4th May 2024

This novel’s title is explained in a short preface. A snowdrop could be “an early-flowering bulbous plant, having a white pendent flower” or “Moscow slang for a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw”. It is no great surprise to discover which is the more relevant to the story that follows.

Nicholas (Nick) Platt is a 38 year-old single lawyer – from Luton, rather incongruously – who has worked in Moscow for 4 years. He likes the city and his lifestyle as one of the well-paid westerners playing key roles in the “Wild East” of the post-Soviet economy.

If anything, Nick regards himself as morally superior to most of the others enjoying their temporary sojourns from London or New York: “I spoke better Russian than most of the carpet-bagging bankers and mountebank consultants in the city – the pseudo-posh Englishmen, strong-toothed Americans and misleading Scandinavians the black-gold rush had brought to Moscow, who mostly managed to shuttle between their offices, gated apartments, expense-account brothels, upscale restaurants and the airport on twenty-odd words”.

At the same time, he recognises – in part, at least – the reality of life in the capital. “The office was in a crenelated beige tower on Paveletskaya Square… the air-conditioned daytime home of half the expats in Moscow… On the other side of the square was Paveletsky train station, the domain of drunks and wrecks and glue-sniffing children, poor hopeless bastards who had fallen off the Russian tightrope”. Such is Moscow at the end of the 21st Century’s first decade.

Given this background, one might suppose that Nick would be alert to the potential scams and duplicity that are prevalent in this environment. He is an experienced Moscow-dweller, who is professionally qualified and linguistically competent. But he is also a naïve and obvious victim-in-waiting. When his elderly neighbour Oleg Nikolaevich reminds him of an old Russian proverb – “The only place with free cheese is a mousetrap” – we know that Nick should have been listening more intently.

AD Miller impressively contrasts what Nick sees – or thinks he sees – as he goes about his day-to-day business with the underlying dynamics that are actually shaping Russian society and its economy. The more perceptive observer of the latter is Nick’s friend, Steve – a heavy-drinking journalist working for the Independent whilst also moon-lighting for a Canadian newspaper. His drunken aside – “crime, business, politics, spookery – the usual Russian merry go-round” – might be a statement of the obvious, but he is the one perceptive enough to recognise that “[t]he St Petersburg crew are taking over, the old defence ministry gang are getting nervous”. St Petersburg was the political stamping ground of Vladimir Putin, of course – the Russian leader since 1999 – who is not mentioned by name, but referred to by Nick more than once as “Russia’s weasel President”.

So much for context. Miller’s narrative moves forward at a brisk pace, the story’s action beginning when Nick intervenes in the attempted mugging of two young Russian women – Masha (Maria) and Katya – near the entrance to Pushinskaya underground station. He begins a passionate relationship with Masha and is brought into their world, most notably with the introduction to their aunt, Tatania Vladimirova. At Masha and Katya’s suggestion, he agrees to arrange the sale of the elderly woman’s apartment in the sought-after centre of the city in exchange for another property on a proposed new-build site in the suburbs.

The main item of Nick’s formal business concerns facilitating a huge loan from a group of western banks to finance an off-shore oil terminal near Murmansk on the far north Barents Sea. (He thinks it no more of a coincidence that this is where the two women state that they originally came from). When his infatuation with Masha appears to distract him from one or two danger signs in the business transaction, we know that all might not turn out well. In essence, Nick senses that things are not quite right, but wants to look the other way. (As it happens, we had more than detected this already from the tone of Nick’s first-person narration, which is given in retrospect and overlain with wistful regret).

There are strands of poignancy in the tale. Nick recognises his self-imposed expatriate status – with both its pleasures and constraints – as the precursor to an impending mid-life crisis, having jettisoned his contacts and familiarity with London and Britain. Most sadly, this estrangement extends to the relationship with his parents, as confirmed when he truncates a Christmas visit to them and, later, when his mother visits him for a few days.

More generally, we also sympathise with those members of Moscow’s older generation, who survived the War as children and then endured forty-plus years of Communist inefficiency and corruption, but who are being left behind (or worse) by the current regime. They include Tatania Vladimirova and Oleg Nikolaevich and the latter’s friend, Konstantin Andreyevich, who has mysteriously disappeared.

Viewed as a whole, perhaps the most striking thing about this near-contemporary novel is how dated it became on the fateful day in February 2022 when the weasel-eyed President’s forces invaded the Ukraine. Two years on from that, one hopes that the subsequent sanctions imposed by the West have meant that the “carpet-bagging bankers and mountebank consultants” – and their lawyers – have withdrawn from “the black-gold rush” that previously pertained. Likewise, it is unlikely that the summer holiday that Nick takes with Masha and Katya in Odessa – “…for Russians… a fairy-tale nirvana of debauchery and escape” – would be on the repeat list in the near future.

