The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II
Goodreads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.83 by 1211 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: Young Adult
After reading The Good Shepard I was primed for more nautical escapades and the write-up and praise for this title enticed me into downloading the (lengthy) sample. I read it and was glad when it ended. That is an hour lost.
It is presented in the manner of a thriller, chopping and changing from time and place without apparent rhyme of reason to keep the reader guessing, or in my case, grousing. Not only that…. Each vignette is padded with back and side stories which have nothing to do with the title.
The offering is based on a synthesis of secondary sources and it shows. The descriptions, of which there are far too many anyway in those back and side stories, are thin. In first sixty pages only one woman appears and a charitable reader will suppose she must be one of the ingenues who became ingenious. But it is only guesswork.
I could go on but I noticed that the writer’s biography refers to him as a ‘video game pundit’ and that suffices to indicate the intellectual level of this book by a writer whose ‘criticism and journalism has been featured in numerous high-profile publications,’ followed by a depressing list of mastheads whose editors ought to have known better.
The breathless History Channel ‘Now It Can Be Told’ presentation is trite. The author warns the reader will be surprised and shocked that board games are used in planning military operations. It seems to have been news to the author that the boards are maps and tokens represent forces constrained by circumstance. Alexander the Great used sand tables to out-think his adversaries; generals and sergeants since have drawn plans in dirt to assess a situation. (Themistocles did so, too, long before Alex but I fear this author will have not heard of this admiral who lured the Persian fleet to its doom by using pebbles on a beach to test his hypothesis.)
The Verdict above as Young Adult indicates that such a readership might find it informative. Anyone who has any interest in the subject already knows all of this and more. Indeed, many tweenage boys who play video games will know all of this already.
By the way, some of the Good Reads reviewers who made it to the end have observed that the ingenious women amount to less than a quarter of the total. Does it follow that three-quarters is padding? ‘Fraid so. Still the overall rating of 3.83 is IMHO proof of the value of Good Reads ratings.
GoodReads meta-data is 222 pages, rated 4.17 by 8,192 litizens.
Genre: historical fiction.
Verdict: Detailed and compelling.
It reads in good part like a study in leadership with much inner dialogue and very little of CGI shot ‘em action of the (trailers for the) film (Greyhound).
Convoy J45 of thirty-seven merchant ships crosses the North Atlantic in the winter of early 1942. There are troop ships from Canada packed with men. Enough fuel in five oilers to power the entirety of the Britain’s Royal Navy all over the world for one day. Food and medicine to keep alive thousands of the very young and the very old. There is also a boatload of women, volunteer nurses. The load is a weighty in every sense.
It is also varied. The merchants, liners, and oilers are Greek, Norwegian, American, Canadian, Dutch, Danish, Polish, and French. Each nationality must put aside its way of doing things and cooperate with the whole, led by a British ship. Accordingly, the signals (by flag and light) are terse and few. No complex manoeuvre or qualified directions can be given to such a polyglot assembly. Keep it simple!
By a quirk of enlistment dates, the senior naval officer is Commander Krause, USN. He has many years of preparation and is well trained and highly motivated, and completely inexperienced in the duty, to the North Atlantic, and with the new ship he is on, and unknown to both his crew and 3000 other men sailing under his command in the whole of the convoy.
His interior monologues in decision-making lay out the tactical and strategic chessboard on which each ship moves. We also learn along the way that Krause, despite his obsessive efforts, has been judged only an average officer and will not be promoted any time soon. He is a ‘C’ student who studies long hours, keeps notes, tries hard, is dedicated, and just scapes by. In war even ‘C’ students must serve.
Keeping the convey’s ships together in the cruel sea is almost impossible but absolutely necessary since stragglers attract U-boats. To herd the ships of the convoy and to protect them from U-boats Krause has two destroyers and two corvettes. His own ship, one of the destroyers, is the reeling USS Keeling, as the crewmen say, while the other destroyer is a battle-scared Polish ship that escaped Danzig. One corvette is British and the other Free French. Four navies working as one with four different sets of protocols, training, equipment, and attitudes. The officers of the four ships have been expected to learn and comply with a 259-page manual of operations for such missions in their spare time. It is, of course, in English and the French and Polish officers have tutors (liaison officers) to help them. The manual is a compromise written by a committee in London, and reads like it. There is no index.
The other three naval captains, his juniors in service, have been at war for more than two years and their crews have suffered casualties and the ships show battle damage. Yet he and the pristine Keeling are in command.
Krause is a serious man who is mindful of his own limitations and has devoured the manual in between sessions of meditation and prayer in the few minutes he has to himself. Those minutes are few. His dedication might compensate for his lack of ability and his lack of experience in these waters and convoy duty, the writer seems to imply.
