Hard boiled all the way through: Where The Dead Lay (Frank Behr series No. 2), by David Levien

Posted on July 25, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

Frank Behr, Indianapolis private investigator and protagonist of David Levien’s previous novel “City of the Sun”, investigates the murder of one of his few friends, Aurelio, a jiu jitsu trainer and former mixed martial arts champion. The investigation leads him into contact with a local family of criminals with ambitions to establish themselves, through ferocious violence, in the big leagues.

Behr has many attractive features as a character – courage, loyalty and intelligence to start with, but he is also morose, humourless, angry, emotionally distant and rather inarticulate on any subject other than armed or unarmed combat. These are believable and understandable characteristics for a person with his life history, but they do not make him the most enjoyable protagonist to spend a novel with.

The plot is some consolation, and there is a significant compulsion for the reader to see how all the pieces fit together. However there isn’t that much else: one learns little of the city (Indianapolis) in which the novel is set, or contemplate few moral dilemmas that may be associated with the investigation of violent crime perpetrated by professional criminals. Still its an entertaining, though violent, crime novel, good for a bleak holiday. But it leaves me with no desire to ever cross paths with Frank Behr again.

All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945, by Max Hastings

Posted on July 25, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

Max Hastings presents the world with two personae. There is the curmudgeonly right-wing journalist, scion of the Establishment and apologist for the British military. Then there is the historian, who comes across as a wholly different sort of beast, his historical work pervaded with a great sense of humanity and of the pity of war.

With this book, Max Hastings the historian has completed a body of work on the Second World War comparable to Shelby Foote’s magisterial history of the American Civil War. This book fills some of the gaps in the history of the war not covered by his more detailed studies (Overlord on the battle for Normandy; Armageddon on the last year of the war in Europe; Nemesis on the last year of the war in the Pacific; Warlord, his study of Churchill’s war leadership; and Bomber Command). So there is greater consideration here of, for example, the invasion of Poland, the war in the Mediterranean, the major naval campaigns such as the Battle of the Atlantic and the Arctic Convoys, and amongst the most chilling chapters, a discussion on the war in the Balkans. Naturally, however the discussion of the war’s final campaigns are more cursory here given Hastings’ other writings.

One of the things about Hastings’ historical work that is so delightful is that even if one is familiar with much of the narrative of the events he will often bring new detail or insight to the discussion. This book does not disappoint in this regard: the retreat from Stalingrad, for example, is told principally from an Italian perspective; and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is discussed through the idea of “technological determinism” which Hastings sees as shaping key aspects of the Allied campaign, particularly the B29 bomber offensive on Japan. By this he means that when a military capacity exists there can become an overwhelming motivation to use it irrespective of the strategic value: it is an idea that also helps illuminates the dynamics behind some questionable dashes into war, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There is also a great fair-mindedness to Hastings’ historical writing, acknowledging, given the comparable horror of both Soviet and Nazi tyrannies (something that Timothy Synder explores in greater detail in his exceptional book Bloodlands), that for many eastern Europeans the war never could appear the clear cut battle between good and evil it has become in Anglo-American mythology. Hastings also points out how that Anglo-American myth must take some tarnishing given Britain’s role in the Indian wartime famine, the Anglo-American betrayal of Poland, and some of the needless blood shed by the Allies in the Pacific.

Overall a great work of narrative history, elegantly written with a seeming effortlessness that belies the great learning it contains.

The Speed of Light, by Javier Cercas

Posted on July 25, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

The Speed of Light uses the same author-in-search-of-a-story device as Javier Cercas’s previous superb novel of the Spanish Civil War, Soldiers of Salamis. At its core the book is a meditation on how war breeds atrocity and the consequences of atrocity on the perpetrators – the murdered are barely mentioned and only fleetingly considered.

However while a gripping read it ultimately is significantly less satisfying a book than the author’s earlier one about the Spanish Civil War. As one of the characters says to the narrator in The Speed of Light – “you can’t understand because you haven’t killed”. And because the author – presumably not a killer either – does not understand he cannot explain. Instead he describes, recounts and tries to empathise. This is an honourable exercise, but it provides little insight to this subject. Furthermore the author’s blurring of the distinction between himself and his protagonist leads, I found, to great difficulty in trusting the account itself and hence the insight the author offers.

