Tag Archives: Book Review

The Cut Throat Trial, by the Secret Barrister

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Summary: One of these suspects is not like the others …

As aficionados of Rumpole will know, a “cut-throat” trial is one in which co-defendants turn on each other. That is the heart of this novel about three boys accused of murder — a case that also involves a victim nearly decapitated, so there is that sort of throat-cutting too.

This is the first foray into fiction by the Secret Barrister. It is told from multiple perspectives: a defense and the prosecution barrister, the judge, and two of the defendants. Each voice feels distinct, a technical feat that lends the narrative both texture and credibility.

As in their non-fiction, the Secret Barrister’s abiding concerns with the state of the law, society, and the criminal justice system in England and Wales permeate every chapter. Like Wendy Joseph’s Unlawful Killings, it exposes the squalid tragedies of murder committed by children.

Yet for all its artistic achievement and political undercurrent, this is first and foremost a courtroom thriller — and it is a cracking one. It takes a staple of English literature, the red-herring-strewn cosy murder mystery, and serves it up American-hard-boiled. Gone are the familiar comforts of Agatha Christie and the nostalgia-fests of Richard Osman. Instead, we are in a world where the streets are mean, knives wound horrifically, killing is messy, dying is sore, cops and lawyers are flawed, defendants are pathetic, and justice is too often elusive.

By refusing to flinch from the grotesque realities of murder, the Secret Barrister has produced a novel several cuts above much contemporary English crime fiction, and one that, like the best of literature, illuminates the human condition while laying bare some of the failings of our world.

The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome, by Robin Lane Fox

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Summary: a survey of Greece and the Roman Empire from Homer to Hadrian

Robin Lane Fox may, for want of space, skim over some important subjects, such as the Peloponnesian War or the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD BTW). But The Classical World is still a lucid and engaging narrative, and an excellent introduction to the sweep of that whole period of history.

It’s depressing to think that after some 2,500 years of history humanity has little changed: the abject supplication that the UK displays towards the US shows what empires expect of their vassals is little changed in millennia; today privileged poshos still think as little of committing genocide on foreigns as did democratic Athens or autocratic Rome.

But, as Lane Fox notes, some of the ideas from this time notably those of Socrates and particularly Jesus, offer a more hopeful ideal for humanity.

Given the depths to which western civilisation has sunk at this point in time, Jesus’ imperative to love our neighbours as ourselves still has a lot of heavy lifting to do.

Hacks and Leadership

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Summary: a not very funny rumination on a very funny tv show

Who wants to read about what the tv series Hacks has to say about leadership? Probably no one. But it has lessons on that subject area as important as those that Buffy and Angel teach on philosophy and morality. So here are a few thoughts.

If you haven’t seen Hacks yet, you are lucky. There are four seasons awaiting your delectation. However, like much writing about humour the following is not all that. Still, this is free to read. So tough.

Hacks is about the borderline unhealthy relationship between a legendary comedian, Deborah Vance (played by the legendary Jean Smart) and her new writer, Ava Daniels (the very funny and genuinely admirable Hannah Einbinder). 

While the setting may be the glamourous world of showbusiness, fundamentally it is a workplace comedy. In the workplace that Deborah and Ava find themselves in by season 4 they represent archetypes of bad leadership: Deborah is imperious and ridiculously demanding, with no sense of workers’ rights and frequently forgetting that she has a duty to teach not just perform. Ava is well-meaning but so young she does not know what she does not know. In particular she has not quite grasped that her brilliance as a writer does not necessarily provide her with the knowledge and experience to be a professional leader. 

If you are in any way like me, this will immediately remind you of Lavina Greacen’s book, Chink, her biography of the Irish Second World War general Eric Dorman-Smith.

Just me?

Well, a central theme of that book was that leadership is a collective task, requiring at least two people to have any chance of working. 

This is something that the writers of Hacks also instinctively seem to understand. Neither Ava nor Deborah are necessarily people you would like to know in real life. But together they make each other better as people and as leaders. Of course, they have difficulty admitting this to each other – too much ego getting in the way. And they have even more difficulty realizing that there are others central to what success they have achieved, not least Jimmy, their self-effacing and under-appreciated manager (perhaps the real hero of the show?)

Maybe if they had read a few of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels they would know that they need to use more the four sentences that achieve wisdom: “I was wrong,” “I’m sorry,” “I don’t know,” and “I need help”. 