Finally, a theme to which the author – and his main character – keep returning is the weather in Moscow. The narrative starts in the final warm days of September, after which the light snow sets in and then the huge falls of heavy snow and the winter’s bitter cold. The pavements become treacherous and the river freezes. When the warmth of the short-lived Spring arrives and the deep snow melts away, so then is a snowdrop discovered, the corpse draped from the boot of an abandoned car in the street opposite Nick’s apartment.

3rd April 2024

Robert Harris is a hugely successful and popular author of fast-paced thrillers, usually based on historical times and events – Ancient Rome, the Munich Agreement of 1938, the cracking of the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, amongst others.

The actual Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660 was the result of the negotiation between the Royalists, newly re-established in power following the Restoration to the throne of Charles II in that year, and the remnants of the Puritan regime that had won the Civil War and ruled the country after the execution of Charles I in 1649. The Act included an agreement on the degree of retribution that the restored Government could take against those who had been instrumental in bringing the King to trial or signing the death warrant (59 in total) or administering the execution itself on a cold January morning outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.

The hunt for the regicides is led by Richard Nayler – secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council – whose particular focus is on two of Puritan colonels, Edward Whalley and William Goffe. Edward – or Ned – is the father-in-law of William and older by about twenty years. He was also a cousin of Oliver Cromwell, who had died in 1658 after acquiring the autocratic powers of a military dictator: a king himself in all but name. We learn early on that Nayler – a committed Royalist who was wounded at the Battle of Naseby – also has his personal reasons for hunting Whalley and Goffe: reasons that account for his fanaticism to complete the task. (Nayler is the only one of the book’s main named characters to be fictional).

When Nayler finds out that Whalley and Goffe have fled to New England, he follows them there and recruits a local posse whose members are either attracted by the sizeable reward on offer or keen to avenge their own experiences in the Civil War. After their folly in circulating freely in Cambridge following their arrival in Boston – and then having to flee from their temporary home there – Whalley and Goffe take flight through Massachusetts and then Connecticut, wary of being seen by anyone who might succumb to the lure of the reward. The first half of the novel describes the desperate conditions that the hunted endure – whether in the frozen wilderness or hidden away in the attics or cellars of Puritan supporters – and the progress of Nayler and his men in their pursuit. At one point, Nayler is standing within feet of his quarry without realising that they are there.

Harris evocatively describes the small New England communities in which Whalley and Goffe hide and the strict codes of Puritan beliefs that sustain those who live there. Interestingly, these codes have local variations, New Haven and Hadley being even stricter than Cambridge or Hartford. The fugitives themselves see their suffering as part of God’s overall plan and oversight. After hiding in the wilds for several weeks – well past the 40 days and nights that Jesus was in the wilderness – they view their Biblical faith as being tested and drawn upon: “God has sent us this trial for a reason. It is our duty to endure it”.

Harris is also skilled at weaving in the general historical context to the immediate story without the narrative reading as a history book. At various times, we are taken through some of the Civil War battles, the trial and execution of Charles and Cromwell’s malignant undermining of Parliamentary business in the 1650s. There is a careful attention to period detail without overwhelming the reader with extraneous information. In this respect, it might be noted that we are not spared the gruesome nature of the Crown’s punishment of those convicted of treason: that is, the hanging, drawing and quartering of those of the regicides who had the misfortune not to find refuge in Europe or (as Nayler arranges on one occasion) to be assassinated in the street or to die before their arrest.

The years pass and, in them, the well-known events of the time: the British capture of New Amsterdam (renamed New York) from the Dutch in 1664, the Great Plague of 1665 and Fire of London in 1666. For the hardline Puritans, however (including William Goffe), these events merely constitute the wrath that heralds the Second Coming in 1666 – the End of Days – but the calendar turns to 1667 and, as Ned notes with a combination of bitterness and cynicism, the world is unchanged .

It is these years that provide the main poignancy in the tale. Whalley and Goffe are separated from their families in England with risky communication being possible only rarely through coded messages that are smuggled into the letters sent or received by their local supporters. The letters sent by Goffe’s faithful wife, Frances, tell of the marriage and death of children whom he can only remember as infants.

Even more years pass. Harris stretches the duration of the narrative’s timescale well beyond that which most people might think appropriate for the pursuit and arrest of those wanted by the law, even perhaps for the killing of a King. But the task set for Richard Nayler – by Richard Nayler – has no limit to the length of its undertaking.

5th February 2024

The circumstances – serious and dramatic – of Jack Taylor’s dismissal from the Garda Síochána (or Gardaí, Ireland’s national police and security service), after 10 years service and on his third warning, are recounted in the opening chapter of Ken Bruen’s The Guards. It turned out that punching a pompous government minister in the mouth was not consistent with maintaining his then employment status.

Thus it is that we are introduced to him as an alcoholic Galway-based private eye, whose “office” is his usual seat in a basic, spit-and-sawdust public house called Grogan’s. His morning coffee routinely has a large measure of brandy poured in by the elderly and frail Sean, the bar-owner.

We are in no doubt about our sense of place. Grogan’s has three portraits above the bar – of a Pope (Jack is not sure which one), St Patrick and John Fitzgerald Kennedy – with JFK in the middle. (The Pope had previously been in centre field but, following the Vatican Council, had been “bounced” out to outside-left).

