24th March 2025

Donald Cameron is a 20 year-old artillery subaltern when he meets the older Evan Davies in a captured German pillbox on the Western Front in October 1917. The pair – a Scotsman and a Welshman – strike up a conversation about the English, whom they both like and respect, but also find difficult to understand. Donald refers to an eyeglass-wearing colonel who “had the wind up all the time except once, and that time he walked up to a Bosche machine-gun emplacement with a walking stick and fifty-eight Bosche came out and surrendered to him”. Another colonel was “a neat dapper little man who ate sparingly in order to keep his weight down for post-war polo”. Evan, an aspirant publisher, proposes that Donald contact him after the war so that he can commission him to write a book about the English.

Subsequently, after a high-explosive shell pitches near him in the Passchendaele mud, Donald spends 18 months in a “monster hydropathic” in Scotland recovering from shell-shock before going back to work on his father’s farm in Aberdeenshire. After his father’s death, Donald travels to London hoping to take up a career as a journalist as “there seemed to be no other profession which required neither ability nor training”. He is making little headway when a chance lunchtime meeting with Evan Davies in a Fleet Street public house sets him on his proper course.

England Their England describes Donald’s journey as he undertakes the post-war research for his book. The novel of AG Macdonell (1895-1941) is (mainly) one of affection and gentleness with an underlying wry humour. At the same time, we are in no doubt – from the opening chapter – that the author recognises that England’s recent history also has its darker side. His portrayal of the conduct of the war – the condition of the trenches, the gathering and use of intelligence, the decision-making of the High Command, the allocation of medals – whilst presented with a knowing sarcasm, also does not hide an underlying bitterness about the circumstances in which Donald and Evan found themselves. (In the First World War, Macdonell served for two years in the Royal Field Artillery before himself being invalided out of the army).

Although he is a naturally shy individual, Donald has an unerring – albeit also haphazard and fortuitous – ability to make a series of random contacts within the English middle classes, beginning with an invitation to a weekend house-party hosted by the wealthy (and formidable) Lady Adelaide Ormerode MP. Before “the company sat down seventeen to dinner”, he has somewhat bewildering conversations with a former President of the Trades Union Congress (who thinks Donald possesses some dark political secret), a glamorous film star (who thinks he is a major producer) and a servant (who thinks he is the centre-forward with Chelsea FC). Donald returns to London on the Monday morning “with a note-book full of notes”.

The following weekend, Donald finds himself in an XI raised by a newly acquired friend – Mr William Hodge, the editor of an Arts periodical – for a cricket match on a Kent village green. This episode is probably the most well-known in the book as it includes the description of home side’s ferocious fast bowler – “the blacksmith… tightening his snake-buckled belt for the fray and loosening his braces to enable his terrific bowling-arm to swing freely in its socket” – which invariably features in any anthology of cricket-related literature. The match swings one way and then the other in a highly unpredictable manner before reaching a satisfactory conclusion. At the end of play – and indeed well before that – much alcohol is consumed by Mr Hodge and his team and the day is an enjoyable one for all concerned. However, Donald has less success in drawing conclusions for his research. Notwithstanding the varied and idiosyncratic nature of the match’s various participants, “Donald got home at 1 o’clock in the morning feeling that he had not learnt much about the English from his experience of their national game”.

And so on through other adventures: a day spent as a guest at an upmarket Home Counties golf club, an assignment as the assistant of a British delegate to a League of Nations conference in Geneva, a temporary role as a London theatre critic…

It has to be said that some of Macdonell’s observations do not sit well with the modern reader. At the Geneva conference, a satirical description of some of the delegates’ responses to a report on “the barbarous conduct of the Hungarian Army in Yugo-Slavia during the Great War” is simply distasteful. Likewise, when asked by Donald about the British policy at the conference’s Committee for the Abolition of Social Abuses, an Old Etonian civil servant responds” My dear sir, we don’t have policies about things. We leave all that to the dagoes. It keeps them out of mischief”.

The latter is not the only incidence of casual racism – the background on a Major-General at the weekend house-party provides an even more explicit example – that obliges the reader to form a view about its presence in the narrative. Is it part of a straightforward descriptive context, reflecting the social mores of the 1930s, to which Macdonell is not applying any value judgement? Or is the author deliberately emphasising – and damning – the warped perspectives of some of the caricatured individuals in his cast-list?