The decisions, the assessments, the reports, the weather are all endless, relentless, and merciless. On the bridge there is a constant flow of information to which he must react. Radar and sonar are limited in the weather, and so are the six-man lookout watches in rubber suits, roped to their stations, drenched in ice water at every pitch, roll, or yaw. They can see things the radar and the sonar cannot see or may miss with so many other ships nearby, a periscope, a floating mine, an oil slick, a torpedo wake ten-feet below the surface of the boiling sea, a life raft; if they don’t blink; if the salt water does not burn their eyes; if the cold does not freeze over the binocular lenses.
None of this is good. The pressure, the friction, the potential for catastrophe are ever-present. Then it gets worse when the six-week trained sonar operator reports a positive return. Ping! Action is required this instant. Or is it? Sonar operators before the war were trained in twelve-weeks, and passed by scoring 9 out of 10 or better on three tests. In order to get ships crewed, that training had been cut to six weeks, and one test with a passing score of 6 out of 10. The same can be said of most of the rest of the crew from the gunners, to the depth charge mechanics, to the cooks, all of them half-trained and inexperienced in the North Atlantic.
Moreover, as Krause had silently observed since taking command of the Keeling some of them did not want to be there and it showed in posture, by intonation, and with looks. He knew that for all of them to survive, for the ship to complete its mission, everyone of them had to do his assigned duty completely and immediately. He knew that. He was not so sure some of the crewmen knew that. Well, they are going to find out now.
Green water coming!
There follows a long game of hide-and-seek as the Keeling, with Krause’s lack of experience but that thick manual, tracks that sonar ping, which in time by its own manoeuvres proves itself to be a U-boat commanded by an practiced and cunning captain with a disciplined crew. While on the surface the Krause has many advantages, but the U-boat turns some of the strengths into weaknesses with tricks and feints. The Keeling is faster, but with a deke here causes it to overshoot and lose time in U-turning.
In the flow of data that is fed to Krause about the elusive U-boat, the Keeling itself, the other escorting warships, the 37 craft of the convoy, also comes – in writing – a Most Secret Signal from the British Admiralty that the radio operator hands him, because it must not be spoken aloud. A wolf-pack is definitely in the waters ahead. (This intelligence is the fruit of the Bletchley Park boffins and must not be revealed to anyone who does not need to know in anyway. After reading the message Krause orders the operator to destroy it by burning it in a bucket on the bridge.)
The tension of all of these proceedings is marvellous, and not a shot has been fired, nor a definite sighting of the enemy made, but the knowledge that he is there becomes an electric charge in the hull of the ship, everyone feels it. More decisions are required. How long can Krause keep his crew, and the others on the warships, at Battle Stations before they tire, lose concentration, become bored, and if nothing happens then come to be less responsive to that alarm in the future. At the same time the cooks want to know if dinner will be served. The radar officer says one of the screens has to be reset to offer more clarity and that means turning off the radar for two hours to change tubes. To turn it off deprives Krause of one of his advantages. To rely on its erratic dancing blurs that now fade in and out is also risky. The battering of the green water has loosened the forward chains, and they should be fixed, but that would require turning away from the gale-force wind, offering a target. So it goes.
The pressure on the captain will make him a diamond or crush him. That pressure cascades downward as the deck officers realise how high the stakes are and the importance of his own duty by the book. Similarly the bridge crewmen imbibe the gravity of the situation and it radiates from them through the whole ship. The increasing strain is palpable.
The cruel sea.
At every step Krause must be aware that to utter a sharp word or to ask for a repetition might undermine the confidence of a crewman and impair his efficacy next time. Always he must speak in a flat, level voice without emotion, haste, or temper. Always he must speak the approved navy phrases — deck talk — with no embellishments, for these could be misunderstood in this perpetual crisis, always he must speak with a dead calm to promote that same calm in others.
In the two days covered in these page Krause gives more than two hundred orders about navigation alone. Then there are other orders about search patterns, patrol assignments for three other ships in the flotilla, running repairs, meal service, and the like. He also communicates with the cargo fleet in the convoy. Try another metaphor: The stone he is made of is slowing chipped away by these decisions to expose the inner man.
The Kraut, as the crewmen call him, draws strength from his Biblical education with many well chosen homilies that remind him of eternity, that is, the bigger picture. Pondering some of these passages is one of the pleasures of reading this book. Rather than telling others what to do, this Christian tries with every conscious minute to live up to that faith’s highest standards, largely in silence.
C S Forester
Cecil Scott Troughton Forester did not serve in the Royal Navy either in World War II, still less the Napoleonic Wars of his 12-book Hornblower series. While he was born in Cairo, he left Africa at age five and never returned. He did write about thirty (30) other novels, of which this is his last. He also published another fifteen works of popular history.
Loved skimming the condescending comments on Good Reads. Always good to know the trolls are feeding.
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) by Sarah Bakewell
GoodReads meta-data is 387 pages, rated 3.96 by 9260 litizens.
Genre: Biography
Verdict: Merveilleux!
