Category: Book Review

The Fear Index (2011) by Robert Harris

Good Reads meta-data is 323 pages, rated 3.55 by 16,526 litizens.

Genre: Thriller diller.

DNA: Switzerland.

Verdict: Gulp!  

Tagline:  The AI did it!  

It all began when Rich Brain received a book fin the mail, a first edition of Chuck Darwin’s Origin of Species. Nice. It will add to his collection of first editions that he never looks at among the other luxury goods stuffed into his vast Geneva mansion. (Thereafter passages from Darwin are chapter epigrams. Neat.)  

Trouble is, who would give churlish, reclusive Rich Brain anything?  He rings up the seller at 2 am, because he is Rich Brain and time means nothing to this titan, to ask who bought the book. The groggy seller says, ‘You did.’  Huh!  That threw Big Brain but Seller read out the details, including the bank account, which is later checked and found to be one of his many stashes, this one is not in a Cayman Islands tax shelter. The mystery begins!

(I have occasionally received a book delivered in the mail and forgotten both that I ordered it and why I wanted it. But I knew who to blame.  The dog!)  

Rich Brain is a mathematical genius, just ask him. Wait! Don’t he will simply sneer at you for asking about the obvious. While Brain disdains money, he disdains even more those without it. He seems to characterise those around him from the outside in. Think Jay Gatsby. A man wearing a cheap suit must be a cheap (= stupid) man, and so on, thus reasons this Croesus.  Although it is true that he disdains just about everyone else, too. He is an equal opportunity despiser of one and all.  

This genius has devised an Artificial Intelligence program, call it Vix, capable of learning to trade stocks and he has been minting money from it.  Trades of a billion US dollars is all in a day’s work.  Overnight he makes millions, each and every night. Oh hum. 

Well the Darwin book is one thing but an intruder into his fortress home who seems to have walked in through the front door, politely leaving his shoes at the mat, despite the Maginot Line security, is quite another. The plot thickens. In what follows there is much to’ing and fro’ing in Geneva that I liked. I spent a day there once including a homage to Rousseau.  

He is now caught between two men in cheap suits, a weary police officer and the intruder. Though his coincidental sightings of the later stretch credulity.

Is Rich Brain having a schizophrenic nervous breakdown? Is someone out to get him? Are both true, or neither?  He goes off the rails, but was he pushed or did he jump? Then again, he was never quite on the rails to begin with. Meanwhile, what is Vix doing?  Well quite a lot, and that is scary, too. I thought of the Forbin Project (1970). Reviewed elsewhere on the Blog.

Vix is determined to survive per Darwin.

Great ride; no finish.  Why did Vix gaslight Brain (book) and then try to get him killed (intruder)?  Was it an Oedipus complex? Will Brain be tried for murdering the German?  Does Vix have yet a third location?  Why did Gabby latch onto Brain in the first place, and second why did she stick with him?  Will Inspector Weary make it to retirement?  

P.S. I classed it as a ‘thriller’ above but it is not written in the frenetic, confused, jump-cut style which leaves it to the reader to fit the jigsaw puzzle of words together. A mercy that.   

Hansjörg Schneider, Silver Pebbles (1993).

Good Reads meta-data is 183 pages, rated 3.58 by 189 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Swiss.

Verdict:  Bah.

Tagline: Bah!

Liked descriptions of winter weather, city, train station, and the Rhine River…. Also liked the personalities of the supermarket check-out woman and her de facto: She practical and down to earth; He a dreamer who thinks he is smarter than he is. In fact he is almost too dumb to believe.  

Didn’t like Inspector Grump’s constant whining and whingeing, and feeling sorry for himself.  Nor the aggressive verbal relations he applied to his squad members and they reciprocated.  Repetitive blaming all ills and woes on unnamed ‘higher ups.’  I suppose the author thinks that is social criticism, but it is not. It is just lazy carping. He should read some Michel Foucault.  

Very little detecting or police work, and ever more padding about snow, interspersed with Inspector Grumble’s simple-minded monologues on the idiocracy of everyone else in the Ruling Class/Deep State.

The Basel train station has an unusual history in World War II, and that fact always makes me receptive to novels set that city. The station was split, half administered by Nazis and half by Swiss.  I read a thriller that started there, see: https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/2021/09/target-switzerland-a-novel-of-political-intrigue-2020-by-william-walker/. I read that earlier book because I had found an intriguing reference to this railway station schizophrenia.  Nothing about that in this pot simmerer which did not reach a boil.  

Lucian, A True Story.

Good Reads meta-data is 90 pages, rated 3.5 by 4 litizens.