Nevertheless the book is elegantly written and translated, and it is thought-provoking. Perhaps it will lead some to revisit actual histories of the Vietnam war, particularly Four Hours at My Lai, which deals much more directly and insightfully with the realities of war-crimes.

The American Civil War, by John Keegan

Posted on July 24, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

If you do not have access to Ken Burn’s outstanding documentary on the US Civil War this is an okay introduction to the subject. It is a straightforward and relatively concise narrative of the war, started by the Southern States as a repudiation of a democratic election, the result of which offered a glimmer of a threat to their brutal slavery practices.

But there are better introductions to the subject, and there are certainly better books by John Keegan: This displays little of the novelty of Keegan’s “Six Armies in Normandy” or the insight of “Mask of Command”. Rather it seems to me to have been published to capitalise on Keegan’s reputation and little else.

It lacks editing with much repetition. Some of his judgements seem bizarre – the drawing of a lineal relationship between Sherman’s practice of total war, brutal as that was, and Hitler’s campaigns of the twentieth century is strange and certainly under-argued. But this is as nothing to his apparent endorsement (contradicting himself from a few pages earlier) of Bedford Forest’s judgement of the inferiority of black troops: citing a probable war criminal and subsequent Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan on this issue is both dubious and offensive irrespective Bedford Forest’s genius as a cavalry commander.

Towards the end of the book brief discussions of Walt Whitman and the impact of the Civil War on development of American revolutionary socialism redeem the book somewhat. It is a pity that Keegan did not explore the war from perspectives such as these rather than the more conventional approach that he adopted.

Overall a book to file under the “could do better” category for John Keegan. A reader looking for insights to the American Civil War could also certainly do better – time spent on Shelby Foote’s 3000 page magisterial work on the war, or Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s exquisite biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals, would never be wasted.

If Harry Potter were a deranged psychopath forced into a book with a lousy plot – Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind

Posted on July 23, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

I know a lot of people love this book. I can imagine even that some literary types, the same sort that would get sniffy about Harry Potter, might sing its praises and allude to some brilliantly evoked passage or other.

This is strange because this is also a book about a magician. It is set in a world a lot like this one a few hundred years ago where magic resides in smells – these can conjure, love, invisibility and all sorts in between. But where other books about magicians, such as JK Rowling’s, Jonathan Stroud’s, or Ursula LeGuin’s, use magic as metaphor or more incidentally to explore other ideas, this book has no other purpose. It demands that the reader accept the fundamental power of the magic of smell and to engage with a repellent magician in his quest for the most magical perfumes.

God above did I detest the whole sorry thing for the pointlessly silly exercise in silliness that it is. There are some vaguely interesting descriptions of perfume making but these are not enough to justify the effort. The characters are cyphers. It says nothing about the human condition.

So despite being a short book it gives a strong sense of being about 200 pages too long.

At least the advent of e-books mean that trees need never again die to bring this sort of ill-judged cow-pat of a book into print.

A book to avoid like pestilence unless you are a masochist or doing penance for some terrible deed.

Commandos’ war in a small corner of Croatia: Island of Terrible Friends, by Bill Strutton

Posted on July 23, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

On holidays on the island of Vis a few years ago I came across a memorial to British commandos in the harbour of Komisa. I found this book after I got home, a non-fiction novel told from the perspective of the real British doctors who worked on the island, in and around Komisa, when it was one of the few bits of Croatia unoccupied by the Germans.

The author, himself a veteran of the war in the Eastern Mediterranean, had clearly taken the time to visit the island as the accounts he gathered are precisely rooted in the geography of the island – its possible to find and follow the roads described in the story and find the locations of many of the incidents. And, while the story is told from the perspectives of the allies and based on the accounts of allied combatants, particularly the doctors on the island, it does not shy away from the nastier aspects of the war: the beautiful island I could see from the window of my holiday apartment, for example, is identified as the place that the Partisans took both German prisoners and their own people judged guilty of infractions to execute them.

Overall a facinating and engagingly written story of deeply likeable people in a bloody but forgotten corner of the bloodiest of wars.