Michel Eyquem Montaigne (1533-1592), author of Essays, largely autobiographical. He is credited with coining the word ‘essay’ to refer to short written treatment of a single theme. After holding forth on subjects as diverse as vanity, certainty, torture, marriage, prayer, age, conscience, cripples, cannibals, anger, thumbs, sleep, liars, Cicero, clothes, nudity, early rising, he was likely to conclude by saying, Mais alors, que sais-je? or ‘But then, what do I know?’ Few of the essays stuck to the title topic, and wandered through digressions and asides in a conversational tone. Most were between three and nine pages in print. He was a blogger avant le mot. These were the fruit of his mature years, but how did he come to that point?
He had a hothouse upbringing even stranger than that of John Stuart Mill.
At birth his father had him then and there separated from his biological mother (the wife) and deposited with a wet nurse and her peasant family, where he remained for two years with no familial contact. Only on his second birthday was he taken home. According to his father this experience with the peasants was to imprint upon him an awareness of others.
Once he was home his father had decreed and arranged that everyone speak Latin. There was a tutor who was fluent in the dead language and he taught the servants, and his father a few Latin phrases to use to and before the boy. No one spoke French within his hearing. In this way, his father reasoned, he would learn Latin naturally as the Romans did. Latin was the language of the law, the church, the government, and the international language of the learned and that made it the bedrock of a successful career and life, reasoned his father, who knew no Latin until the tutor taught him a few phrases. By this time, his mother had other children and she ignored this eldest specimen child in his test tube.
On his sixth birthday he was sent to a residential boarding school sixty miles away where he stayed for ten years until age sixteen. He neither returned home nor was visited there by any members of his family, though there was the occasional letter in Latin from his father prepared by the tutor. It was only then at six years old that he heard French. While the teachers knew why he ignorant, the other students neither knew nor cared and were cruel in taunting and teasing him where he was nicknamed Michau. Having no choice, he endured it and says little about it in his autobiographical musings. At sixteen he returned to the home he barely knew.
Table of Contents
His father hoped that these experiences would prepare his son and heir for life. He was not following any theory of learning, for he was himself uneducated and had a distant awe and respect for knowledge. Père Montaigne had filled his library with books he could not and did not read as totems for such learning (like the wall of unopened books behind Craig Kelly these days). He was an energetic member of the lesser nobility who worked tirelessly to improve his properties. However, he was better at starting projects – dams, bridges, retaining walls, weirs, levelling fields, clearing stones, fences, hen houses – than finishing them.
Michau became a magistrate (part notary, part lawyer, part judge) in Bordeaux when he was about thirty. Between sixteen and that age, not much is known of his life, though he learned to ride a horse and liked to do that. He did not like the duties of managing the property, and when his father died, most of those unfinished projects remained unfinished. As heir and owner he turned over management of the property to an agent, confirmed a complete break with his birth mother, and ignored his six siblings whom he barely knew. When he married he had a similar distant relation with wife and his own children. (There is an interesting explanation of the relevant manners and morēs of the time that is too detailed to summarise. Read it.)
He travelled to and from Bordeaux and was a dutiful magistrate, thorough, patient, insightful, and bored by squabbles over chickens. He wrote very clear briefs and rendered succinct judgements, which inevitably made him enemies because there was always someone disappointed at a result.
The work might have been boring most of the time but the times themselves were not. It was in the midst of the Troubles, aka a 60+ year war of religion among Catholics, Protestants, and variations of each. While the main fault line was Catholic versus Protestant there were factions within each so that sometimes they attacked their own. Three- and four-sided conflicts were common. One side would massacre several hundred of the other and retaliations would follow, until the blood lust abated and an implicit truce settled in. Then at an opportune moment, often when the victims were praying in a church, another slaughter would occur, and the dance of murder and mayhem in God’s name would begin again. God’s will, they shouted. (Starting to sound familiar?) Murdering defenceless people at prayer has been the practice in the American south for years. Still is.)
There was also an international dimension as Protestant England and Catholic Spain encouraged the conflicts in France so as to preoccupy it and reduce French influence in Europe. Consider contemporary parallels at leisure.
The city of Bordeaux, though a long way from Paris, was contested as a rich prize with claret wine, agricultural produce, fishing, and sea port, and one reason Montaigne resigned and went rustic may have been to opt out of this endless, murderous conflicts.
The Essays are not easy to read, though they are low key and can be amusing; they are also contradictory, vague, confusing, and stuffed with digressions and asides. Contradictions, there are more than a few. He says he is solitary and he also says he is sociable. He says he prefers books to people and he also says books are useless compared to a good talk with people. He says he is lazy and he also says he rises at dawn to read and write and spends too much on candles after sunset to keep reading and writing. He reticent and talkative with strangers in the same sentence.
Our author guides readers through the labyrinth of the stops and starts of Michau’s mental wanderings, often placing them in either his personal or historical context with a deft hand. The tone is informal and there are topical references to the contemporary popular culture. Most of these hit the mark. In none of them does the author try to supplant Michau, as some biographers sometimes do in shifting the focus from the ostensible subject to themselves. (See the comments on The King of Sunlight elsewhere on this blog for an example of this Me-ism syndrome.)