The reader would no doubt advise Donald that the sporting world provides many insights into the nature of the English. When he sees the newspaper placards “England overwhelmed with disaster”, “Is England doomed?” and “Collapse of England”, Donald joins a lengthy queue to buy his morning paper fearing that some national calamity had occurred. It had, of course: England’s batting had collapsed in a Test Match in Melbourne.

Macdonell’s wry presentation of the winter sports is also revealing. Donald joins the crowd of 65,000– “thirty thousand young men, thirty thousand young women and five thousand parsons” – to watch the Oxford/Cambridge Varsity rugby match at Twickenham. The afternoon is one of heavy rain and winter gloom, the pitch turns into a quagmire and a dull 3-3 draw is played out. Two days later, at the Stamford Bridge ground of Chelsea FC, the Varsity Association Football game “began in bright sunshine at 2pm and was played throughout in bright sunshine. A brilliantly open and fast match, resulting in a draw of three goals each”. The crowd was four thousand.

Apart from the visit to Geneva and a return ferry trip from Kingston-upon-Hull across the North Sea to Danzig, Donald’s perceptions of England and the English are drawn entirely from his experiences in London and the South East. His judgement on Hull is that it is a “gloomy city…[a] dismal spread of squalor”, its sole redeeming feature being that “the town of Goole, seen from the train, looked even bloodier”. This assessment is no surprise to us as, earlier, travelling by char-a-banc to the cricket match, “Donald had been “enchanted by his first sight of rural England. And rural England is the real England, unspoilt by factories and financiers and tourists and hustle”.

Not that everything in the countryside meets with his approval. He is appalled – as are we – by the crass and obnoxious behaviour of the followers of the North Bucks Hunt, not least by their almost-comical hypocrisy towards animal welfare.

But we do not need to worry. The unpleasant encounter with the Hunt is heavily outweighed, on the other side of the balance sheet, by Donald’s experiences – revealing, poignant, uplifting – in the (random) contacts that he makes with other individuals on his travels: the entrepreneurial Yorkshire engineer, the elderly patrons of a village pub, a young schoolboy in Winchester (Macdonnell’s alma mater)… In their turn, each add to Donald’s knowledge of the English and provide him with confirmation of the admiration and respect that he had discussed with Evan Davies inside the Passchendaele pill-box.

14th February 2025

The front cover of this spy story boldly depicts it as “A John le Carré novel”. It’s a debatable point. Le Carré died in 2020 and the author – Nick Harkaway – is one of his sons. But, as marketing ploys go, it’s a strong sell.

There is no doubt that we are firmly – and reassuringly – in le Carré territory, however. The book is set in 1963, immediately after the climax of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). (Readers unfamiliar with the earlier book should be warned that its denouement is clearly revealed). There is a cast list of familiar le Carré characters – Control, George Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Bill Haydon, Peter Guillam, et al – about whom those familiar with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) will not find it easy to avoid casting their minds forward to future events. And, of course, there is the liberal use of the spy-trade’s jargon – the Circus, Cousins, scalphunters, safe houses – with which we can remind ourselves of our insider knowledge.

The story begins with a London-based secretary and PA – Susanna Gero – arriving at work to discover that her boss – László Bánáti, a literary agent – has disappeared. We learn quickly that both are Hungarian émigrés and – via Haydon – that Bánáti is really Ferenc Róka, a former Soviet-trained agent. He had fled the scene only a day or so before the arrival in his office of a hitman with termination orders from Moscow Centre.

Control, the Head of the Service, commissions Smiley to find Róka and to determine why it is that the Centre wishes to eliminate him after his many years of living a quiet life in London. Smiley’s mission takes him to Berlin and Vienna with support from Peter Guillam, the scalpel Tom Lake and – rather improbably, on Control’s orders, Susanna – before events move to the other side of the Iron Curtain. Woven into this narrative – and, it turns out, crucial to it – is the backstory of the new power in the Centre’s hierarchy, who wishes to eliminate Róka: Karla, the man destined to fulfil the future role of Smiley’s great rival across the ideological divide.

Interestingly – given the parallels with the beginning of both Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy and one of its sequels Smiley’s People (1979) – Smiley has to be enticed out of retirement (or near-retirement) to fulfil the brief, as he had taken responsibility for the disquieting events at the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Once on board again, however, he demonstrates his particular skills with his usual understated – and impressive – thoroughness. The episode in which he and Esterhase (remotely) access the conversation between two Soviet agents in a London hotel room is a masterclass. Likewise, when he and Lake are forced to shake off the attentions of some of the opposition’s agents in Vienna.