Genre: Fiction

DNA: Greco-Roman.

Verdict: Fake news.

Tagline: It’s all lies, and that is the truth! 

 ‘Call me Luke’ (AD 125-180) was a geographic Syrian and Roman citizen who went west to fame and fortune, first as a visiting professor hither and yon, and then as a celebrity author. He was often ‘in conversation’ with local nobs, engaged in panel discussions, and spruiked his many books at personal appearances. Like most learned Romans of the time he spoke and wrote Greek, the language of international culture, as well as enough Latin to cash his appearance cheques.

Lucian’s story is true in that it is all lies, and he tells us from the get-go. Is he that logician’s specimen come to life, a lying Blackfoot? You be the judge!

In this autobiographical foray Luke takes off, literally, in search of a good time and willing ladies, with fifty other likely lads; together they sail through the pillars of Hercules to wild and woolly adventures on earth, on the sea, on the moon, among the stars, in the belly of 300 kilometre long whale, on an island of tree women, and more.

The sarcasm and satire are piled on. The main targets are earlier tellers of tall tales like Herodotus who reported every rumour as fact in the best tradition of the free press. Lucian outdoes them all in his fantasies. But he is lying as he happily reminds the reader.

He ends by promising a volume two, but that, too, was a lie.

It figures.

Of course then as now there were Good Readers who thought the lie was itself a lie and believed what he said to be true concealed behind that lie. Straussians avant le mot. 

I got around to reading it because Thomas More with Desi Erasmus translated it from Greek to Latin, and published it in Florence (1519) in Machiavelli’s lifetime. I began to pick again at the thread that Machiavelli might then have been aware of More because he was a personal friend of the printer. Also because Lucian might have turned More’s mind to Utopia.

Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016).

Good Reads meta-data is 442 pages rated 4.09 by 1161 litizens. 

Genre: History.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: A synthesis. 

Tagline: ‘It takes a strong will to resist the lure of ebooks.’

So many books are about books it is no surprise that there are books about the physical object we call a book: A biography of the book.

What I learned about the evolution of the book was that it is a tale of laborious trial and error by many hands over several millennia to get to the book as we kne/ow it: Paper, ink, fonts, binding. Gutenberg was one of a cavalcade of obsessives who went broke trying to improve book printing.  

Other tidbits include the following: 

Book-locks which I have seen were not parental controls which I had thought but to tighten closed books so that the parchment would not curl.  

The consequences of shelving books on end rather than lying flat were many. See also, Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (2000) on this point.

In many cases fonts were named for the first to develop them. From Italy Italic was a reaction to the heavy Gothic type Gutenberg used.

Foolscap paper derived from a watermark left on certain size sheets of paper in England 17th Century after the fall of monarchy.  The crown was replaced by a ‘Fool’s cap’ watermark as sign of loyalty to the new order.

Paper sizes A1 to A10 originated in Germany.  A1= 1/2 a square meter, each subsequent size is a half of its predecessor.  Sizes of paper originated with the reach of workers who made paper.  

• Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1786): The initial idea for a proportional paper system came from this German scientist. He proposed a width-to-height ratio of 1:√2, recognizing its mathematical efficiency for scaling. A sheet of paper with this ratio can be folded in half to produce two smaller sheets that have the exact same proportions as the original.
• Dr. Walter Porstmann (1922): German engineer formalized Lichtenberg’s concept into the DIN 476 standard. This standard set the largest size, A0, to have an area of exactly one square meter, with all other “A” sizes defined by successively halving the larger sheet. Such a progression is called geometric harmony.
• Codified by International Standard Organisation in 1975.

I also found a clanger when author says Herbert Hoover was Secretary of State in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet (p 418).  Not only was Hoover not Secretary of State, he was not in cabinet at all, though he certainly worked closely with Wilson’s administration. 

More interesting was James John Audubon:

• born in Haiti to slave owning family of planers. The family returned to France when the slave revolt stirred. In 1814 family sent teenage James John to Pennsylvania to avoid conscription in Napoleon’s endless wars.
• He was a boy naturalist, first in Haiti, then France, then USA.
• Tried to make a living out of his naturalist interest.  Bird book with travels.  No one in USA wanted to publish it.  Took it to London. No. Then Edinburgh where he succeeded.
• One copy of all ‘textual books’ must be given to British Library.  He only had 200 and was deeply in debt.  Didn’t want to surrender even one copy for nothing.  So extracted text describing locale and birds from the pictures and printed it separately and compared to the illustrated book this textual book sold cheaply and gave that to the BL, but not the picture book.

