-water after another. This book is silent on any other sexual interests he may have had.
When Russia and Japan fought over the metal and mineral riches of Manchuria in 1904-1905 he gained combat experience. He learned there that cavalry had no chance against the machine gun, and he loved horses too much to see them slaughtered to no point. Thereafter in his mind the horse was a means of transportation, not a weapon. This was not the common reaction and made him stand apart from other officers who still favoured the cavalry charge. Nonetheless he weathered his baptism of fire and gained recognition and promotion because of his cool head and clear thinking under fire.
A contemporary cartoon on the bloody conflict, showing Russia and Japan courting Manchuria.
There are estimates of 70,000 Japanese deaths, 120,000 Russian, and 20,000 Chinese by-standers in the eighteen months of combat. Teddy Roosevelt brokered a peace treaty.
The theatre of operations.
Later when the Russian General Staff wanted to gather intelligence about the far reaches of Western China, that is, Sinkiang, the duty fell to him. Mannerheim travelled for two years, filling notebooks with copious details about roads, mountain passes, fodder for animals, obstacles, fords in rivers, attitude to foreigners, capacity of the central Peking government to act in these extremities, the effect of altitude on man and beast, the grades of ascents, the frequency of avalanches, and more. He was a meticulous notetaker, a keen observer, and inquisitive questioner, so much so that Chinese authorities more than once interrogated him as a spy but his cover as a scientific explorer held. When he reached the Russian legation in Peking, it took him two months to write a report based on his notes. It was later published in two volumes.
Mannerheim’s Asia route.
Leaving aside the myriad of details, what is most impressive about this exercise is, first, that he did it largely unaided, and, second, that he realised the area had no strategic value and said so. At best a Russian incursion there might draw off Chinese men, material, and attention from the real prize, Manchuria. He said as much in his report.
He was offered another such mission but respectfully declined because he was anxious to return to field command to continue his way up the promotion ladder. In 1914 when the lights went out all over Europe he was a Major General in the Russian army and led troops into combat against the Austrians in Rumania and Germans later in Poland.
While he had been in the Orient, the Russian hand on Finland tightened. Taxes increased. Traditional freedoms were curtailed. Censorship increased. The imposition of the Russian language grew. Mannerheim’s correspondence with his large clan of brothers and sisters made him vaguely aware of this change. But there is no doubt he felt torn between a maternal interest in Finland and his personal oath of loyalty to the Czar.
Russia had been home to him for thirty years and had provided him with many more opportunities than Finns could have. He knew far more Russians than Finns, apart from his own family who, remember, were Swedes with little in common with the locals Finns among whom they lived. He spoke nearly no Finnish.
By early 1917 the wheels were falling off the Russian cart and he was caught up in it, like millions of others. He despised the mob he saw in the Bolsheviks, there was never a democratic sentiment in this man, and took leave to recuperate from war wounds in Finland, passing through the St. Petersburg station from which Lenin emerged.
With Russia collapsing, Finns declared themselves a country in 1917 and set about making one. While autonomy appealed broadly to Finns, there were many differences over the specifics. Some wanted to remain close to Russia for protection, while others wanted an entirely new course. On another plane were those who wanted a Bolshevik revolution in Finland to displace the established order of aristocracy and church, and others who wanted to fortify those institutions and practices against any and all threats. In time these divergent interest boiled down to conservative Whites who wanted a Finland independent and radical Reds who wanted a Soviet, which might well be aligned with Russia. (See Craig Cormack, ‘Kurrikka’s Dream’ (2000) for the Red side of this coin, with an Australian echo.)
The self-appointed Finnish Council’s first priority was to define and defend the territory of Finland, including the Karelian Isthmus, from predators, of whatever flag. Defence required an army, and army had to have a general. A few streets away sat a Lieutenant-General. This general’s exploits as soldier in Manchuria, explorer in Sinkiang, and general on the Eastern Front had been a matter of some national pride among Finns in the preceding years.
The book is very well researched and carefully argued. It begins with a survey of existing biographies of Mannerheim which is lost on this reader but affirms the care of the author in situating the work. It is based on extensive examination of Finnish, Russian, German, and Swedish sources, including Mannerheim’s own notebooks and letters. Altogether it seems to be a definitive work of the public life of Mannerheim. I could not find a picture of the author on the web.
Note, Mannerheim took it upon himself to convert the cavalry under his command to mounted infantry, and only the intervention of Czar at some point saved him from a reprimand for such an initiative. As World War I approached the Russian army was spending more on sabres for cavalry than machine guns, according to Barbara Tuchman in ‘The Guns of August’ (1962), discussed elsewhere on this blog. As journalists are always criticising the last war, so generals often prepare for it.