This is the era of Hillmans and Routemasters – not surveillance drones and mobile phones – and the pace of Harkaway’s story is steady rather than frantic. There is one high-speed car chase, though “high-speed” is something of a stretch as Smiley is driving a Trabant with a dodgy gear-box. More generally, the author provides sufficient space for the characters to breath and reflect and, occasionally, to consider the overarching validity of their chosen profession. For Control, “I want… to win. It is a war, after all, and if one must fight a war, better to win with all the unpleasantness that implies, than lose, and be subjected to the cost of losing”.

By contrast, Smiley is a more nuanced figure: “Literature tells us that sorrow is more profound than joy – a very Russian perception, as it happens. As I live longer, I’m more convinced that our valorisation of pain is what makes our world so bleak. We anticipate it, we approve of it, and in doing so, we make it. We need a better way”. We are not misled into thinking Smiley risks being vulnerably empathetic, however: when it is necessary, he is ruthless in achieving a given objective.

Within the le Carré oeuvre, there is a hiatus of a decade between the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the depiction of George Smiley’s long-range battle with Karla in Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This is an open window through which Nick Harkaway could supply further variations of “A John le Carré novel”. In common with – I suspect – most Smiley-watchers, I hope he does.

16th January 2025

Philip Roth’s novel begins with the nomination of Charles A Lindbergh as the Republican candidate in the 1940 US Presidential Election to stand against the two-time incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Lindbergh is a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler. His platform is based on a combination of “America First” – which involves staying out of the foreign wars that are now raging – and a virulent anti-Jewish philosophy. This is spelled out in a seminal speech made to supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, broadcast on the radio: “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples [i.e. the British
and the Jews] to lead our country to destruction”. (In Roth’s chronology, this is a pre-election speech; Lindbergh actually gave it in September 1941).

The story takes shape through the eyes of Philip – 7 years old at its beginning – who lives with his parents, 10 year-old brother Sanford (Sandy) and cousin Alvin in a Jewish neighbourhood of Newark, New Jersey. His father – Herman, an insurance agent – has a prescient fear of what the future will hold when Lindbergh is elected President. His views are shared – initially at least – by Alvin who joins the Canadian Armed Forces to fight the Nazis in Europe.

A family trip to Washington reveals the previously latent anti-Semitism to which Lindbergh’s election has given official endorsement. In quick succession, this is demonstrated by a tourist at the Lincoln Memorial, a policeman, a hotel manager and a restaurant diner. On their return to Newark, Herman ruefully reflects: “They live in a dream and we live in a nightmare”.

We see that, at first, the undermining of American Jewishness takes place within the family. Philip’s Aunt Evelyn becomes the mistress of a prominent rabbi – Lionel Bengelsdorf – who is what in other political circles would have been called a “useful idiot” within the Lindbergh administration; to the disgust of his father, Sandy becomes a keen advocate of the Just Folks programme of sending young Jewish boys away from their homes (and closely knit communities) for work experience elsewhere, in his case on a Kentucky farm; and Philip’s parents argue about whether to flee the country for the apparent safety of Canada.

For the young Philip, there is the formidable task of trying to make sense of what is happening in the grown-up world around him, whilst passing through what otherwise would be a conventional childhood: learning to play chess with his neighbour, Seldon; adding to his prized stamp collection; stealing a football from a neighbour’s garden.

In the meantime, whilst events progress in the global conflict – Japanese forces making inroads into China and Burma (with India threatened), Germany engaging in total war with Russia on its eastern front and Britain fighting a lone hand in Western Europe (with no American support) – Lindbergh basks in his success of avoiding direct American involvement. He hosts the German foreign minister – Joachim von Ribbentrop – on a state visit.

As the anti-Jewishness takes a lethal hold across much of the country, there are attacks on homes and business in several cities, most severely in Detroit where a repeat of Germany’s Kristallnacht of November 1938 is enacted. A prominent Jewish figure is assassinated. This prompts the preparation for armed resistance by some of the Jews, notably the young toughs linked to neighbourhood gangs and organised crime. Herman is offered a gun with which to protect his family by a (non-Jewish) neighbour. The latter – an Italian nightwatchman – is a recent arrival in the locality when, in the interest of “assimilation”, the authorities undertake the forced removal of some Jewish families from their neighbourhoods for re-settlement elsewhere.