In medieval Europe mirrors were used by the faithful to reflect divine rays from relics onto pilgrim. A good business for touts outside churches selling mirrors. A proto selfie? 

So many technical details, so many proper names I got lost in the morass.

Remember the Norwegian ‘Medieval helpdesk’ on You Tube?  It is still there. 

Author opens with that tagline above and then says little or nothing about ebooks.  Whoops, no that silent withdrawal of Nineteen Eighty-Four (p 9), though he used the numeric title and not the words. Orwell stipulated words not numbers for the title, but no one listens to authors. Certainly not publishers. 

Me, I compared the resistance to printed books (leads to atrophy of memory, allows rubbish to be published and read, makes us solitary rather than conversational and convivial, and  class aesthetics because printers were begrimed working class, whereas scribes were learned, devout monks) to current resistance to ebooks (too fiddly, put bookstores out of business, allows a tidal wave of crap, and does not have the aesthetic qualities of a nice book). Certainly right about the crap. I can leave the aesthetics to others. Video dented but did not destroy cinemas and I hope digital books will not destroy bookstores. What has already destroyed far more bookstores were the predatory mega franchise chains like Barnes and Noble, Borders, Smith, Waterstone, and their ilk which set out to do so with pricing and location.

Good Reads meta-data is 331 pages, rated 3.79 by 1726 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Kiwi.

Verdict: Trying (too hard).

Tagline:  Abandon credulity all ye who read here. 

Havelock North NZ pop. 14,500 in the wine country of Hawke’s Bay is the scene of much mayhem and even, perhaps, murder.  Happily ensconced bookstore proprietors, who just happen to be retired Plods from Old Blighty, get drawn into this netherworld along with their dog, which has some of the best lines: ‘Arf!’  Their store is called Sherlock Tomes, and that bon mot is why I choose to read this book. But never judge a book by one clever twist. I tried and failed a time ago to read one featuring the Cat of the Baskervilles.  

I found this one hard going wading through pages and pages of superfluous detail. True some of it redounded later, but it was impossible to detect which was relevant. TMI. About clothes, decor, food (including dog food), many other sidetracks. Even where life and limb is threatened, the proprietors cannot focus. Neither could this reader.

There is a lot to like about the plot but it was whitened out by the blizzard of ephemera. It was hard to believe that the original police investigation was as superficial as it seemed in retrospect.  The disappearance of a school girl, followed by the departure of her best friend, the disappearance of a drug dealer, and the disappearance of $NZ100,000 all with a few days of each other, and only the first school girl was investigated. It was pretty clear that stereotyped FW was a blue herring from the get-go.  He was too bad to be true.  Likewise the multiple authorship which was hinted at in the text was on the cards.  

I read it while sitting on a veranda looking out to the Pacific Ocean in Fiji. Lucky me. I left the paperback copy in the guest library of the Royal Davui Resort, August 2025. Perhaps the next reader will be more receptive and perceptive than me. This is the first of a series and ends with a cliff hanger to the next volume.  Not for me.

Good Reads meta-data is 368 pages rated 4.28 by 72 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

DNA: Academic.

Verdict: The anti-platonic Plato.

Tagline: He kept all of receipts.

Focus is in the title, that is, Plato’s on-again, off-again relationship with the tyrant father and son, Dionysius the Elder and the Younger of Syracuse on Sicily.  Before going on please note, that in Greek the word ‘tyrant’ meant a ruler who was not hereditary. Because Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars looked east (as did Alexander the Great later in retaliation), and much of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War concentrated on the Greek peninsula and the east, with the exception of the catastrophe at this very same Syracuse in earlier times when it was a democracy. In contrast, the extensive Greek settlements in the western Mediterranean are not as well documented and known.  But Greek colonies populated southern Italy, Sicily, Marseilles in France, as far as Cadiz in Spain.  

The greatest single power among the Western Greeks was Syracuse. It had wealth from silver and gold, and large population compared to many other cities. Its double harbour gave it an advantage in sea trade.  And it had, by the time the Dionysius two ruled, a formidable military reputation after having defeated that Athenian invasion in the Peloponnesian War.  

Plato went to Syracuse – a long and expensive voyage with some risks from weather and pirates – three times over two decades.  He did so, when the smoke and mirrors of scholarship have been exhausted, to encourage the ruler(s) of Syracuse to exercise moderation.  He hoped to convert a ruler to think of the whole in the long term against the highest and most abstract standard.  The Dionysii were infamous for their cruelty, debauchery, hedonism, and worse, but Plato decided he could but try, despite the apparent odds.  The Elder was cruel and rapacious but liked to have trophy wives, slaves, and intellectuals in his entourage. The Younger was vain, selfish, and debauched by food, drink, and sex. Not promising ground then, but Plato had a student of old at court, one Dion who was wealthy and an in-law of the Dionysii to pave the way for him.  So Plato tried and tried again, and again.  To no avail.  