But they haven’t. Indeed, not enough people have. That is one of the reasons why there is so little wisdom and empathy among those responsible for leading in today’s world. It is also one of the reasons that moral leadership increasingly falls to the protests of artists like Hannah Einbinder and Kneecap, while so many more respectable pillars of society are silent as gravestones. 

All that aside, Hacks is one of the best portrayals of workplace politics since The Wire. And it’s bleeding funny.  Try it. 

Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves;  The Great War, by Peter Hart; Catastrophe: Europe goes to war 1914, by Max Hastings;  and The Peacemakers, by Margaret Macmillan

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Summary: Diverse, highly readable perspectives on the First World War

Like many of my generation, my introduction to the First World War was at school, studying the sublime poetry of Wilfred Owen. Owen’s writings along with others such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, did much to promote the “lions led by donkeys” view of that war. 

This is a perspective on the war that Peter Hart takes considerable exception to. A key theme of his fine narrative history of that war, similar to Hew Strachan, is that the allied generals have been unfairly maligned, made scapegoats by civilian leaders who bore more responsibility for the carnage.

The generals of the Western Front were, he argues, by and large, diligent soldiers, trying to learn the best way to fight an industrial war. This is something that their prior experiences, helping their colonial empires steal other people’s countries and butchering anyone who objected, had not properly prepared them for. 

Better than Strachan, Hart illustrates well the impact of the generals’ decisions on the front line troops of all armies. He quotes extensively from the letters and diaries of the combatants to give a truer sense of their experiences, including of the vicious fighting. This makes it hard to sympathise with Hart’s  broader argument that the generals were doing their best. 

The industrialised trench warfare of the First World War was not quite unprecedented: the Union’s final campaign against Richmond under Grant previewed the sort of warfare that would come to define the Western Front. Grant had realised that an attritional campaign would bleed the South to such an extent that even if he lost every battle the Union would win the war. 

With no extant tactics to breach the fortified lines in a way that would have meaningful strategic impact on the course of the war, the opposing sides settled into a similar war of attrition. This led to regular battles that hoped to inflict such a butcher’s bill on the other side as to make it difficult for them to continue.

Other pressures, not least that of coalition warfare, also demanded action, irrespective of how inadvisable. That is how the British came to attack fortified German positions on the Somme in 1916 – to provide some “relief” to the French under German attack at Verdun. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 deaths. That still does not seem to me a reasonable price for generals learning on-the-job or offering moral support to an ally. 

By way of contrast, during the Second World War Matthew Ridgeway, an American Airborne general risked his entire career by refusing to lead his troops on what he believed would be a suicidal assault on Rome. This would have entailed dropping his lightly armed forces in the midst of two German heavy divisions.

I suspect most of the allied troops on the frontline of the First World War, such as Owen, Sassoon and Graves, would have happily swapped their “diligent” generals for a few with a fraction of Ridgeway’s moral courage. 

Graves was almost killed in a later stage of the Somme battle. It is striking that in Goodbye to All That, his engaging account of his wartime experiences, he never describes killing anyone, though he hints that he did. The closest he comes is describing a sniping opportunity to kill a bathing German. Graves writes that he could not bring himself to press the trigger on the naked man, so he assigned the task to a subordinate instead.

Graves clearly carried the war with him for decades after. The guilt and trauma of it infuses his account of the Greek Myths, for example.

Given the horror of the war, it is understandable that we all should look for who to blame. This is among the tasks that Max Hastings undertakes in his typically gripping account of the outbreak of the war. Hastings is at pains to point out that Germany more than any other nation was the one that could have put a stop to the descent into cataclysm. Hence in Hastings’ view this is the country that should bear most of the blame. Hart has a similar perspective, noting that Germany believed that as war was inevitable the sooner it began the better it suited them. 

In this Hastings and Hart offer somewhat different perspectives to Christopher Clark’s exceptional book on the same subject, The Sleepwalkers. This lays considerably more of the blame on Serbia, Britain and France’s ally. Margaret Macmillan, whose book, The War that Ended Peace, also explored the dangerous, dizzying array of alliances and egos that shepherded Europe to war. Both these accounts suggest there is plenty more blame to go around all combatant nations. 

With The Peacemakers Macmillan explores the end of the war, specifically the Paris Peace conference that led to the Versailles Settlement. This established much of the contemporary political shape of Europe. Alongside the “Great Power” politics of the Conference, Macmillen’s book is also the story of how the peoples of, in particular, central and eastern Europe shook off the rule of the Great Powers whose blundering had dragged them into catastrophic war. 