Likewise, our sense of the contemporary (i.e. turn of century) period is aided by the frequent references to what might broadly be described as popular culture: a song by Gabrielle, the television series ER, a Beckham haircut… In addition, Jack (and Bruen) occasionally step back to the previous generation – Joy Division, Gary Numan… It has to be said that not all these casual asides invoke a warm recollection from Jack’s perspective.

The early passages of the book also set the tone for the linguistic identity of the locality: “Jaysus”, “yah eejit”, “by the holy”, etc. There is a risk here that Bruen would draw too heavily on a clichéd “Oirishness”, but this is largely avoided thanks to the urgency of the narrative and the underlying presence of both a wry humour and unremittingly cynical take on the world.

Jack sits in the bar most mornings and, a minor reputation having been earned as an effective investigator, waits “for the world to come knocking”, in this case a distressed mother concerned about the drowning of her young daughter.

The story – narrated in the first person – progresses from this initial encounter. At first, Jack and his side-kick Cathy B make little progress and he is on the verge of giving up the case. However, a vicious beating after another evening in the pub convinces him that he might be on to something. And so the story evolves as Jack identifies the powerful figures behind the abuse of teenage girls. There are sudden – and, for the reader, unexpected – deaths.

Bruen’s default style is for short – often once-sentence – paragraphs that intersperse the consistently snappy dialogue in a series of brief (usually one or two-page) chapters. Jack’s conversations – or, more frequently, just his inner thoughts – add to the richness of the cultural references, particular of writers both Irish (JM O’Neill, Patrick Kavanagh) and non-Irish. The latter include Elmore Leonard, Derek Raymond and David Goodis – novelists in the noir genre – whom Bruen is clearly acknowledging as among his own influences.

Jack’s investigative work takes regular breathers, as his assaults on whatever booze comes to hand – beer, gin, whisky – have their predictable effects, notwithstanding his occasional efforts to bring things under control. At about the half-way stage of the book, he spends 12 days in the mental hospital in Ballinasloe following another drink-induced blackout. (Wikipedia informs us that St Brigid’s Hospital opened as the Connacht Asylum in 1833 and housed about 2,000 patients in the 1950s, but subsequently declined in importance, as the Irish mental health policy moved towards deinstitutionalisation. It closed in 2013).

This allows for a reflective – and poignant – interlude in which we learn more of Jack’s love of books and literature: “There’s always been books. All my bedraggled life, they’ve been the only constant”. He had begun with his father’s Zane Grey cowboy stories and advanced through Richmal Crompton and Robert Louis Stephenson until, thanks to the guidance of a kindly local librarian, Mr Kennedy – “a tall thin man with an air of other worldliness” – he graduated to Dickens, poetry, philosophy… and American crime novels.

The Guards – the first (to date) of 16 novels involving Jack Taylor – is not simply a story about a private eye investigating a mystery. In fact, Jack does relatively little investigating at all and it is an apparently minor character – another ex-Guardaí, who has turned to religion – who guides him to resolution. This includes the tidying up of a particular loose end that the author had seemingly left hanging, but which Jack dramatically – and shockingly – resolves on the last page.

Ken Bruen also explores other themes, including the mystery of individuals, even those close to you, such as Jack on his friend Sutton – “even now, I’m unsure of his nationality, his age, his background… the details shifted and swayed so often you could never nail down one particular fact”. We are touched by the references to acts of guidance or kindness, whether long in the past when Jack’s father and Mr Kennedy the librarian sowed the seeds of his lifelong bibliophilia – Ken Bruen is acknowledging another debt here, I feel – or in the present, as in the small acts of comfort provided to Jack by the homeless Padraig or Jeff, another barman.

And, underlying it all, there is the sad perspective of the alcoholic – “you know you’re bad when a publican’s glad you’re not drinking”. We are informed that the measure of brandy poured by Sean into Jack’s morning coffee was “to kill the bitterness”. What we are not told, however, is whether this is the bitterness of the coffee – or the bitterness of everyday life.

10th January 2024

The prolific Australian author Thomas Keneally (born in 1935) is probably best known for Schindler’s Ark, which won what was then the Booker McConnel Prize in 1982 and which was subsequently adapted for the screen by Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List (1993), the winner of 7 Academy Awards.

A Family Madness has two central characters. The first – in the part of the book’s narrative set in contemporary (mid 1980s) Sydney – is Terry Delaney, a young professional Rugby League player who is attempting to progress from his club’s third-grade team through the reserves and into the first-grade. At the start of the story, his on-field exploits have been halted due to a 6-month suspension for breaking an opponent’s jaw. His day job – though really his evening-to-night job – is as a guard protecting a number of industrial and commercial premises for Radislav (Rudi) Kabbel, the owner of a family-based security company, which also employs Kabbel’s sons Warwick and Scott and daughter Danielle.