There are some fascinating insights in the Sixteen Century attitudes to sex and family that are best read. We are a long way from that time and place. But it explains his distance from his own family.
There are details, more than I wanted but which I perhaps needed, on the deadly influence of religion and Michau’s twists and turns to stay safe from condemnation from self-appointed, self-righteous apostles of one sect or another. One of his fears was that a Savonarola would appear and burn down the tower in which his library and cabinet of curiosities were housed.
Bordeaux was a Catholic city surrounded by a countryside of Huguenots. As a landowner and as a civic official Montaigne had frequently to navigate through these troubled waters. One of his principles was to get along with everyone, and he was pretty good at that. Though of course any time he was polite to a Protestant, a Catholic zealot would threaten his life, and any time magistrate Montaigne ruled in favour of a Catholic claimant, a Protestant fanatic would swear vengeance. In this climate conflicts over butterfly farms escalated. By and large Montaigne was more successful than many others at toning the conflicts down. So successful was he at it that he ascended to a higher office as mayor of Bordeaux in which office he was the first ever incumbent to be re-elected. He liked to say in later years that in his tenure nothing happened, and it took a great deal of work to ensure that.
All of these efforts at putting oil on troubled waters made his name known, and his nearest neighbour in the countryside began to cultivate him. That was Henri de Navarre, a Huguenot champion, who saw in Montaigne an honest broker to communicate with the Catholic court in Paris. In this vexed situation the Queen Mother, Catherine d’ Medici, became an active negotiator and Montaigne was instrumental in keeping a channel of communication open between her and Henri who was to became Henri IV. At times both Medici and Navarre offered Montaigne honours and positions which he steadfastly declined and ducked to stay out of the limelight.
Of Montaigne’s many aphorisms, one that particularly appealed to me was his advice ‘to have a room behind the shop,’ by which he meant a wise man (and yes he assumed only men as readers) would do well to have an escape room away from the public and his family, too, a room of his own. Thus he is an exponent of the Man Cave, as some refer to my private office. Montaigne recommended such a retreat as a place where everything is to your liking and no one else enters except by invitation. He trained a servant to clean the room in a way that did not disturb the papers on his desk, the piles books on the floor, the notes stuck to the walls, the curious oddments scattered on the shelves, and so on.
Another of his aphorisms was to stay at home: If you want to know about the world, read a book. But he was as inconsistent about this as about much else. His poor health became an excuse to travel, rather than lie at home. Off he went in search of water treatments, clean air, cosmic balance, a miracle cure, and snake oil unavailable locally. Once he started travelling, there was no stopping him. A two-week sojourn to a spa town two days away turned into a fifteen-month trip to Rome and back. At each stop he sent scouts ahead to see what was on the other side of the next hill, and as soon as they reported back, he had to see for himself, and so gradually he found himself in Rome. Along the way he filled his notebooks with interviews, sights, descriptions, drawings, and collected books and curiosities just like the tourist he was. By this time his name was known to the reading classes, and he was frequently feted along the way. He claimed to dislike this attention but always turned up when invited, the first to arrive and the last to leave. He spoke native Latin, fluent French, and a passable Italian so he was in demand.
Throughout his life he reworked the Essays in many editions,well, he added and added to the book, and it continued to sell well as it grew to three times its original length. He also violated his own rule of brevity and one essay is more than 250-pages long, with so many digressions and asides, not even this biographer can say with confidence what it is about.
The collection was also translated (and abridged) into English and Italian where new audiences found it. Over the years the Essays have been interpreted to death, the more so of late by the most dreaded of interpreters, Po-Mo PhDs in Cultural Studies. In the hands of some of these exponents the book has been taken to mean the opposite of what Montaigne said. The author skewers some of the most absurd of these sallies, though to be sure they are self-skewering, too. Reading her deadpan Stephen Colbert parodies of them is diverting.
Sarah Bakewell
She also charts Montaigne’s posthumous popularity among readers and intellectuals over the centuries with an amused eye. It is all in all a pleasant ride. Recommended.
GoodReads meta data is 331 pages rated 3.95 by 39 litizens.
Genre: biography*
Verdict: Scatter gun does occasionally hit targets.
William Lever (1851-1925) was born a dry goods store owner’s son, who learned the business sweeping the floor. That was an especially onerous duty in the backroom where large bars of all-purpose soap were cut into one pound sizes. The trimmings that fell to the floor were profuse and sticky. This boy had a lot of trouble sweeping them up only to throw them away. That seemed like wasted effort and so the first of a long string of innovations came. He wrapped these floor sweepings neatly and labeled them soap flakes. After all, to use the one-pound lumps of soap a housewife had to scrape flakes off it, thus buying ready-made flakes was a labour-saving step and they could be sold cheap since they had been heretofore waste, and it proved popular and profitable. His father soon gave him his head and stood back.