These efforts have long fascinated Platonists and much has been written about them over the centuries. The author’s mastery of this multi-lingual literature is impressive. Very. Intriguing also to learn Twenty-First century efforts to apply MRI technology to reading carbonised scrolls destroyed/preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  

Instead of admiring Plato for dirtying his hands, even risking his life, and trying to redeem the tyrants (and thereby lighten their yoke on the people of Syracuse), he is indicted for interfering by hindsight moralists. But he did little more than advise moderation. Does make him liable for what followed. It seems so since he is routinely arraigned as an accessory.   

I first read of this story in Mary Renaut’s novelThe Mask of Apollo (1954) when I was an graduate student. It was recommended to me by someone whose identity has by now escaped me. Perhaps I will re-read that.  We will see. 

Awhile ago I read and commented on a book the front cover of which declared it to be a biography of Plato.  It was a very well done account of the history of his time and place, but not a biography of the man.  Ergo, I was still in the market for a biography and when Howard Whitton sent me a review of this book, I had a look, and it promised some more biography.  This is another excellent study that tries to bring out the biographical echoes in Plato’s essays, particularly Republic.

A few months ago I read and commented on a Straussian study of Plato’s thirteen letters (Ariel Helfer, Plato’s Letters [2023]) that….  That entry is elsewhere on this blog for clickers. Well, Straussians make a lot out of little or nothing.  If aboriginal stargazers concentrated on the black areas of the sky rather than the stars, Straussians concentrate on what it absent; silence; what is not said.  Of course, there is a lot of nothing, right Jean-Paul? And you can make it mean whatever you want want.  

Long ago I read Ludwig Marcuse, Plato and Dionysius: a Double Biography (1947) and learned nothing about either of them from it.  

Good Reads meta-data is 146 pages, rated 3.11 by 193 litizens

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Kept me guessing.

Tagline: ‘Gulp!’

The briefings for the 1942 Operation Torch included everything but an encounter with an alien or a trip in its craft (forward a billion years or so in time).  Two Allied agents on a secret mission behind enemy lines in Tunisia meet two Germans on a similar quest but before they can kill each other and be done with it by page 10, there is that presence against which they, hesitantly combine forces.

It is the usual suspects in this motley crew, a Scots scientist, an upper-lip-stiffed Brit, a crazed Nasty, and a mercenary woman.  When they emerge from the craft they find a strange old world, and the strangeness is very well portrayed, as is the porcelain living doll they find there.  

Adventures follow. What they needed was Captain Future and the three Future Men (tricky though because none of the latter trio is a man).

Turns out ’47’ was the right answer. ‘729’ was a close second.

Both the aberrant strangeness of the alien and the old world are the best parts of the book.  I found it intriguing and diverting for a few hours. Though there were two women – one wily and one porcelain – in the story, both are ciphers, and disappear in the last two acts.  

The date 1 January refers to the publication of the first episode in a serial form of the novel only a few months after Operation Torch. 

Genre: Sy Fy: Species: Epic poem; subspecies: Blank verse. 

Good Reads meta-data is 157 pages, rated 3.85 by 3001 litizens. 

DNA: Sweden.

Verdict: 47.  

Tagline: Helvetet är andra människor.  (Hell is other people.)

This epic poem is the basis of an opera, and four films. Whew!  When the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 this volume was named as the second most important book published in Swedish. Double whew! The only Nobel Prize for SyFy, apart from those in economics.

What’s the story then?

Aniara, a routine shuttle carrying 8,000 people, lifts off for Mars from a despoiled Earth.  (‘I told you so,’ said Greta, again.) It is a three-week flight aboard this Volvo ferry with its casino, IKEA shopping maze, theatres, and other mod cons with 2000 rooms, each with an en suite bathroom(?).  Millions have taken this ride before.  But hardly has this one left Earth orbit for the jaunt when the unimaginative writer’s friend, a meteor shower, strikes.  The contractor who built Aniara did not anticipate such an occurrence and the ship is damaged. Like the mighty KM Bismarck, the Aniara’s rudder is mangled and the craft cannot be steered.  Instead it is thrown well off course toward the light-centuries distant Lyra constellation.