The background story of Kabbel, our second key character, begins in the dark days of Byelorussia – then one of the Socialist Republics of the USSR – during and immediately after the Second World War. The events of this period are revealed through Rudi’s own written history of the Kabbelski family and his translation of the wartime journals of his father, Stanislaw Kabbelski, who was the Chief of Police in the city of Staroviche.

Stanislaw Kabbelski’s diary records begin in September 1941, when Byelorussia is under the control of the Germans and the systemic murder of Jews is under way. He is fully complicit in this. The actions come close to home when the young Rudi’s tutor – a First World War veteran called Hirschmann – is said, in the dreadful euphemism, to have “gone east”. In practice, it was probably to one of the mass graves on the Gomel road three miles west of the city.

Much of the central part of the book deals with the complexities within Byelorussian nationalism that surface both within the period of German occupation and then after the tide of the war changes, when the Red Army starts to make its inexorable progress through the region. Stanislaw Kabbelski is caught up in the bloody factional rivalry which continues after his family has fled to the west and into a Displaced Persons Camp run by the Americans. Indeed, it continues into the Australia of the 1950s, when he takes revenge on a fellow nationalist revealed to have been a Soviet spy.

Running in parallel with this part of the narrative is a catalogue of Delaney’s own difficulties, not least his suspension from playing, the pressures on his marriage resulting from his affair with Danielle Kabbel and the reckless actions of his ex-policeman friend, Brian Stanton, in which armed robbery graduates into something even more serious. There is much to admire in the way that Thomas Keneally weaves the various strands together.

For Delaney, it is the game of Rugby League – the principal sport in New South Wales – which provides him with the opportunities to gain kudos and respect, as well as financial reward. As Stanton mentions to Kabbel, whilst Delaney might work as a security guard, “he’s only filling time in between football matches”. Later, after one particular night-time skirmish when on security duty, “Delaney… sat crookedly in a seat in the waiting room [of the hospital], favouring his shoulder and wondering if he could play on Sunday”

Rugby League is a tough sport and, although Keneally is a long-standing supporter of the game, he does not pull his punches – literally – when describing the conflict between alpha males. We learn that one of Delaney’s team-mates was “a second-rower who had an evil reputation for twisting the testicles of the opposing hooker”. Later, an opposing centre “… another whizz-kid… had all the tricks, all the savageries. Before getting up, he gouged and scored Delaney’s eyeball with his blindside thumb… The crowd cheered,,, When tackled [he] always levered himself upright with a hand placed across Delaney’s face” It is Delaney’s act of violent retribution that gets him the 6-month suspension.

At the core of A Family Madness is Keneally’s assessment of the significant ethnic and cultural differences within the melting pot of Sydney’s working class. This is briefly raised in a reference to the suburb of Petersham, which reportedly housed 67 different nationalities: “The Greeks remembered what the Turks had done, as did the Armenians. The Christian Lebanese spat at the shadows of Muslim Lebanese…Croatians told their daughters not to talk to Serbians and in coffee shops Serbians muttered complicated curses at Croatians”. It is more explicit in Delaney’s ostracisation by the Sicilian family of his betrayed wife, Gina – “the child of a sturdy Italian couple from Palermo” – and, following his own affair with a Serbian girl, the vengeful and calculated violence attended to Brian Stanton by her wronged husband.

However, it is the Kabbel family that stand apart. At one level, there is the utter ruthlessness – observed first-hand by Delaney – with which Warwick Kabbel takes revenge on one of the guards working for a rival security company. More significantly, not least in the arsenal of weapons and booby traps that they accumulate, the family members make their preparations for “The Wave”, which they believe to be imminent and after which, when civil society has broken down, it will be every family for itself. (One of Delaney’s police contacts draws a comparison with the Jonestown cult in Guyana in 1978, the perpetrators/victims of a mass suicide-murder).

Above all, there are the Kabbels’ strict ties of family, which bind them together to the exclusion of everything else. After Delaney attempts to go through the formal procedures with the civic authorities in his attempt to rescue Danielle – and their child – from Rudi’s clutches, the response is horrific. As one of the wallopers – i.e. a policeman and also “a handy full-back from the local club” – cries in despair (at the end of Chapter 1), “Oh holy Jesus, Delaney! Who are those people?”

Footnote

[Although Belarus gained
its independence in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the
country’s political and economic structures remain firmly linked with those of modern-day
Russia].

5th December 2023

Elsewhere on this website, I have included WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) as one of my dozen favourite pieces of fiction. I have now caught up with his first novel – Vertigo – which was initially published in Germany in 1990, in the Vintage edition of 2020 with the translation by Michael Hulse.

I was quickly enveloped by some of the familiar characteristics of Sebald’s writing: his elegantly flowing prose style; the ease with which he effortlessly moves from one theme to another; his enjoyment in the discoveries to be made when travelling (usually by bus or train or on foot); and the eloquence with which he recalls people and events of the past – including his own past. In addition, there is the (occasional) uncertainty about what is actually happening in the narrative as he draws on imagination or speculation to supplement the description of events.