There followed many other elementary changes that brought a competitive advantage, like cutting the soap into bars of a hand size. Later he distinguished between soap for laundry and soap for person with additives in the latter. And so.
He made his soap first a national and then an international business, scattering innovations like seeds in the wind. Some did not work out, most did. He was quick to make use of new-fangled advertising and made innovations in that, too.
The paternalism in him led to philanthropy, although he always denied that he ever gave anything away. It was all a business investment in his mind. He built an ideal community in Cheshire near Liverpool for his principal manufacturing plant, called Port Sunlight (after his most successful product line), which we visited in 2004. It reflects the man in that the architecture is varied, not uniform as it is in other model communities, and endowed with art works and green spaces galore. An art gallery was located between the residences and the factory so that workers on the way to and from home could walk through it for their edification. It provided a dry-cut when it rained and was designed to accommodate wet feet and umbrellas with drains and mats.
He collected art by the simple expedient of buying the complete collections of others, selecting for his private residences the works he liked, and using the rest to adorn Port Sunlight and Lever offices around the world. He was something of a magpie in collecting as the museum at Port Sunlight shows.
He established the eight-hour day at Port Sunlight. Paid the highest wages in the land, and turned gigantic profits much of which he ploughed back into Port Sunlight, while expanding the business overseas and vertically integrating it with suppliers. In time, with increased mechanisation, he cut the week from 6 to 5 and 1/2 to 5 days. He was widely detested for all this by business rivals who tried to blacken his name with smears and innuendo. Each of which he batted off with a team of lawyers.
The Gallery at Port Sunlight
He was a lifelong supporter of the Gladstone Liberal Party, including its efforts to end the state religion and grant home rule to Ireland, and was elected to parliament where his sole purpose was to advocate and agitate for a national old age pension comparable to that which he paid his retiring employees, both men and women. The norm at Lever Brothers was equal pay for equal work between men and women. He carried that over more generally and was an advocate of female suffrage. Thus he practiced and preached equality for women with men, but that was not enough for some people.
One zealot made an example of him by burning down his house (and all its familial and artistic contents), she said, to light a beacon for women’s suffrage, further saying that until that goal is achieved everything has to be attacked, even allies, it seems. It is a kind of Pox News logic of attacking a soft target. No one was home and no one was injured but it both hurt his feelings and angered him so that he rebuilt the house…in stone, so that it could not be burned again by another nutcase. It did not cause him to weaken in his advocacy of the suffrage, but he did take pleasure when the malefactor was slammed up.
His efforts at vertical integration in the Solomon Islands and then the Congo led him to realise how terrible colonialism was, and he treated the natives he dealt with better than any other European had ever done. This fact does not spare him the troll attacks on Wikipedia today where he is castigated for not having 21st Century sensibilities by people whom in turn will be castigated one day for not having 23rd Century sensibilities. History has become troll berate troll.
He was a micro-manager even as the business grew and grew to become an international behemoth. To do so he wrote – yes wrote, not dictated – 50,000 letters a year. The archive swamps most biographers. This one did not even dip a toe into it. As the majority owner he did not distinguish his private interest from those of the company and in time that came unstuck. Lever Bros did not quite recover from World War I and its aftermath, when prices fell, competition emerged, foreign markets disappeared. Lever tried to keep doing things the old way as the capital dissipated, until there was a management coup d’état in 1922-1923 and he finally let go of the reins, reluctantly, slowly, sporadically….
In the 1930s Lever Bros merged with United Soaps of the Netherlands and become UniLever which remains a diverse and gigantic multi-national. It long operated a large plant nearby in Balmain (established 1895) until land prices made it profitable to sell the area (for residences) and relocate to Minto south west of Sydney. Here are a few of the current UniLever brands: Vaseline, Ben & Jerry’s, Knorr, Magnum, Vif, Comfort, Domestos, Lifebuoy, Dove, Omo, Sunlight, and so on and on.
How his formative years led him to these ventures, how he learned and changed as he went, his relationship with his long-suffering wife (for he insisted throughout his life on sleeping in the open air on specially designed rooftops – true!), his response to failure (and he had a few), are invisible in these pages.
Adam McQueen
*The book has to be catalogued as biography but it isn’t, hence the asterisk above. It is a string of anecdotes that reflect the interests of the author more than the importance of the stories in forming or revealing Lever. It is also punctuated with the sort of snide, adolescent ad hominem cheap shots so prolific in Bill Bryon’s sophomoric books.
There is a short, grudging entry on Lever in Wikipedia that hardly does the man justice. Pedants note. There was a younger brother who worked in the business initially, hence the name, but left it after few years.
I listened to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 program Great Lives about Lever while on my walks across north Newtown, and recalling our visit in 2004 to Port Sunlight, I followed up with this book. Lever is certainly worth reading about but I cannot recommend this book to any serious reader. It is too self-indulgent, too one-eyed, and superficial. The author is the star of this show, not the subject.
GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 4.09 b7 727 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Good ingredients spoiled by the chef.