Philip Roth (1933-2018) was a native of Newark and – quite apart from the name given to his young central character – this is an emphatically personal novel. He moves easily between the claustrophobia of the Roth household and the wider events that have resulted from the presence of the aviator-hero in the White House.

We are invited to reflect not only on the implications of the wholesale capture of the law-enforcement agencies and the mainstream media by those in government, but also – even less easily – on the issue of assimilation of ethnic and cultural groups within a country’s overall framework and on America’s role on the global stage. And – surreally for the present-day reader, given recent comments made by President-elect Trump – on the speculation that the USA’s Armed Forces might launch an attack on Canada.

These are hugely significant issues, of course. It is surely one of Roth’s great accomplishments that – 20 years after the novel’s publication and as we wonder where current global and national events might lead us – they should continue to resonate so powerfully.

The Plot Against America contains a postscript comprising the author’s “note to the reader” and biographical summaries of the major historical figures in the work, including not only Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow, FDR and von Ribbentrop, but also Henry Ford, the broadcaster Walter Winchell and Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York City.

The author begins the note by reminding us that this is a work of fiction. It is the flexibility provided by this imaginative form that enables him not only to portray a vivid account of an alternative American history, but also – in its final quarter – to present a dramatic shift in the narrative’s direction.

20th November 2024

One day in November 1851, Eliza Cargill – a recently widowed 20 year-old in Monterey, California – is approached in the street by a Mrs Parks. “Dear, if you find yourself in embarrassed circumstances, don’t hesitate to come to me. I think I can help you” offers the latter. A short time later, Eliza – having changed her surname to Ripple – duly takes her place in Mrs Parks’s bordello.

The madame does not encourage the girls in her stable to learn too much about each other but, separately, Eliza does strike up a close friendship with Jean MacPherson, whose own line of employment is to “attend to the needs of ladies, not men”. Jean, who for some of her clients dresses up in men’s clothes and calls herself John, claims to frequently encounter ghosts around the town though, to her frustration, she is unable to communicate with them.

Jean introduces Eliza to Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder in the Rue Morgue and so it is that when two other young prostitutes mysteriously disappear – followed by the discovery of a corpse on the bank of a river out of town and then the murder of one of Jean’s clients – the two women set about attempting to solve the crimes. Eliza, in particular, is captivated by the detective skills of Poe’s Parisian sleuth, Inspector Dupin. (Poe himself had died in 1849 at the age of 40).

In undertaking this task, Eliza and Jean largely have the field to themselves. When it comes to upholding the law and seeking justice in Monterey, the lead is usually taken by ad hoc vigilante groups, but none is established for this case. (Likewise, no effort had been previously been made to identify or apprehend the man who had fatally shot Eliza’s abusive husband – Peter Cargill – following an argument in a bar).

Whilst not exactly a one-horse town, Monterey has only a single sheriff (with no constables) for its official law enforcement and it becomes clear to Eliza and Jean that the girls’ disappearance is of no interest to him. When Eliza asks why they should investigate the case, when the sheriff will not, Jean’s response is immediate: “Because we have to. So what if we are beginners and have no idea what we’re doing?”

Jane Smiley presents the narrative with a light touch. By present-day standards, of course, Monterey in the 1850s would have been a hard – at times, grim – place in which to live, but the author does not dwell on this to any great extent. Similarly, Eliza’s daily routine would have been dangerous and unpleasant, albeit that Mrs Parks – a strict but sympathetic overseer of her premises – employs the capable Carlos as a permanent security presence during working hours. The author’s standard – if not coy – reference to Eliza’s sexual encounters is of her clients – townsfolk, sailors, adolescent boys – simply “doing their business”.

The historical context is similarly presented in a low-key way although, on occasion, it does seem as if there is an obvious checklist of reference points that must be included by the author. Hence, it is Mrs Parks who, for no obvious reason, refers to the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848; a couple of characters refer to the inevitability of a Civil War between the Slave and Non-Slave States; and Eliza, having learned of the legal disputes surrounding the route of the railway from the East to California when with one client, raises it in pre-coital conversation with the next in what can only be described as slightly unusual verbal foreplay.

As for Eliza and Jean’s amateur detective work, there are times when the credibility is somewhat stretched. For a complete novice in this line of work, the former demonstrates a remarkable skill in matching some distinctive footprints behind a tree in a graveyard with, later, those in a muddy street following a heavy rainstorm. Inspector Dupin – indeed Sherlock Holmes himself – would have been impressed with such acute powers of observation.