The opening chapter (Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet) summarises the career of a writer – Marie-Henri Beyle – from being a 17 year-old in the Napoleonic army invading the Italian peninsula in 1801 until his death in Paris in 1842. At the start of this period, Beyle has occasion to pass the site of the previous year’s Battle of Marengo between the French and Austrians: “he gazed upon the plain, noted the few stark trees, and saw, scattered over a vast area, the bones of 16,000 men and 4,000 horses that had lost their lives there, already bleached and shining with dew”.

Experts on 19th Century French literature (of whom I am certainly not one) will recognise Beyle as being better known under his pen-name of Stendhal (although this is not revealed to us). As an example of how the author sows doubt into the reader’s mind, we are led to query whether one of Beyle’s many paramours – a certain Mme Gherardi, of whom he wrote as having accompanied him on a journey through the Alps from modern-day Italy to Austria – actually existed.

The broad geographical region comprising the Adriatic, northern Italy, Austria and Bavaria also forms the backdrop to the book’s other three chapters. In the longest (All’estero or Abroad), we accompany the narrator (whom we assume to be Sebald) as he makes two journeys – seven years apart – from Vienna to Venice via Verona in the 1980s.

Sebald has an unrelenting eye for the historical and/or the beautiful, as we move on from Giocomo Casanova’s imprisonment (in 1755) in the rat-infested prison chambers below the lead roofs of the Doge’s Palace in Venice to Pisanello’s fresco (of 1435) over the entrance to the Pellegrini chapel in Verona and Giotto’s fresco cycle (completed around 1305) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In the last of these, “I was overwhelmed by the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries”.

There is an underside to his travel experiences as well, however, quite apart from losing his passport in Limone, when the hotel receptionist mistakenly hands it over on the departure of another person. In Milan, Seward wards off the aggressive attack of two pickpockets and, later – in a bout of travelogue – regrets his decision to take a stroll around for an hour or so: “any idea of the kind, in a city so filled with the most appalling traffic, will end in aimless wandering and bouts of distress”,

The book’s other chapters – Dr K Takes the Waters at Riva and Il ritorno in patria or The Return to his Homeland – also describe journeys, though with their respective emphases on the principal destinations.

As with the earlier coverage of Stendhal’s life, some key aspects of the narrative are semi-hidden. “Dr K” – the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company – is, of course, the thinly disguised Franz Kafka, who took holidays in the town of Riva del Garda on the northern shore of Lake Garda in 1909 and 1913, on the latter occasion for three weeks.

The immediate pre-First World War period features more the once in Sebald’s narrative. In Verona, he spends some time in the main library – the Biblioteca Civica – (notwithstanding it actually being closed for a public holiday) researching the local papers for the main news items of the late summer of 1913, one of which was a sensational murder trial involving one Maria Oggioni, who pleaded self-defence to the charge of shooting her husband’s batman. Sebald suggests that she might have found it relatively easy to win over the judges, as her enigmatic smile reminded observers of the Mona Lisa (and La Gioconda had recently been found under the bed of a Florentine workman who had liberated it on Italy’s behalf from the Louvre two years earlier). More fatefully, “1913 was a peculiar year. The times were changing and the spark was racing along the fuse like an adder through the grass”.

A similarly cursory disguise is given to the Bavarian village to which Sebald himself returns (at the end of his 1987 journey) in the final chapter – the village in which he had been born – which is simply labelled as “W” throughout. However, for we amateur literary detectives, Sebald provides a list of the small villages through which his bus passes towards the end of its route, after which we are informed that he walked through Unterjoch and Pfeiffermuhle to his final destination: i.e. to Wertach.

This is a nostalgic and poignant chapter. After an absence of 30 years, Sebald is disconcerted to discover that very little of what he remembered from his childhood still remained: “the village itself, I reflected, as I arrived at that late hour, was more remote from me any than other place I could conceive of”.

Most of the dwellings and other buildings had been demolished or redeveloped: the school, the fire station, the cheese dairy, the grocer and haberdashery… Likewise, not surprisingly, there is the absence of most of the village’s inhabitants whom he could recollect from that earlier time: Kopf the barber, Dopfer the hunchback, Ekram the Turk, his teacher Fraulein Rauch, the friendless and ill-fated Dr Rambousch and, not least, his grandfather, in whose company he was often to be found. One of the few remaining points of reference was now the Engelwirt Inn, in which Sebald stayed for a month; during his childhood, his family had lived there in rented rooms. (The present-day Google Maps lists the Gasthof Engel in Wertach as permanently closed).