But the Versailles settlement also sowed the seeds of future war in Europe, by assigning all the guilt for the war to Germany. This ignored the role of, in particular, Serbia in starting things. It also ignored the fact that the Germany that came to Paris was a different country to the one at the start of the war. Not fundamentally different, of course: as German history since 1919 has shown it a country that has never quite lost its relish for atrocity. But by 1919 it had been through a democratic revolution that was economically crippled by the demand for reparations from the victorious powers. This created the political conditions for the Nazis to emerge. 

In granting to Britain the Palestine mandate the Versailles Settlement also paved the way for a new settler-colonial entity there, and for the Zionist genocide of the indigenous people that, with shameless US, German and British support, continues to this day. 

The First World War remains an example of, as William Faulkner once wrote, the past not even being past. Its dark legacy is a bloody one in the present for millions of defenceless human beings.

So, perhaps Wilfred Owen remains still the most vital voice on the First World War, understanding from that one war the pity of all war, and encouraging a level of empathy for the victims of war that no discussions of causality, strategy or blame ever can.

The Ghosts of Rome, by Joseph O’Connor

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Summary: more Paddington 2 than Jaws 2

Sequels are a tricky thing. Some, like Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments add something to an earlier classic. More ill-judged ones, like Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, can dent the lustre of their more accomplished predecessor, seeming to aim to cash in on a successful formula rather than say anything compelling or new.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the Ghosts of Rome, Joseph O’Connor’s follow up to his superb novel of European Resistance to Nazism, My Father’s House.

Time has moved on a few months from the first novel, the German occupation has become more brutal, and the pressure on the Choir – the escape line for Allied prisoners of war and Jews established by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty – more extreme.

The pattern that O’Connor uses for this book is similar to its prequel: It focuses on one operation, and one individual in the midst of the otherwise present and correct ensemble of the Choir, in this instance Contessa Giovanna Landini – Jo.

O’Connor admits that all of the novel, including the purported transcripts of BBC interviews, is his own invention. But many of the people involved including Jo and her Irish pals, Delia and her daughter Blon, were real. This accentuates the sense of awe regarding what these ordinary people endured and achieved in such extraordinary circumstances. And, even if we know they survived the war this does not diminish the tension.

The Ghosts of Rome is a gripping thriller. But like the best thrillers it is more than that. It explores and asserts the importance of morality and friendship in the face of monstrousness. These remain important ideals in a world in which the genocide of vulnerable people is again high on the agendas of many of the supposed liberal democracies of the West.

A Thread of Violence, by Mark O’Connell

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Summary: I would be more forgiving of this book if there had been more about Bridie and Donal in it.

I worked with a lot of Irish nurses in Ethiopia and Angola. They were a tough, sexy bunch, ruthlessly professional and deeply committed to social justice. (The character of Sophia in my novels The Undiscovered Country and Some Service to the State was modeled in no small part on some of them.)

As a professional group, certainly as an Irish professional group, they have probably done more than any others to make the world a better place. 

I imagine Bridie Gargan must have been quite like them. A 27 year old in 1982 she was already making the world a better place working as a nurse. Having just finished a long shift one day she decided to reward herself on her way home with a spot of sunbathing in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. It was there she had the misfortune of encountering Malcolm Macarthur, who proceeded to beat her to death with a hammer. 

After Bridie, Macarthur went on to kill Donal Dunne, a farmer, with his own shotgun. It seems that these killings were part of a half-baked plan that he had to commit an armed robbery to replenish his finances after he had squandered an inheritance. Macarthur was such a wastrel that he simply could not contemplate working for a living. 

Having finished it, I am left with very mixed feelings about A Thread of Violence, Mark O’Connell’s account of a protracted series of meetings that he had with Macarthur following his release on licence for the murders of Bridie and Donal. O’Connell had set himself the task of trying to get to the bottom of what motivated Macarthur to such grotesque violence. 

It is a beautifully written book, and it is important, I believe, to try to understand violence to better prevent it. But in the end O’Connell adds little illumination to these dreadful events and he admits that he never did get to the bottom of the question of motivation. 

So, what justifies this literary treatment of Macarthur, a worthless man who has led a worse than worthless life? I am left feeling not much, particularly as O’Connell writes so little about Bridie and Donal who barely feature in this book other than as victims. O’Connell missed the opportunity, in my view, to show how these much more consequential people deserve more attention than their self-important killer.

I can understand how O’Connell, as a working writer doubtless with a contract to fulfil, must have felt he had to write something in spite of his admitted failure to achieve his aim. But I am sad to say that I do not think this book adds much to human understanding. 