The murder mystery is efficiently solved by Eliza and Jean, of course, with – from their perspective, at least – no loose ends left remaining. It seemed to me that their success was based on gut feeling and intuition, however, rather than the accumulation of any firm evidence. Moreover, a key twist in the resolution is based on the previous fateful acquaintance in another State of two individuals who had hitherto featured as separate characters in the story.

Jane Smiley has delivered a cosy narrative, the immersion in which allows us to be transported back to an earlier time in what is now the Golden State. However, the rose-tinting of some of the circumstances, combined with an overall flatness of delivery, leave the strong impression that there is much that has been left unsaid.

22nd October 2024

The Shape of Water is the first in the series of novels by Andrea Camilleri (1925-2019) featuring the Sicily-based Inspector Salvo Montalbano. The English translation in the Picador edition of 2004 is by Stephen Sartarelli, who also provides some informative Notes.

The narrative moves quickly from the start and maintains a brisk pace. The first murder victim is found in the opening chapter: Silvio Luparello, a well-connected engineer, discovered on a rubbish-strewn tract of Mediterranean brush – the Pasture, a site frequented by drug dealers and prostitutes – on the outskirts of Vigàta, Montalbano’s home town.

The victim being a prominent behind-the-scenes figure in Sicilian politics – as well as a wealthy businessman – it is inevitable that Montalbano’s investigation becomes embroiled in a tangled web of criminality, graft and corruption, this network of murky connections apparently extending into the judiciary and the Church. Running in parallel with this, the police also have to use their resources in dealing with a nasty tit-for-tat war between the island’s Cuffaro and Sinagra gangs; we are not spared the details of one particularly gruesome killing.

The Inspector solves the Luparello case, of course, using a potent combination of policing skills, imaginative intuition and some unorthodox approaches to the gathering of evidence, not all of which are technically above board. He is aided by his loyal subordinates, including the efficient sergeant, Guiseppe Fazio. I liked the latter’s appreciation of the effectiveness of the interview technique of another colleague, Giallombardo: “You know what he’s like: someone spends a couple of hours with him, talking like he’s known him for a hundred years, and afterward he realises he’s told him secrets he wouldn’t even tell the priest at confession”.

Camilleri does not hide his views – a combination of disappointment, contempt and resignation – on the general governance of Sicily, often expressing himself with a rich irony. The site of the murder is near to the ruins of a large chemical works that had opened “when it seemed the magnificent the winds of progress were blowing strong”. Now, however, the breeze had dropped altogether “leaving a shambles of compensation benefits and unemployment in its wake…. The old structures still soared, corroded by weather, neglect and sea salt, looking more and more like architectures designed by Gaudi under the influence of hallucinogens”.

It turns out that evidence found in the ruined chemical works has a crucial role to play in the development of Montalbano’s investigations. More generally, however, one also senses that the site itself represents the author’s use of an early metaphor for the overall context of life in Sicily: that notwithstanding any occasional grounds for optimism about economic and social progress, there is an inevitability about the dissatisfaction with the eventual outturn.

It is against this background that the dogged and admirable Inspector Montalbano maintains his efforts to solve crime and hold its perpetrators to account. In doing so, he might justifiably be seen as honouring the memory of those in Sicily’s actual police and judiciary – not least the magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, assassinated by the Mafia in 1992 – who, with even greater courage and determination, paid the ultimate price in their pursuit of what they believed to be right.

22nd August 2024

There are two-books-in-one in this novel by the Parisian-born Laurent Binet, translated from the original French by Sam Taylor.

First, there is a conventional historical thriller about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia – otherwise known as the “Hangman of Prague” or the “Blond Beast” – by the Czech Resistance in 1942 and the terrible revenge that was exacted by the Germans.

In addition – and interspersed throughout the narrative – there is what is effectively a commentary by the author about the writing of the book. This ranges widely, as Binet discusses his extensive (perhaps bordering on obsessive) research, his views on other novels and films that have covered the subject (including Seven Men at Daybreak by Alan Burgess, noted below) and his determined attempt to avoid the insertion of speculative (and unknown) details into a story that has its basis in actual events.

The historical context is set out with some skill, both in terms of Heydrich’s personal background and, more generally, the development of the war in Central and Eastern Europe.