Genius is no excuse: Bobby Fischer Goes to War, by David Edmonds

Posted on July 22, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

Bobby Fischer Goes to War is a compelling account of the 1972 world chess championship, accessible to non-chess players and of interest to students of the Cold War: the account of this match is well contextualised in the politics and culture of the time and in the biographies of the two protagonists.

At the centre of the account, as repulsive as ever, is the American Bobby Fischer the challenger, one of the greatest chess players who ever lived and a venial, spoilt, perpetually petulant overgrown adolescent, unforgivably indulged by the championship organisers in his whims and tantrums. The Russian, Boris Spassky, the reigning champion, by contrast is a more sympathetic figure, contributing to his own ultimate undoing by acquiescing too easily with the pusillanimous and cowardly behaviour of the organisers.

Those who do not appreciate chess may regard this story as “much ado about nothing”. Those who love the game will enjoy the account and lament how an event that could have been a marvel of sportsmanship, courage and analytical thinking degenerated into such a farce.

The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, by Matthew Cobb

Posted on July 21, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

In June 1944 in the French industrial town of Tulle the Germans declared they were going to execute 120 people in a reprisal for a defeat by the resistance. They began hanging them from the balconies and lamp posts of their own town. Having murdered 99 innocent men aged between 17 and 42 they stopped, possibly because they simply ran out of rope.

This sort of chilling anecdote regularly illuminates this fine narrative history of the French Resistance. The book strives to outline the breadth and depth of the French resistance, in the process remembering key figures such as Moulin in their full human complexity and capturing the excitement, horror, heroism and tragedy of this aspect of the struggle against the Nazis.

A central theme of the books is how the heroism of the Resistants was taken advantage of by De Gaulle, who derived the political benefits of the struggle while barely acknowleging the sacrifice of the resistants. Nevertheless, while always clear in his sympathies to the Resistants of both Left and Right, the author does not shirk from addressing some of the atrocities and excesses of those same people.

The climax of the book is, perhaps inevitably, the liberation of Paris, in many ways an aberration in the Second World War. Elsewhere, including parts of France, there was an almost total failure of the Allies to support the national insurrections against the Nazis, with terrible consequences from Prague to Warsaw.

Overall an excellent introduction to this period of history in all its bloodshed and confusion.

Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre

Posted on July 21, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: a fine account of the liberation of Paris

A detailed account, in the mould of Cornelius Ryan’s great second world war trilogy, of the 1944 Paris insurrection. The story of its initiation and its relief is drawn from the personal reminisences of participants and witnesses, French, American and German.

This leads to a gripping and at times very moving book. Though the vastness of the cast occassionally makes it difficult to keep track of characters this never detracts from the coherence of the sprawling narrative.

The account is broadly pro-de Gaulle in its sympathies, but otherwise the authors keep to themselves their views of the wider controversies associated with the relief of Paris, such as the decision by the resistance to stage an insurrection in the first place and the relationships between the resistance in France and de Gaulle’s government in exile. The arguments of various participants are outlined and examples of the tensions are recounted but the authors don’t exercise much their own judgements rather letting many of the real people speak for themselves and the readers decide.(For more on these controversies see Mathew Cobb’s The Resistance)

An exemplary work of journalism rather than history, and none the worse for it.

Homicide in the Navajo Nation – Skinwalkers, by Tony Hillerman

Posted on July 21, 2014 by aidanjmcquade

In the middle of the night someone tries unsuccessfully to kill Navajo police officer Jim Chee by putting three shotgun blasts through the wall of his trailer. Meanwhile Lt Joe Leaphorn is investigating three apparently unrelated homicides in different parts of the reservation. As Leaphorn’s enquiries proceed he senses a link with the attack on Chee and so recruits his help to the investigation.

The contrasting personalities of traditional Jim Chee and more sceptical Joe Leaphorn are finely drawn – both deeply attractive characters, not perfect but complementary to each other in their professional skills and with imperfect but believable private lives as well. The detail and care of the characterisation enriches an absorbing plot and a beautifully plain style of writing.

Much of what I have written above could be said about many fine thrillers. But it is the rooting of this story in Navajo history and culture that makes it something truly out of the ordinary. This provides not just absorbing background to the plot but a context that is fundamental to understanding the motivations of the characters.

Having finished it, it is great to know there is more in this series, but sad to find out that Tony Hillerman died a few years ago – its like meeting a new friend only for them to disappear immediately.