IKEA krimis – and other irritants.
Bleaders, today’s lesson concerns those krimis that I cannot finish. There are several varieties filed under the heading UNFINISHED, and I have commented on some specimens earlier, like those in which everything is written in the present tense, flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, back stories, etc.
That has become a deal-breaker with this reader. One weekend I read a newspaper review of book that interested me, and I was about to order it, when in the last paragraph the reviewer said that this historical study was written entirely in the present tense which the reviewer found confusing and distracting. Amen! I decided I could not read a 400-page book on an historical subject in the present tense, too hard on my teeth. (Tooth gnashing, grinding, and gritting while reading is not recommended by dentists.)
Books described as Thrillers almost always suffer from One-tense-itis, or Present tense-itis, not sure which of these neo-logisms I prefer. (I do know I prefer the hyphen [-] in neo-logism though WORD’s autocorrect does not.) Tangent completed, now back to today’s subject.
There then are IKEA krimis.
Many, many krimis read like catalogues where every article of furniture and clothing is described in detail, from pencil stubs to curtin material as the protagonists move around and meet people. Page after page is spent on fabrics and furnishings in some combination of Martha Stewart with Land’s End and IKEA catalogues, and as always at first I read it thinking that it either sets the scene or relates to, in a manner yet to be revealed, the plot, but no, all too often it is just what it appears to be, padding.
Pain in the Back-story. In the same krimi is often to be found back-story-itis, another virus of the genre, in which each character from taxi drivers, to receptionists, to passers-by are introduced in such detail that an innocent reader like me thinks the character must be important and I should pay attention because later that seemingly incidental character will figure in the plot, but…alas, no.
As in many other art forms, the primary audience seems to be other writers (perhaps, on professional awards panels), and not readers, and so the author displays the creative ability to generate backstories for everyone. Ugh! Padding by another name.
Of course, in this, as in so much else, I am in a minority, because the very books I have in mind are described as best-sellers, as great works, lionised by authoritative sources like the ‘New York Times.’ I struggle to forebear from naming titles but they have been many over the years, and I recently struck another one.
This latest example catalogues fittings, furnishings, and clothing without end, and to no end. In parallel the historical settings, which is what captured my initial interest, was treated as a one-dimensional.
The action, such as it is, takes place in Washington D.C. at Christmas 1941, and yet to all the participants in the story the war is all but won because the Germans are stuck in Russia. Huh? Yes, Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 and by December it was no longer advancing, but the crucible of Stalingrad was fought between August 1942 and February 1943 and that was the first major defeat.
Likewise the book also makes the German V-Rocket program at Peenemünde much more developed in 1941 than it was, and also has the Germans desperate for these secret weapons in December 1941!
To top that there is also a reference to kamikaze Japanese pilots in December 1941 but these attacks began in October 1944 when the Japanese were desperate. See what I mean. I stopped reading after about sixty pages.
The result was overwritten with a cast of historical characters, and undercooked with the historical context half-baked.
Though I was much interested by the period and the historical characters I just could not wade through more and more description, while gritting my teeth at the useless catalogue combined with historical mistakes. This book is a ‘New York Times’ bestseller published by one of great New York City publishers and part of series. Conclusion? Different jokes for different folks. Different facts for different….
‘The Disappeared’ (2002) by Kristine Rusch
An adult and thought-provoking sci-fi krimi. Recommended for adults.
I found myself squirming several times when reading it, tempted to put it aside, but then I realised it was getting under my skin and that was the point. Chapeaux!
Moreover the characterisations of the human protagonists are credible and the plot twists and turns follow the two rules of Sherlock Holmes: there is a logical explanation to everything and nothing is as it seems. That all adds up to a four-star review.
In a future universe there are many species who trade and cohabit the same planets with multi-cultural laws to regulate dealings and to settle disputes. The distant Multi-Cultural Tribunal issues absolute and binding rulings and warrants and it falls to the local police to enforce them, no questions asked.
Many misunderstandings arise in business transactions and in cohabitation, and there are many active warrants, which never expire. The punishments the other species apply are, well, inhuman. For several of the species apprehension of a violator is a matter of honor and no effort or expense is spared in pursuit. In some alien legal codes, ignorance is no defence. A guilty mind is not necessary.
One generation of entrepreneurs sees in this situation a market gap. Secret companies emerge to help those targeted by a warrant to disappear (and start a new life elsewhere), a relocation service for the guilty, not for witnesses.