Pippi Longstocking, Max von Sydow’s knight, Inspector Beck, Björn Börg, Olof Palmé, Greta (not you know whom) Garbo, and other Swedish stereotypes are on board. The crew attempts repairs without success; nor is there is any emergency road service from Volvo for Aniara.  These 8000 are now condemned to live out their lives, as are their descendants, within this metallic shell on the way to Lyra where they will never arrive (because the ship itself will wither en route into a Marie Celeste hulk).  What meaning is there in this existential crisis?  See above.

(Was this the basis for StarLost in 1973.  Hope not. But it is a trope in a lot of SyFy before and after 1956 – the ark as coffin.)

In addition to all the other short term diversions the ferry has Mima with its minder.  What is Mima?  Mima is an AI as conceived in 1956. It is referred to in the same casual I might refer to my iMac, and so I can only guess what it is.  Mima is there to inform, entertain, educate, and pacify passengers during the short trip to Mars. It has a repository of tapes, both video and audio, but it also receives and intercepts transmissions from the ether, including from Earth. Intended to function mostly as a diversion for three weeks at a time, when left on continuously for the years of this journey it becomes increasingly self-conscious, and it is aware of the situation. It is sentient enough to realise the hopeless situation even as it itself wears out, those flash drives and circuit boards are not immortal, and Mima is sentient enough to feel dread of the darkness to come.  The minder became the central character in the two film versions I have seen.  

So for the first few months or even years Mima keeps up a happy face, but like Grock the clown Mima grows melancholy as it ages and becomes decrepit. The CDs wear out from repeated spins.  It receives incomprehensible transmissions, perhaps from alien beings. It loses contact with dying Earth long before all that.  

(Note to self: turn off Dexter, iMac, before it becomes sentient.)

Mima mirrors the hopes of the passengers and as this robot loses hope, so do they, or vice versa.  On board the population re-enacts much of the stupidity of life on Earth. There is wasteful use of resources that seem to be infinite on the Aniara.  Salvation cults come and go. Orange demigods strut and fret. First there is unlimited orgy followed by celibacy. Human sacrifice was a short-lived fad. (Get it?) Through it all the Aniara drifts on.  

***

It is partly a take on a common Cold War setting of mixed group of survivors of a nuclear war, having to deal with each other. e.g., Five (1951), Day the World Ended (1955), On the Beach (1959), This is not a Test (1962), The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), and many more.  This trope has since been done to death and well past that in the Post-Apocalyptic genre that has exploded in recent times.  But in this case not one of the passengers is a distinctive personalities. 

Good Reads meta-data is 274 pages, rated 3.90 by 7130 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Italy

Verdict: Nolo contendere.

Tagline:  Proving what might not have happened. (Yeah, not punchy.) 

When a young boy is found dead near a beach resort one of the usual suspects is arrested and fitted to the crime. Being a Senegalese peddler, the racial stereotypes in the court of public opinion have him convicted before the handcuffs go on.

Hero reluctantly gets involuntarily involved and slowly picks apart the circumstantial case against Peddler.  There is much insider detail about the judiciary, the judicial system, and policing in Bari, way down south.  The telling is smooth and packed with asides into the humanity of all involved, though mostly that of the lawyer, though not of the police officers who do have a cardboard quality.  

The main events are in the court room where Hero casts doubt on the certainties of the prosecution. The means by which that is done is fascinating, a seminar in defence by obfuscation.  There is a very great deal of talk. One defence summation is timed at more than two-hours.  Could the judges, let alone a jury, cope with that much exposition?  (Many social-psychology experiments conclude that a person’s attention span is no more than 20 minutes at a time.) They must have been made of stern stuff and elastic bladders because I am sure students could not withstand a 2 1/2 passive lecture. 

Along the way we learn much about the lawyer, his life, his loves, his habits, his car…[TMI].  On the other hand we learn only a little about the Senegalese peddler, apart from the facts that he is a legal immigrant, multi-lingual, and – spoiler – maybe innocent of the alleged crime.  That is another thing we do not learn, who committed the crime, how, and why. This story does not follow that Perry Mason trope, that the best way to prove a client innocent is to find the guilty party.  

I said ‘maybe’ above because I was not quite sure what I was supposed to think. Nor was I sure whether the police officers’ superficial effort was (1) to calm public opinion with a quick arrest or (2) if they really believed he was guilty, but (3) were too lazy to make a proper investigation, (4) because his being black was sufficient for conviction.  Whoops there I go again tying myself into knots over nothing. 

Also under the heading of unknown is what lawyer had to say to his ex-wife that was so important.  OK, may I blinked.  

This is the first in a series by the author, a retired judge who managed a number of mafia trials, and lived to write these tales unlike some others.  Both are major achievements.