After his initial naval career ends in disgrace and dismissal, Heydrich is recruited by Heinrich Himmler to head the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the intelligence wing of the Schutzstaffel, SS). Part of this role – undertaken with unbridled enthusiasm – is overseeing the wholesale liquidation by the murderous Einsatzgruppen of those left in the wake of the progress of the German armed forces in Poland – “teachers, writers, journalists, priests, industrialists, bankers, civil servants…”.

By September 1939, Himmler and Heydrich have also taken over responsibility for the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) from Hermann Göring. Such is Heydrich’s reputation that, within the SS, there is a saying: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich” – “Himmlers Hirn heist Heydrich”. Hence the title of the book.

The state of Czechoslovakia is abolished in March 1939. Slovakia, though nominally independent, becomes a satellite state aligned with Germany, whilst the Czech component – Bohemia and Moravia – is established as a German Protectorate. Heydrich is put in overall charge by Adolf Hitler in September 1941 with a three-fold responsibility: crushing the remnants of the Resistance movement; ensuring the full “Germanisation” of culture and language; and, crucially for the war effort, ensuring that the industrial base produces an increased output of desperately needed armaments for use in the war with Russia.

For the exiled Czech Government – headed by President Edvard Beneš – and its military advisors in London, a spectacular attack on the Nazi occupiers becomes a matter of urgency. Fearful of the nature and extent of any German retaliation, one possible target is Emanuel Moravic, a collaborationist Minister, but this is rejected as he is little known outside the country. Instead, it is decided to go for a more significant – indeed, the most significant – figure, Heydrich. I would have liked to have learned more about how this decision is reached as, at its heart, is the unavoidable moral dilemma of weighing up the benefits of success against the dreadful revenge that must have been anticipated, albeit perhaps not to the extent that actually occurred.

The mission is put in the hands of two exiled parachute commandos, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík – respectively a Czech and a Slovak – supported by the thin local network of Resistance members in Prague and elsewhere. It is a story of bravery, mishap, foolhardiness, luck (good and bad) – and betrayal.

The novel shares a characteristic with Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (1971) – about a 1963 assassination attempt on President de Gaulle of France – in that the reader might well know the outcome in advance. (In the case of the Heydrich assassination, my own understanding of the events had previously been through a 1975 film Operation Daybreak, starring Anthony Andrews and Timothy Bottoms, based on Alan Burgess’s novel). However, this doesn’t detract from the heightened sense of drama provided by Binet, as the assassins finalise their plans, make their attempt and then seek to escape.

In its Vintage Books edition, the book does not contain any page numbers, but consists of no fewer than 257 “chapters”, averaging about a page each and with some only one or two sentences in length. I think this probably adds to the flow of the narrative, although I did also find that this was interrupted by one or two of Binet’s private insertions.

This is an important book. It tells us how, whilst the life of an evil man was brought to an end, the terrible times of which he was a central figure still had some distance to run. The German reprisals included razing the Bohemian village of Lidice, murdering some 340 of its inhabitants and obliterating it from the map – all based on false information that the village had had some sort of connection with the assassins.

However, the book also informs us that, in the post-war reckoning, these horrors were not forgotten. The modern village of Lidice is twinned with Coventry and there are neighbourhoods with that name across the world, including in the United States, Cuba, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Azerbeijan. Such are the threads that link the Nazi regime and the Hangman of Prague and the Czech Resistance to a town square in Montevideo and a street in Santiago.

24th July 2024

It is likely that most people would suspect that, beneath the glamour and opulence of the 5-Star hotels and A-List parties, there is a seedy underworld in Los Angeles. Quite how sordid – with its crime, drugs, violence, prostitution, hangers-on and desperation – is revealed in this fast-paced contemporary thriller.

We identify with two main characters – Amanda Mae Pruett (Mae) and Chris Tamburro.

Mae is employed by Mitnick & Associates – “LA’s pre-eminent crisis management firm” – whose mantra is “We don’t get the good news out, we keep the bad news in”. The reader gets an early illustration of her impressive skills in manipulating the public perception of events when she creates a positive story – duly lapped up on social media – about how a troubled young actress (one of the firm’s clients) obtained a horrendous black eye just days before she was due to start shooting a film.

Chris is a burly enforcer – a “fist” – employed by a dodgy lawyer, Stephen Acker, who, in turn, works for a ruthless security firm, BlackGuard. He had previously been dismissed from the LA Police Department after the FBI caught him in a sting involving confiscated drugs. We learn that “…everybody at BlackGuard is ex-something. Ex-cop, ex-fed, ex-military. Everybody got trained on the government dime”.

