March, 2022 Readings: “March bustles in on windy feet, and sweeps my doorstep and my street.” (Susan Reiner)

My usual mix of non-fiction and fiction this month...with some Sharon Olds poetry to keep my mind sharp.

This morning, I finished Anne Applebaum's TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY and I confess to feeling disappointment.

Strange, because I'm a big fan of Applebaum's history books.

This one seemed anecdotal and unfocused, like a long magazine article that's been padded out (which I think was the case). In some instances, she seems to be taking the opportunity to get in digs at former friends and colleagues who have abandoned the center, embracing far right authoritarian regimes, becoming apologists for dictators. The book is unstructured, lacking any kind of central, defining vision.

Not for me.

I'm currently half-way through Michael Palin's Erebus, which is the account of one of the ships on the doomed Franklin expedition to navigate the North-West Passage, as seen in Dan Simmons' The Terror, named for the other ship on the expedition. But both Erebus and Terror had sailed together to polar regions previously, making three voyages to the shores of Antarctica in the early 1840s.

Palin writes with an easy style but not skimping on historical detail. He is also able to leaven the text with some personal reminiscences of many of the places mentioned through his second career as a professional traveller for tv documentaries. Strangely, one of the UK digital channels is currently re-showing some of his travel shows as I write, which seeing as I selected Erebus for my reading schedule some while back is a remarkable coincidence. (The tv shows currently being shown were made through the 1980s and 1990s, giving them a curious period charm and the - very - occasional raised eyebrow.)

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit– Jeanette Winterson
Audible audiobook read by the author
3***

Winterson’s semi-autobiographical debut novel has a protagonist who is also named Jeanette. She’s the adopted child of a fervent believer in an evangelical church, and is being raised to become an evangelical preacher. But Jeaneatte is attracted to girls, and this is viewed by her mother, her pastor and followers of her church as a sign that she is possessed of demons and cannot possibly be trusted to “speak the truth.” Her struggles to balance her faith, her love of God and her budding sexuality form the basis of the story.

Winterson’s novel is a glimpse at one teenager’s path out of childhood and into adulthood. Oh, the angst of teen years! The confusion and questions that adults don’t seem to want to answer (heck, they don’t want you to even ask), the emotional roller coaster of attraction vs guilt. The first time one realizes that other people – people who seem like perfectly nice people – live differently that one’s own family.

First published in 1985, I can see why it became so popular. But I’m long past this stage of life and I’ve read many books treating coming-of-age, including those featuring LGBTQ characters. I thought it was fine for its genre, but not particularly memorable to me.

The author narrates the audio version herself, and does a fine job of it.

The last few weeks' reading...

Conclave, Robert Harris - the pope dies and the cardinals have to choose a new one. Written from the point if view from one of the cardinals. There's the usual conflict between the hard liners and the more liberal elements of the church, but also a couple of favourites who turn out to have skeletons in their closets... and then a dark horse candidate very much not like the other cardinals. Surprisingly enjoyable.

The Fear Index, Robert Harris - there were half a dozen of his books on offer for 99p on Kindle, so I bought them. They're potboilers but usually entertaining, and often even have a little bit of genre in them. As this one does. Ostensibly about algorithmic commodities trading, it slowly turns into an AI-run-amok story. Interesting on the details of algorithmic trading.

Soldier of Another Fortune, Mike Shupp - the third book of Shupp's The Destiny Makers quintet, about a present-day man dragged forwards in time tens of thousands of years to a world in which some people are telepathic, "teeps", and held in distrust after teeps seized control and instituted a brutal empire centuries before. The introduction of time travel results in various factions travelling back in time to change events to better suit them. Tim Harper is fighting his own private time war against the people of this future Earth. The story seems overly complicated, and I've a feeling I really should read all five books as if they were a single volume, but this is good solid sf.

Tunnel in the Sky, Robert A Heinlein - teenagers are sent via some sort of warp-gate to an alien planet to see if they can survive in the wild for a couple of days, but something goes wrong and the teens end up trapped for a couple of years. Imagine Lord of the Flies with town hall politics, lectures on civics, and lethal fauna. Very silly.

The Kingdoms, Natasha Pulley - see my review here: https://medium.com/p/the-kingdoms-natasha-pulley-29a0119e3b3

Serotonin, Michel Houellebecq - if you've read Houellebecq, you'll know what to expect. In this one, a French bureaucrat finds himself alone and hooked on a new antidepressant. He reflects on his past relationships, but visits to his ex-partners go badly. He visits a friend from college days, now a dairy farmer whose business is failing. Honest, uncomfortable, some clever insights into contemporary life in France, but not in the least bit cheerful.

I was halfway through Within a Budding Grove when When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut became available, so I'm reading both.
The Proust is a re-read. Funny how after a couple of decades I still remembered that the bookcases at his Balbec hotel had glass doors. I wonder why that stuck in my mind.
The Labatut is a series of fictionalized short bios and anecdotes where scientists are presented as romantic heroes. Somewhat melodramatic but it has my full attention.