There are many sources of tension in the setup. There are several mysteries for the police to unravel. Negotiations with two separate sets of aliens each sensitive to the least cultural slight. There is the Earth Alliance government, remote and inaccessible, for which keeping the peace by adhering to the strict letter of the Multi-Cultural Tribunal warrant is paramount. The fate that awaits those apprehended does not bear thought.
The more so because several of the species in the Tribunal act on inter-generational justice. Like Chinese emperors of old and North Korean dictators of today, they have justice to the third, fourth, fifth degree, or more. Huh? That means the punishment often falls on relatives of the culprit, relatives who themselves did nothing and may not even know the culprit. For those who shelter from the news, it is common in North Korea for the sins of the father to fall alike on daughters and grandsons. When the father is executed so are his children and grandchildren to eradicate the line. Now imagine being an officer who rounds up the babes in arms for execution.
In this novel one of the felons to be surrendered is a baby. Another is a woman who cut down a tree, only later to be told it was a sacred relic. In the law of that alien world ignorance is no defence. Still others did in fact kill a member of another species in a drunken fight over money. And so on. All of the felons in this novel are guilty but that does not make any of it easier.
All of this comes to a head because a second generation of entrepreneurs has emerged and decided to increase value for shareholders by selling-out the disappeared ones to their pursuers.
While it is illegal to help felons disappear, it is perfectly legal to sell them out.
What a beautiful scheme. The credits flow in drowning out the screams of those who disappeared and now are found. Disembowelment, babies surgically modified to become alien, condemnation to mortal slave labor, or shot on the spot are among the punishments for the humans apprehended, all compliant with the ruling of the Tribunal. The job of the local police is to hand over the felons.
Those who had successfully disappeared for decades are now sought and arrested. The human police execute the warrants of several alien species on a Moonbase. So many that they cannot keep up. One asks why low level police officer negotiate with aliens, but the answer is perfectly sensible bureaucratic logic. No more senior official wants to get involved in such distasteful and explosive business, so it is shoved down the line. That will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organisation.
This is the first is a long-running series.
K. K. Rusch.
It is well written though I flipped some pages quickly as there is nothing special in much of it, and too much musing by some of the characters for my taste, but mercifully shorn of mindless descriptions that bedevil so much of the krimi genre these days. The dialogue is functional. The author does not try to describe the aliens apart from some vague outlines, the Rev, the Disty, and the Wynin. Just enough to make clear that they are alien, not humans with heavy make-up. That is altogether an intelligent decision.
I particularly liked the senior investigating officer DeRicci and her one-way ticket approach, and the Retrieval Artist in the last pages. The last scene was a surprise and a nice coda to much that went before.
When I read the title ‘The Disappeared’ my first thought was all those who have disappeared from military regimes in Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and…..
A sobering reminder that there are worse governments than the local mob.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, ‘The Soccer War’ (1986)
A unique journalist this, as Poland’s one and only foreign correspondent for many years he covered the world of Poland’s allies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. His extended essay ‘The Emperor’ (1989) on the reign of Haile Selassie in Ethiopian is nonpareil.
The insights, the wit, and desiccated humour all stay with the reader long after. Though much of it is fiction larded with a great deal of speculation it makes sense in a way the description of facts and furnishings does not.
The essays in his ‘Travels with Herodotus’ (2002) are likewise memorable. This volume is much more thematic than the compilations of his journalism in other titles. The focus here is on history and the recording thereof.
When ‘The Soccer War’ came to light among the book boxes at home I put it aside to peruse, and peruse I did. (We are still unpacking after last year’s move.)
Most of the places and events in these essays are unknown to me. I never heard of them at the time, or if I did, the memory faded at day’s end. But Kapuściński went where Poland supported insurgents, governments, or had economic interest in the nooks and crannies of the Cold War. He travelled, as he remarks elsewhere, Polish-class. [Use the imagination.]
The Soccer War was a three-month armed conflict between El Salvador (the Switzerland of Central America) and Honduras, then a brother-in-arms with Poland in the Socialist International. Though the animosities and tensions between the two countries were many and deeply rooted, the war exploded when the two played soccer for a place in the World Cup in July 1969. These two midgets were deadly serious, and several thousand people died, and tens of thousands more were displaced. In the aftermath social services collapsed in both countries and many more died of disease and untreated illnesses.
Kapuscinski with some comrades.
Kapuściński happened to be there and became an eye-witness, though he hardly saw anything, try as he might. Think of Fabrice at Waterloo in Stendhal’s ‘The Charterhouse of Parma’ (1839). Add jungles, swamps, and a language barrier.