It has to be said that Jordan Harper does not portray the official police force at all sympathetically. Corruption, violence and the leakage of information are rife. Moreover, in east LA, the continual battles against the various gangs are conducted by what are effectively gangs within the East LAPD: “…every Dead Game Boy [a police gang] has the same tattoo inked over their heart, where it would always be covered by a uniform and bulletproof vest… A red addition is made after you’ve killed a man in the line of duty”.

The narrative takes a sudden – and shocking – shift when someone whom I had assumed would be another central character is murdered. Mae and Chris join forces to investigate the reasons behind this, she for personal reasons and he when commissioned by Acker and BlackGuard. When their path leads them to uncover more murders – in the plural, this time, a massacre of the inhabitants of a house they had been watching – they realise that their own lives are in danger from the overwhelming forces now being marshalled against them.

Mae and Chris label these forces as “The Beast” – a sinister web of interconnections comprising holding corporations, major property interests, corrupt public officials and compromised media players as well as Mitnick & Associates’ PR empire and BlackGuard’s security forces. (And, at its centre – a la Ian Fleming – a reclusive billionaire). It is here that Harper is drawing on the widespread paranoia within present-day America about the Deep State or whatever other malevolent forces might be in league to keep the Ordinary Joe – you and me – exactly where they want us.

In this case, The Beast’s interests range from the trade in body-parts and the billions to be made from a major property development through to the protection of the reputations of a powerful Hollywood producer and his cronies. When Mae and Chris uncover evidence of a major paedophile ring, their goals become focused on “saving” a pregnant 14 year-old and revealing what really goes on at the producer’s “soda pop parties”.

The author skilfully signals the moral ambiguities that both Mae and Chris recognise within themselves. They see the virtue in attempting to take down – via blackmail and for their own profit – someone who is clearly a nasty piece of work. At the same time, they acknowledge to themselves that – in their different ways – their own careers have been far from unblemished in terms of the work they have done and the ways in which they have gone about it.

At the heart of this is their fatalism about the nature of Los Angeles and the inevitability that the city will always contain its bad guys. As another character recognises, “You can kill an ant, but if you leave the sugar on the floor, more ants will come. It’s the same with people – you can clean out the monsters, but if you leave the money and sex and power on the table, soon enough more monsters will come”.

And the reason for this? That the city is also an overwhelmingly powerful magnet, drawing on the hopes and aspirations of those – particularly the young and naïve – looking to make their names and fortunes. There is “…a web of social media, all these teenage wannabes, all so polished, working on their brand”.

Harper indulges in a certain amount of LA name-dropping – of both people and places – though this is not done to excess. Mae walks past Gary Oldman in the lobby of a plush hotel and, later, sees someone who looks like Natalie Portman eating a chocolate croissant in a French pastry café. It is Natalie Portman. The frequent – and swift – changes in location take us past where John Belushi OD’d and the rapper Biggie Smalls was killed in a drive-by shooting. And, whilst the diets of both Mae and Chris seem to comprise entirely of various types of fast-food, we are also informed about what is available in the more upmarket – if not pretentious – eating establishments. In a restaurant on Silver Lake Boulevard, one of the characters has “a bowl of ancient grains and bison hit with the house-made lacto-fermented hot sauce”; at a nearby table, a little girl has a tantrum, flips her plate and her “Zhug-smudged rock cod goes flying”.

Above all, the reader becomes totally immersed in the furious pace of the city and of the lifestyles – at both work and play – of those who live there. In particular, we are almost overwhelmed by the instantaneous world of social media, not least at Mae’s firm. In the basement “Bunker”, where her colleagues are continually creating or amending accounts on Twitter and Instagram, the access to news feeds and cell phone posts demands immediate reactions and responses in order that the appropriate narrative feeds into the public domain.

Jordan Harper takes us on this hair-raising ride with aplomb. Welcome to modern times. Welcome to Los Angeles.

29th June 2024

CJ (Christopher John) Sansom (1952-2024) is probably best known for his novels set at the time of Henry VIII and featuring the hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake. An agent of the King’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, Shardlake first appeared in Dissolution (2023).