This title offers an unusual locale: Aix-en Provence in high summer, with an unusual setting: a small, private museum of porcelain, and an unusual crime: the entire contents of the museum vanishes over an April weekend, leaving only the display cases anchored into the floor. Nor were there any signs of damage, no shards on the floor, nor of a break-in. The inadequate door locks were not forced, though a competent burglar would have made short work of them with a paperclip. The blinding sun and the burning heat slow everyone and everything down, except, it seems, the crims.
With such a good list of ingredients, I forgot my usual cautious Kindle sampling and bought it …. and found the execution of the recipe drained the ingredients of flavour. The prose is laborious, the descriptions as endless as they are pointless, the passages are padded well beyond any meaning. We are treated to detailed accounts of meals and also the deliberations in choosing the items to consume from the menu and every ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ that are uttered in a restaurant. Indeed there is far more of that than any account of the museum itself or its lost contents to the extent of my impatient reading.
I persisted in the hope that the text would achieve momentum, but after 25% on the Kindle-o-meter I gave up. Every time the protagonist moves, there is a laboured description of what he sees and does, none of it advancing the plot: he pushes his chair back, it squeaks on the tile floor, he stands up, he drops his napkin on the table, he nods to André the waiter, he walks to the door….[see if you can guess what he does at the door.] I doubt we will ever see André again, but we have invested in his name nonetheless.
For some reason reading this reminded me of a business lunch once that included heated avocado. There is a good reason why no recipes call for cooking avocado, and I was reminded of that at this lunch. When heat is applied, avocado turns a sick, mushy grey. A good ingredient ruined in the preparation. Maybe that is the association.
M L Longworth
The author has a dozen books, and a career as a journalist and writing teacher. So there! What do I know. As usual, not much
IMdB meta-data is 42 episodes (for all three seasons) of 90m each, rated 7.6 by 1067 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi, species Christie.
Verdict: Delicieux!
Season Two is set in the 1950s to the mid-1960s, specifically after 1954 because that is when the très moderne Facel Vega coupé automobile driven by one character came (briefly) on to the market. The ensemble cast includes the dumb blonde in the office, the super cop, and the ambitious and impetuous journalist. It is set in Le Nord, near, but not in the city of Lille. There is plenty of the rain for which the North is famous.
Supercop learns to appreciate the goodhearted simplicity of the blonde secretary who painfully types his reports, exploits a journalist’s youthful fearlessness to blunder into situations, and they in turn appreciate his tenacity in ferreting out la verité, as Maigret would say.
The plots are derived from Agatha Christie, some from the Tommy and Tuppence sequence, others from Dame Marple, and Monsieur Poirot, aussi, but re-potted into French soil, and given a French twist.
While Supercop is a man of many talents, we are spared a backstory and he does not have a painful private life (so trivialised in most cop shows). Indeed, he seems to have little private life at all but he does like slamming up crims.
The redheaded journalist has two first names, Alice Avril, and provides the energy. Marlène the secretary is the emoting and emotional sounding board, while Supercop is the electronic brain. Together they are a kind of family of siblings. He is the older brother who enjoys teasing and tormenting the younger sister journalist, while ignoring the older clothes-horse secretary whose head is full of romantic nonsense from women’s magazines.
Loved the episode where he got a mobile phone in 1954. Yep, a war surplus US Army field telephone the size of a suitcase, which he carried around only to have the Telecom reception drop out at crucial moments. Very realistic. Minitel would have to wait.
Although many changes have been made from the sources, the villains remain the same, in so far as I recall the Dame’s stories. When the ghosts appear in Silent Witness, no effort is made to offer a Cartesian explanation, Horatio.
The touch is light, the movement is brisk, the dialogue sparkles, the villains are ever so polite, though too often the immediate effort to avoid an investigation by labelling the death a suicide or an accident is clumsy and irritating. The worst example is the L’affaire Prothero. Memo to script writers, stop messing about and let the team get on with it. Though in that episode the victim is so repellent we could hardly wait for his demise.
On the other hand, there are occasional dream sequences that are a hoot, as when the journalist is confronted by a dissatisfied and armed reader! (Dare we hope Rupert Moloch has such dreams?) When Marlène gets carried away in a romantic revery straight out of the women’s magazines she devours every day. Or when Supercop realises he cares about each of them and recoils in horror because his armour has rusted. Then there is the singular appearance of his anti-Cartesian mother, the mystic. More mère, please.
The tomboyish journalist has some Cinderella transformations.
There is also some superb acting when the script calls for it. The episode when it seems Marlène has been murdered elicits terrific performances from both Supercop and Journalist as they realise how much they loved her for all her genial incompetence. And Marlène plays a double role as herself and her dowdy, miserable sister. Chapeaux! A reverse Cinderella. Even more memorable is one character actor who says not a line, but the guilt, fear, and shame that cross her face are remarkable in two short scenes.