Sebald neatly – indeed, brilliantly – completes the circle of his narrative in this final chapter. In discussion with the current owner of the Café Alpenrose, he learns of one of the village’s forebears who led a contingent of a thousand men at the Battle of Marengo, all of whom were slaughtered. Later, when Sebald is given access to the café’s attic – which had been strictly out-of-bounds when he had frequently visited the dwelling with his grandfather – he finds a vast pile of miscellaneous clutter that the previous owners – two elderly spinster sisters – had accumulated over their lifetimes: sacks, ropes, doorbells, mousetraps, beehive frames… Amongst this collection is “the uniform, trimmed in colours pink-grey and green, almost certainly belonging to one of the Austrian chasseurs, who fought against the French as irregulars around 1800”. However, “when I touched one of the uniform sleeves that hung down empty, to my utter horror, it crumbled to dust”.

WG Sebald’s beautifully written narrative has taken us back to Marie-Henri Beyle and the Napoleonic conquests at the turn of the 19th Century.

23rd September 2023

It is 1926. “’Is it a hanging?’ an eager newspaper delivery boy asked no-one in particular” in the early morning crowd gathered at the gates of Holloway Prison.

So begins Shrines of Gaiety. It is not a hanging. The crowd has come to watch as Nellie Coker – the “Queen of Clubs” in the Soho district and the owner of half-a-dozen money-making establishments – is released from Holloway Prison after a 6-month sentence for breaching the licensing laws. From a distance, she is discreetly observed by Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher and his unlikely (and unofficial) sidekick, Gwendolen Kelling, a 30-something librarian, who has recently arrived from York searching for two young girls who have run away to the bright lights of London.

And so we are introduced to three of the main characters in Kate Atkinson’s entertaining tale, which is set in the capital city – its nightlife at once both glittering and seedy – during the inter-war period.

They are soon joined by a cast of other significant figures in the complex network of relationships and contacts that is revealed during the course of the story: Arthur Maddox, a corrupt police detective; Niven and Ramsay Coker, Nellie’s adult sons, one a dispassionate First World War veteran, the other a dissolute wastrel; Freda Murgatroyd, an ambitious young theatrical performer; Vivian Quinn, a louche gossip columnist and chronicler of the ‘Bright Young Things’; Mr Azzopardi, a supposed Maltese gangster with a long-standing grudge against Nellie.

It adds up to a spider’s web of the righteous and the crooked and those placed somewhere in between and we can enjoy the mental mapping of the overlapping linkages – some deliberate, others coincidental – between the main players. (That said, I did find a couple of the coincidences – including one that leads to a hugely dramatic episode – rather convenient for the narrative’s development).

Kate Atkinson skilfully builds up the backstories of the principal characters. In the case of Nellie, this included leaving her drinker/gambler husband in Edinburgh and taking her 5 young children to London, where she initially found rooms at a pound a week near King’s Cross. It is the death of a landlady that provided Nellie with an unexpected and illicit windfall, which she used to buy into and progress through the nightclub scene. This has culminated in the ownership of the Amethyst, a club which is patronised by royalty and criminals alike. “Mixed bag”, she comments, when asked about one evening’s clientele, “Tallulah Bankhead, Frazzini [a leading gangster], the King of Denmark…”. The clubs are protected from raids – initially at least – by Nellie’s connection (Maddox) at Bow Street police station

The main plotline concerns the various threats posed to Nellie Croker’s empire from various sources, both within and outside the family. As we learn from the opening scene, one of these is from DCI Frobisher, who is aware of the corruption at Bow Street and seeks to link the club scene with a series of deaths by drowning of young girls washed up near Tower Bridge. The sheer ruthlessness of Nellie in protecting her interests is duly made evident when it is required.

Atkinson adeptly makes use of both real-life and fictional characters. Amongst the rival gangs mentioned in the narrative are the Elephant and Castle Mob, Derby Sabini’s roughs and the Hoxton Gang, all of whom were major players in the London underworld of the period. (Charles “Darby” Sabini (1888-1950) has a Wikipedia entry describing him as “a British-Italian mob boss and considered protector of Little Italy during the interwar years”. Nellie Coker herself is based on the real-life Kate Meyrick (1875-1933)).

The author’s researches have yielded a plethora of cultural references: Gwendolen’s librarian experience in York had extended to persuading her dour branch manager that they should stock “…the ‘racier’ writers of the day: Elinor Glyn, Ruby M Ayres, Ethel M Dell”; although one of the force at Bow Street was nicknamed The Laughing Policeman, “God, how Frobisher hated that stupid Charles Penrose song”; later, the background sounds include “Billy Murray singing ‘Clap hands. Here comes Charley’”. There is a neat reference to contemporary advertising: “they said smoking was good for you, but Ramsay wasn’t so sure”.

Period detail is essential in establishing the temporal context, of course. However, there were times when I did feel that this was rather laboured: Frobisher was interested in “a demonstration of a ‘televisor’ to the Royal Society by a chap called Baird”; one character refers to another as having been “stopped at one of those new ‘traffic light’ things” near St James’s; later we learn that, “there was much talk in the air of a General Strike” (although not, it has to be said, by any of the characters with whom we are concerned); and “…when I [Quinn] was in Paris I had a very interesting discussion about bullfighting with an American chap called Hemingway, a journalist, writes stories”.