The Gameshouse, Claire North - an omnibus of three novellas originally published separately as, I think, ebooks only. The first is set in Middle Ages Venice, in which the wife of an abusive noble husband is introduced to the Gameshouse, a sort of semi-magical institution the members of which play games using real people. Her first game, which forms the plot of the novella, is to get one particular noble elected to the Supreme Tribunal, even though he is the weakest of five candidates (and three of the others are also being "played" by people from the Gameshouse). The second novella is set in 1930s Thailand. A Frenchman, and a player for around a century, is challenged to a game of hide and seek, and at stake are his memories. But it soon becomes clear the game is fixed. Despite running up and down the length of Thailand, the Frenchman is caught - but successfully turns the tables on his opponent. The final novella pulls together elements from the previous two as part of the preparations for a final game, for the Gameshouse itself, between Silver, a player who is some two thousand years old, against the Gamesmaster. They play "chess", using real-world people, and with real-world consequences, and it all very cleverly resembles to some extent the history we've lived through in the twenty-first century so far. The plot twists are pretty easy to spot, and the whole does remind me quite a lot of a French bande dessinée, L'Histoire secrète, whose English language editions seem to have fallen foul of US corporate mergers and buyouts. What a time to be alive. A paranoid would find The Gameshouse scary, a realist will find it right on the border between entertaining and scary.

The Winds of Gath, EC Tubb - long review here https://medium.com/p/the-winds-of-gath-ec-tubb-af1084689bac

The Face, Jack Vance - the fourth book of Vance's Demon Prince's quintet. These have definitely improved as the series has progressed, and this one is notably funnier than its predecessors. The demon prince this time is Lens Larque, who Gersen quickly identifies as a Darsh, one of the less than prepossessing natives of the desert planet Dar Sai (and I'm pretty sure there's a few pokes at Dune in the description of Dar Sai). The plot revolves around a series of financial transactions and court cases Gersen uses to entrap Larque, but which eventually lead to a company mining the supposedly worthless moon of a planet of inveterate snobs. The villain of The Killing Machine, Kokor Hekkus, has proven the most interesting so far, but the story of The Face is definitely the most enjoyable. Only one more book, The Book of Dreams, to go.

A Christmas Party, Georgette Heyer - I've been reading Heyer's historical - kof kof romance - novels for years but had avoided her crime novels, as I'm not much of a fan of English detective novels from the first half of last century. I much prefer Marlowe to Wimsey. Having read two of Heyer's crime novels, I can't say I missed much. It even feels a little like all the horrible people she couldn't put into her romances, she saved up for her crime novels. A Christmas Party, originally published as Envious Casca, is a country house murder. The really unlikeable members of an upper class family, and guests, gather for Christmas, only for the irascible, and wealthy, uncle and host to be murdered mysteriously in his locked bedroom. This is crime fiction that focuses on its characters, and they're mostly a bunch of shits. One for fans.

The Cabinet, Un-su Kim - I've read fiction translated from a number of different languages, but I think this might be my first Korean one. In recent years, I've noticed a tendency in translated novels to use chatty demotic English, and I'm not sure if that's a new trend in translation or simply something that's true only of the translated books I've read in recent years. Well, some of them, anyway. The title of this book refers to a file cabinet in a dusty storage room in a research agency in which no one actually appears to do any work, including the narrator. The cabinet contains files on "symptomers", people who exhibit strange abilities or features - such as the man who has a gingko tree (a very small one) growing out of finger, or the people who can skip time, or people who can seemingly subsist on diets of glass or metal or mud. Didn't really take to this book - didn't like the chatty narration, couldn't see what the point of it all was.

An Occupation of Angels, Lavie Tidhar - originally published by Pendragon Press, but then later republished by Apex Publishing, which is the edition I have (they had a sale a couple of months ago). If An Occupation of Angels is a novel, it's a short one, pretty close to a novella, in fact. It's a first person narrative by an agent of the British intelligence service, in a 1960s in which the appearance of actual angels - as in the incomprehensible inhuman entities hinted at in various religious texts. Someone is killing angels - not an easy task - and clues lead her to Siberia, where it turns out she's pretty central to events, and it's all about Nazis. This is what Tidhar does well, although much earlier in his career (he's less obsessed with Nazis, these days). Good stuff.

WAR IS A RACKET by Brig. General Smedley Butler.

Written in the 1930s, Butler looking back over his service as a decorated Marine and realizing he was nothing more than a bully boy for American business interests.

At one point Butler testified that he was approached by representatives of wealthy Americans--including a DuPont--and asked to lead a march of ex-servicemen on Washington, deposing Franklyn Roosevelt. His deposition was ridiculed or under-reported at the time, but historians have vindicated his account.

Fascinating stuff.

Say Nothing– Patrick Radden Keefe
Digital audiobook read by Matthew Blaney
4****

SUBTITLE: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

From the book jacket: In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known at the Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the IRA was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. … Keefe’s book … uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with.

My reactions
I confess that while I had heard of “The Troubles” I had never really studied the causes of the conflict, nor did I closely follow the politics at play. I remember reading about bombings and noting how the London underground would be shut down due to bomb threats, but the events seemed so distant from my late teen / early adult years in America that I paid little attention.

I’m so glad that my F2F book club chose this book, because I learned about not only the conflict portrayed, but perhaps a little about how a young person becomes radicalized and how festering dissatisfaction can turn from angry rhetoric to acts of terrorism.

Keefe is an accomplished investigative journalist, and he certainly did his homework here. Of the book’s 443 pages, fully 90 were devoted to meticulous notes (printed in teeny tiny print) citing his sources. It was also very interesting reading about the role that the Boston College’s John J Burns Library archives played in some final conclusions.

Blaney does a superb job of narrating the audiobook. His Irish accent comes through, making me feel as if I’m listening the author, or the individuals profiled. The text copy does include photos sprinkled throughout, which, of course, are not accessible to the listener; I’m glad I had a copy of the hardcover edition on hand.