Anachronisms, there a few. In one episode a school teacher remarks in passing that she is ’gay.’ Surely no school teacher in 1954 would publicly to admit to being a lesbian to anyone, still less a police officer, though Marlène’s stupefied reaction is of the time and place.
Seasons One and Three are set in different time periods with different casts, and from a brief look they do not appeal to me. Each season had six episodes but this team was so popular more and more were made over the years to a total of twenty-seven. Season One is set in the 1930s and Three in the latter 1960s.
These are available on You Tube with subtitles. As always with You Tube, it is best to be quick. There are indications that more have been made and the search has begun. Some episodes can be found subtitled on DVD called (Agatha Christie’s) Criminal Games. Good luck.
One of the oldest and biggest department stores in Paris is Le Bon Marché. To read a history of the origins, foundation, and life of this great enterprise I thought would be amusing, informative, and diverting. My imagination ran ahead to consider the nervous bankers who staked the first investment in this new-fangled idea. Then there was the genius who recognised the opportunity. Once a going concern I imagined the turf wars among its sections and ego conflicts among its personalities. The decisions about display, say for example, ladies undergarments. Over the years more than one cashier must have been tempted by the grisbi. I wondered what famous names had started a career selling hair brushes there, or in the back sorting stock for the shelves. Then there would be the customers.… Rich pickings for sure!
Yes, reading about that great ship, its crew and its passengers, sailing through good times and bad would be great fun and interesting. What a cast of thousands from slumming aristocrats to charlatans and grifters, provincial girls leaving home for the big city department store and accountants giving up private practice, the civic bureaucracy that would have to approve everything from construction to opening hours, to say nothing of the opportunities for kickbacks on orders, featherbedding nepotism in staffing, creative accounting and more. Then there would be the changing fashions in clothing, but also in plumbing and kitchens that a successful merchant must lead and follow. To stay afloat BoMac, as habitués once called it, must have been reinvented more than once: that means change, which of course also means resistance. The stories must be myriad.
‘Bring it on!’ I cried.
Regret followed immediately when I read the first chapter. Perhaps I should begin with a Content Warning. Beware! The book was written by a sociologist. In the name of discretion I do not enter the title of the book nor the name of the author.
In the first quarter of the book there is no sign of a human being. Instead there are structures and forces, movements and phenomena, masses and elites, classes and cleavages, times and tides, change and continuity, abstractions and concepts galore. It is likewise encrusted with caveats and qualifications that obscure whatever the point may be. This defensive, small-target approach exhausts the reader long before it enlightens.
No one makes decisions, no one makes mistakes, no one does anything – the gestalt does it all through its mechanistic extensions. There are no agents, only structures. Yes, a few names are named, but they are Sims not individuals with wills, hopes, ambitions, and other human cargo. They function as chess pieces on a chequerboard of sociological theories and concepts.
Was it Gerald Durrell who once described a jellyfish as a process? The fish is itself 95% water, immersed in itself – water. It is hardly (5%) apart from the water. To think of it as separate from water is to misconceive it. To abstract the jellyfish from water makes it meaningless, inert, in a word, dead. That image came to mind as I read this book, well the Kindle sample.
I could go on, and the author certainly did, but well it is not reading for pleasure and profit. If suffering from a toothache, this is a book to read because the concentration and effort it requires will take anyone’s mind off a dental pain…. Perhaps I should try Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) for some of this story, but I do not associate reading the didactic moralist Zola with amusement or pleasure.
GoodReads meta-data is 360 pages, Rated 4.11 by 3005 litizens
Genus: krimi, species Sherlock, hybrid Mrs Holmes.
Mrs Sherlock Holmes (yes, you read that right) tackles vampires in this outing. After a sojourn in Monaco (wherein Monte Carlo is a hill on which the richest live) the Holmeses have decamped to the Carpathian mountains in dark and mysterious Roumania. In fact, Sherl went alone earlier while Mrs was still settling Rivera hash, and then he returned to fetch her along for the ride. And not just the Carpathians, but, yes, Transylvania (and not the so-named county in Kentucky). Holmes learns Roumanian in a few hours. Well, he is Sherlock.
The trolls have been posting threats against Queen M’s youngest daughter, and after consulting the shade of granny Vicky, Queenie enlists Sherl to square the deal. There be vampires!? Well maybe, but more likely someone wants to create panic about such creatures to blame the Queen, using the same playbook found in D.C. of late: the bigger the lie, the better. Can the Moloch Media be far away?
They are riding to the aid of one of Queen Victoria’s grand offspring, Marie of Roumania, Queen by a marriage to a German princeling who found himself on the Bucharest throne. Later the post-War communist regime devoted much energy to denigrating her, suggesting that she might have done good works. The king is an invalid and the crown Prince a wastrel who resents his mother’s efforts to rei(g)n him in while dad-king is too enervated to cope, leaving Marie the top dog.
Could the plot to discredit her be political? Nationalists who reject a foreign queen? Communists who see an opportunity with the king and eldest son useless? Is it international with Hungary aiming to reclaim turf? Is it about money? Or….is the personal political and vice versa?