Kate Atkinson has a straightforward writing style, which aids the reader in making good progress through the narrative. The story has a near-linear structure, in which some key scenes are quickly repeated from a different perspective or with additional detail, but these jerky bits of time-shifting should not present a challenge to the engaged reader. (That there are 68 chapters within the 512-page paperback edition published by Penguin Random House – most of which are comprised of shorter sub-sections – reflects the necessary progress of the different characters and plotlines within the overall story).

With the exception of one couple, Kate Atkinson summarises the fates of each of her characters in the final couple of chapters, taking us variously – at least for those that survive for the duration of the story – into both the immediate post-war years and the longer term. Other fates are determined before then, in one case – to me at least – shockingly so.

“Is it a hanging?’ the boy asked his neighbour, standing in the crowd outside Pentonville prison. Yes, the very same delivery boy that we met outside Holloway..”. The first line of the penultimate chapter completes a neat circle for us. And, this time, it is a hanging.

16th August 2023

“Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered… All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead”.

In the first paragraph of Norman Mailer’s account of the invasion of the fictional Pacific Island of Anopopei by American troops at the height of the Second World War, we are thrust immediately into implicit membership of an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon, as it waits on board ship prior to landing,

And, sure enough, the platoon’s first fatality occurs shortly after its arrival on the beach, the young soldier’s inadequate steel helmet pieced by a flying piece of mortar shrapnel.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this war novel is that, as the narrative proceeds, the platoon is relatively rarely in actual combat with the enemy. There is one significant battle when a Japanese attack attempts to break across a river on the front line, several brushes with unseen opponents on the periphery of the island’s jungle and another skirmish when the platoon is on a lengthy patrol. In the background, the sound of artillery fire on the Japanese positions forms a continual soundtrack during the daylight hours. The platoon does suffer further loss of life, however, including when an unexpected machine-gun bullet to the chest brings sudden death to a character with whom we had been heavily invested.

Rather, Mailer is much more interested in telling us about the individual soldiers in the platoon, the continually changing relationships between them, the widespread cynicism and disrespect that they have for their superiors and the unremitting and punishing physical conditions that they all endure.

And so it is that we learn the personal back-stories of, amongst others: Martinez from San Antonio, his nerves highly strung from the previous conflict on the island on Motome; Croft, the tough, bullying sergeant; Red, the cynical drifter; Hearn, the disillusioned graduate; Ridges, the religious son of an impoverished farmer; and Roth and Goldstein, the two Jews at the bottom of platoon’s food chain.

Their ultimate commander on the island – General Edward Cummings – is an ambitious but ultimately sad figure, I think. In the modern parlance, he has a “gender-role confusion” as a closeted homosexual in an unhappy marriage and with complicated feelings towards at least one of the men under his command.

Cummings’s immediate military objective is to break through the Japanese’s defensive Toyaku Line – a thin stretch between Mount Anaka and the sea – but he is under increasing pressure as the time passes. His requests for naval support are continually thwarted and, he realises, the discipline within his forces is ebbing away, as evidenced by the submission of false patrol reports by some of his sergeants and an increased incidence of malingering in the hospital tent.

Although not in regular combat with the enemy, the physical – and mental – stresses placed on the members of the platoon are evident throughout the narrative. At various times, the platoon is pulling a large gun along a heavily muddied track, building a road to the front line, hacking its way through the thick jungle, wading up a river, crossing the sun-drenched lower hills of the mountain and then scaling its perilously thin ledges higher up. At times, Mailer takes us on these tortuous journeys yard by painful yard.

Throughout all this, the combination of torrential storms, stultifying humidity and hot sun means that the soldiers are consistently wet for days at a time, whether from rain or sweat or both. Shortly after their arrival on the island, a high wind blows away the tents from their bivouac near the beach. The guard duty at night involves shivering under damp blankets. Over time, the men endure blisters, diarrhoea, sores on the shoulders from carrying their loads, gnat bites, nausea and sheer exhaustion. There is no respite.

The sounds of the jungle are on permanent call, of course: the noises of various types of wildlife mingled with the perceived and permanent threat of enemy ambush. The wildlife itself plays a relatively minor role – insect bites and one close encounter with a snake aside – until the later stages of the novel. But its impact, when it does come, is devastating. I suspect that, in that particular episode, Mailer took a perverse enjoyment in revelling in the subconscious fears of every comfortable city-dweller.

We keep coming back to the members of the platoon – their hopes, fears, prejudices. From several of them – usually those prone to boasting the most about their sexual conquests – there is little confidence in their wives at home being faithful. Inevitably, there are conflicts within the group – their nerves on edge and energy levels diminished – which are exacerbated by the casual racism and anti-Semitism. The sudden death of one of their number produces – from one or two of the others – a callously shocking lack of sympathy.

For Mailer, the dehumanisation of the soldiers is only one symptom – albeit a significant one – of the savageries of war. After three members of a Japanese unit are killed immediately after being taken by surprise, the fourth is summarily executed on the trail. There is the looting of corpses’ possessions and, on one occasion, the crude extraction of a cadaver’s gold teeth.