Dominion is also a historical novel, though set in more recent times – with a prologue in 1940, the main story line in 1952 and an epilogue in 1953 – and with an alternative history being described, Britain having surrendered to Nazi Germany after the fall of France in 1940. Lord Beaverbrook is the Prime Minister, Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell are in the Cabinet and Winston Churchill is in hiding. In the opening scene, the wreath laid at the November remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph by the young Queen Elizabeth is dwarfed by the corresponding one – bearing a prominent swastika – laid by the German Ambassador, Erwin Rommel.

Sansom draws us into his alternative – and disturbing – world order: the British and French have been allowed to keep their Empires, but the Germans dominate the wealthy markets of Europe; Germany itself remains in a bloody and apparently ceaseless war with a shrunken post-Stalin Russia; successive American administrations remain aloof in their own backyard.

The author provides a similarly imaginative and dispiriting picture of the life being led by ordinary Britons – from the drabness of the clothing and the filth on the London pavements to the propagandist broadcasts of the BBC and the continual threat to ordinary citizens of falling foul of the thuggish gun-toting members of the Special Branch Auxiliaries charged with eliminating the threat of any public (or private) opposition.

One of those apparently ordinary citizens is David Fitzgerald, a 35 year-old civil servant, whose experience of the short 1939-40 War was of being evacuated from Norway after the failed campaign that brought about the downfall of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s replacement was not Churchill but Lord Halifax, who quickly agreed peace terms with Adolf Hitler. David has a supportive – but increasingly distant – wife, Sarah, and a detested brother-in-law, Steve, a preening supporter of the collaborative regime.

We are told early on that David “had to keep his cover intact, never step out of line” and it is soon revealed that he has been recruited by the Resistance, an uneasy collective of Socialists, Communists and the remains of the banned United Government party of Churchill and Clement Attlee. In addition, David is fearfully hiding another secret: his late mother was Jewish and the Home Secretary – Mosley – is keen for the remnants of British Jewry to be sent to the death camps in the East.

David agrees to undertake an unusual mission for the Resistance: to reacquaint himself with an old university friend – Frank Muncaster – who is incarcerated in a mental institution near Birmingham, following an incident with his estranged brother, Edgar, who was visiting him from America following the death of their mother. Frank is a sad individual, lonely and chronically frightened, his nerves permanently shattered (and a hand badly deformed) after his dreadful experience of being bullied at an austere Scottish public school.

Both the Resistance and the German authorities are seeking to find out if, during their altercation, Edgar revealed to Frank a vital secret relating to his scientific research in California. The German lead is Gunther Hoth, a ruthless (but clever) Gestapo officer, who is quick to deduce that David Fitzgerald is a Resistance member. There is jeopardy for David and his cell in their mission to kidnap Frank and take him to safety. And then the Great London Smog descends…

CJ Sansom’s own political perspective is not difficult to identify. “[T]he world he [David] had been brought up in and longed, deep inside, to believe still existed [was] dull and self-absorbed, ironic even about its own prejudices. But that Britain had gone, had instead turned into a place where an authoritarian government in league with Fascist thugs thrived on nationalist dreams of Empire, on scapegoats and enemies”.

What is perhaps more surprising is the scathing contempt with which Sansom describes nationalism and – especially – Scottish nationalism and the SNP. One of the characters – a Scot – lets rip: “There were some Fascist sympathisers amongst them that founded the SNP. Everything for the glorious nation… The Nats opposed conscription in 1939, sayin’ it wis against the Act of Union for Scots to be conscripted into the British army. That was more important to them than fighting the Nazis… Whenever a party tells you national identity matters more than anything else in politics, that nationalism can sort out all the other problems, then watch out, because you’re on a road that can end with fascism… Nationalists always have to have an enemy, the English or the French or the Jews, there always has tae be some other bugger that’s caused all the problems”.

Sansom continues in this vein in an Historical Note at the end of the book. In doing so, he was determinedly – and bravely – swimming against the political tide in Scotland. In 2011 – just a year before the book’s publication – the SNP under Alex Salmond had won 69 seats out of 129 in a Scottish Parliamentary election, giving it an absolute majority. Sansom’s editorial was a heartfelt plea in anticipation of the Independence Referendum, which was held in 2014.

The author was correct in arguing that “the prospective break-up of Britain [was] creating a new culture of hostility and bitterness on both sides of the border” and it would have been to his considerable relief that the Referendum was won by the Unionist “No” side by 55% to 45%. However, his expectation that such an outcome would mean that “at least one nationalist spectre that has grown during my lifetime would vanish from Europe” has turned out to be decidedly inaccurate and – for those in agreement with his views – far too optimistic.