The telling is superb though the villain was not altogether convincing but the trip through Transylvania was great fun. Strange what one finds in castle walls.
Laurie King
The Princess Ileana who figures in this story died in 1991 after years as the Mother Superior in a convent in Ohio. From Princess of the realm to negotiating the roster for cleaning the toilets is her story.
GoodReads meta data is 384 pages, rated 3.66 by 1652 litizens.
Genre: thriller, krimi.
Verdict: overweight.
In arid New Mexico in early 1945 thousands toiled at a secret project. One peon was a New Mexico National Guard sergeant named Joe, an Indian of some ilk. Naturally, others call him Chief (and he does strut around like one at times).
The peons hate each others, GIs versus civilian contractors, white versus black, white versus red, Anglo versus European, residents versus interlopers, Yankee Doodles versus Red spies, pencil necks versus he-men, mathematicians versus physicists, Greasers versus Jews, everyone versus the local Indians, and on and on. There may be a war on with the prospect of a million more casualties to come, but these thousands have plenty of time for their endless, mutual animosities. True to life then.
The title speaks to the author’s contrivances. The test site was called Trinity and the trinity mountain peaks are mentioned early on and then forgotten as our protagonist insists on calling it Stallion Gate, and though there are references to wild horses in the vicinity none put in an appearance.
The author did a great deal of research and it is stuffed on the pages — about pottery, about Filipinos, about Indian spirits, about boxing, and about the physics, without any dramatic effect. Alas, sorry to say that, but it is true for this reader. Joe is a man among men, and among women who fall over themselves to get at him – every author’s wet dream. He is a boxer, a (modest) war hero, a man of his people, a thinker, a man who never sleeps, and who roams around this top hush hush facility at will because he alone is trusted by one and all.
His notional superior is a purebred cardboard.
Trinity
Am I jaded? Perhaps. I read recently a leaner version of very similar story in Joseph Kanon, Los Alamos (1998), which seemed much less padded, and less boy’s own. It also offered a subtle account of the strange bedfellows General Grove and Dr Oppenheimer.
Mind you, there are some fine moments in Stallion Gate in the description of a sunrise or the reaction to the conscience of the scientists versus those million soon to be casualties, or for that matter the 70,000 casualties that had already been suffered on Japanese soil at Okinawa in the typhoon of steel. Had the Bomb been used earlier, many of those dead might have been spared along with the hundred thousand Japanese who died there.
Martin Cruz Smith
There is a distant personal connection through the New Mexico National Guard which was deployed to the Philippines in 1941 just before the Japanese invasion. One of my in-laws was in their ranks, and he was not as lucky as Joe. Who, by the way, seems strangely incurious about the Filipinos who saved him. He talks of them as though they were a mere plot contrivance. Hmmm.
Listening to Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ podcast on Colette (1873-1954) the other day brought to mind Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
How so?
Lord of the Words Bragg
Bragg’s panel members were absolutely determined to read into Colette’s wondrous prose all manner of weighty and sharp points about gender, equality, class, history, power, and more. When Colette wrote her sinuous and sparkling prose about sunflowers in a field, according to the savants, she was subtly undermine the patriarchy or denouncing it. When she wrote charming vignettes about Claudine’s schoolgirl crushes on the film stars, she was subtly attacking social class. And so for the prescribed 45 minutes, but this time I did not exercise the option of listing to the bonus five minutes afterward, so tedious and tendentious did I find the recitation.
Colette at work.
When I thought about it later, Kundera came to mind. As for the heavy-weights in Kundera’s novel, so for the Colette panelists, only meaning has any value at all. If Colette wrote about flowers because she liked doing it, was good at doing it, and found it satisfying as an end in itself, it does not have meaning at all to these scholars. They united in denouncing her most effervescent novel, Gigi (1944) categorically and repeatedly, including gratuitous ad hominem asides.
It seemed to me as I listened, and it seems to me now in hindsight that the panelists were pursing their own agendas and not Colette’s. That she wrote Gigi in German occupied Paris, living in constant fear that her Jewish husband would be arrested…. That did not enter into the discussion. The lightness of Gigi was much needed when she produced it. That is remarkable.
Before and during the war she published life-style articles and some stories in publications that were anti-Semitic, pro-German, collaborationist, and Vichy. Again our panelists were silent. I expect she did so to eke out a living in hard times and from 1940 there were no other choices. All that seemed much more important in her life than their abstractions about gender, class, patriarchy, capitalism, and other way stations on the tenure-track. Survival. And to survive she looked to light side, the bright side.
Nor was much said about her short but noteworthy career as a journalist of which she once said, in a lesson few journalists these days heed, ‘you have to see and not invent, you have to touch and not imagine…’ (By the way, she reported crime – robbery, rape, and murder – for a Paris scandal sheet, not flower shows.)
I read a long biographical introduction to a volume of her memorable short stories years ago, and cannot identify it today, but some of it stuck with me.