Underpinning all this is the realisation amongst some in the platoon that, assuming they remained alive, they were in for the long haul. One of the malingers – Minetta – resting in the hospital tent after sustaining a minor wound to his leg “thought of the war, which would stretch on forever. After this island there’s gonna be another one and then another one…Aaah, there’s no future in the whole goddam thing”. Later, in the absence of a “million dollar wound” – which would lead to a transfer States-side, but with no permanent damage – he seriously contemplates the more drastic action of shooting his foot off and, at the depths of his macabre blackness, weighs up the pros and cons of deciding which one it should be.

Likewise, when some of the other members of platoon start to speculate on what they will do when they get out of the Army, it is Croft – the sergeant – who sets them straight; “Waste of time thinking about it. The war’ll go on for a while”. And so it does: in a contemporaneous passage, General Cummings speculates on whether he could get another promotion before the campaign begins in the Philippines. (Mailer himself saw action in a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippines in 1945).

The Naked and the Dead was the first – and most successful – of Norman Mailer’s 12 novels, published when he was just 25. (His long career – which included journalism, theatre and film – effectively lasted until his death at the age of 84 in 2007, as The Castle in the Forest was published in January of that year). The intense, linear structure of the narrative is punctuated by episodes of “The Time Machine”, which fill in the characters’ backstories, and the “Chorus”, which consist of short acts of play-like dialogue between characters. The main stylistic concession made by the author was the substitution of the word “fug” for the more usual – and, here, prolific – four-letter expletive. The 541-page volume of that I read was published by Allan Wingate of London as the 12th Cheap Edition in 1955 following the earlier nine Impressions of 1949 to 1951.

28th June 2023

Death at La Fenice is the first of the 32 detective novels written by Donna Leon and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. The most recent – So Shall You Reap – was published earlier this year.

The location for the novels is Venice, where the American-born Leon lived for over 30 years before moving to Switzerland, where she now resides.

The mystery facing Brunetti concerns the death through poison of the celebrated German conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, in his dressing room during an interval of a performance of La Traviata at La Fenice Opera House. It soon becomes clear that there are several possible suspects, including the Maestro’s (much) younger wife, the lead soprano, the soprano’s lesbian lover and the Opera House Director. Nor is there a shortage of motives, both from the recent past and stretching back to the years leading up to and of the Second World War, when Wellauer was an enthusiastic Nazi sympathiser.

Brunetti’s approach is methodical and painstaking, as he conducts a series of interviews with the principal characters and with those – a music critic, a gossip columnist, the deceased’s doctors and others – on the margin of events. The most chilling of these – literally – are with an elderly and impoverished former operatic diva living on the island of Giudecca, a short boat ride across the Canale Della Giudecca; “the popular consciousness [was] of a sinister, backward place, where nasty things happened”.

The Commissario conducts the investigation at his own pace, which – apart from a couple of boat trips and a return train journey to Padova – is a walking pace to his various assignments around the city. (In the Penguin 2022 edition, we are aided on these journeys by the map at the front of the book). He receives little effective support from his two immediate subordinates or from his vain, self-serving boss, Giuseppe Patta, the station’s Vice-Questore.

It is through the eyes of the lead character that we get a real sense of Venice. “It seemed to him that all the shops that served the native population – pharmacies, shoe-makers, groceries – were slowly and inexorably disappearing, replaced by slick boutiques and souvenir shops that catered to the tourists, filled with luminescent plastic gondolas from Taiwan and paper-mache masks from Hong Kong”. As for the principal interests of its inhabitants, this was “a provincial town where gossip was the real cult and, where, had it not been at least a nominally Christian city, the reigning deity would surely have been Rumour”.

Leon extends this portrayal to relay how life is conducted, perhaps not just in Venice, but across Italy as a whole. Early on, Brunetti commands two medical attendants to take the victim’s body from the Opera House to the Civil Hospital. Their sullen response is that it is late at night and they would be breaking union rules about the length of a shift. Later Brunetti muses on how one of the wealthy characters had obtained permission from the planning authorities to insert large skylights in the roof of an (unlawful) additional floor of an apartment complex: “the bribes would be ruinous”.

The author’s wry humour comes across nicely at regular intervals. There is a revealing review of how each of the daily newspapers – from political broadsheet to tabloid scandal-sheet – report the murder. (This was before the plethora of online news sources, of course). Later, we learn that the aristocratic heritage in the family tree of Brunetti’s wife, Paola, incorporates two doges, a cardinal or two, a composer of secondary importance, the former Italian ambassador to the court of King Zog of Albania, a pope, Garibaldi’s banker and “a famous castrato (from whom, sadly, no issue)”.

Although I solved the case – in the sense of “who” – some time before the final chapters, I did not anticipate the twists associated with the “why” or the post-solution next steps that were to follow. Commissario Guido Brunetti was on top of all these aspects, however, and firmly on the path that has – to date – taken him through 30-plus years of solving Venetian mysteries.