A roundup of Unusual Suspects: Isolation Island, by Louise Minchin; The Trials of Lila Dalton, by L J Shepherd; Long Time Dead, by T M Payne; A Limited Justice, by Catriona King.

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Summary: books that it would be criminal to overlook!

I once met a woman who had given her newborn daughter the second name of “Danger” just so when she was older she would be able to say, like the heroine of a 1930s movie, “Danger is my middle name!”,

There is a strong hint of such movie heroines in Lauren, the investigative journalist protagonist of Louise Minchin’s Isolation Island. 

Minchin uses her experience of journalism and having been a contestant on the storm ravaged set of “I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here!” to craft a fun, Agatha Christie inspired, tale of murder amongst game show contestants. 

Minchin brings a lovely devilment to her tale, fattening up the despicable before despatching them while Lauren desperately tries to unearth the evil genius behind the mayhem.  

Minchin has described her heroine as being braver than herself. That may or may not be true – Minchin is also a triathlete and having done one myself I can attest that those are daunting things. But, perhaps as importantly Lauren is driven by a sense of journalistic ethics and a conviction of the importance of truth, which must be Minchin’s own. 

In a time of in which even genocide is being made undiscussable, it is important to be reminded that some truths, no matter how inconvenient, must be spoken. 

On the opening page of The Trials of Lila Dalton, the titular Lila, a barrister it seems, stands up in court with no knowledge of how she got there, but with a client to defend. LJ Shepherd, the author, a barrister herself, describes her book as an “ontological mystery”. That is, not only does her protagonist have to get to the bottom of the facts of her case – the defence of a man accused of a bombing atrocity – but also work out who the hell she is and what she is doing there. 

Shepherd’s is an entertaining and intriguing story. I am not sure that it really required the reality questioning elements as the issues she deals with – the importance of the right to a defence in a criminal trial no matter how seemingly heinous the accused, and the question of how democratic societies protect themselves from violent assaults by those who do not share their values – are important enough.

These quibbles aside, the quality of Shepherd’s writing is exceptional, particularly when describing the treating of casualties in the aftermath of an explosion: these recalled for me some of the accounts of the survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. In this Shepherd does that most difficult of things: she forces the reader to empathise with victims that they may prefer not to think of.

In Long Time Dead, an extra body shows up in a grave and it is identified as a man suspected of murdering a cop and grievously injuring a bystander seven years earlier. The investigation eventually falls to Detective Inspector Sheridan Holler. 

It was Chandler, I think, who conceived of his tales of gumshoes as updated versions of the stories of Knights Errant from Arthurian legend. So, whatever else was unclear in his mysteries, no matter how corrupt the world in which they ventured, one thing you could count on was that his shamus would endeavour to do the right thing, protecting the innocent and unmasking the guilty. 

TM Payne’s peeler protagonist in Long Time Dead is an inheritor of that tradition. While she may find the sort of defence barrister of which LJ Shepherd writes somewhat distasteful, she is still fundamentally decent and committed to the finding the truth. 

There is an echo of Payne’s book in Catriona King’s A Limited Justice. Like it, it is a police procedural – a type of crime novel for which I have a particular affection. 

Both have the bonus of being written by writers who know what they are talking about: Payne is a former cop; King has worked as a police forensic medical examiner. Both eschew the brooding detective for sympathetic professionals – the sort of people who you might actually like to work with. 

A Limited Justice begins with King’s investigator, Marco Craig, opening a probe into a particularly grisly killing on a Belfast garage forecourt. As with many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, as the investigation unfolds the story of the perpetrator and their motivation becomes as important as that of the investigators. Consequently, King is able to use her story to explore not just the crime itself, but contemporary Northern Ireland. As is typical of Northern Ireland the story is replete with black humour. 

Both King and Payne have founded book series based on their protagonists. It is easy to see why: both are appealing companions on the mean streets of the imagination, and King and Payne, like Minchin and Shepherd, are both very gifted writers. 

Sweet Home, by Wendy Erskine

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Summary: a wonderful collection of short stories of contemporary Belfast

The first recorded ventriloquists in history were the Oracle at Delphi. These priestesses, who divined the future for fearful supplicants that sought their counsel, would take on the voices of the dead, and the gods, to add gravitas to their prophesies.

I was put in mind of these sorceresses reading Wendy Erskine’s wonderful collection of short stories, Sweet Home, because Erskine displays a similar witchcraft in the way in which she so convincingly evokes the diverse lives, and the diverse voices of the inhabitants of her stories. 

Like the blasted heath on which Macbeth encounters his witches, the contemporary Belfast in which these stories are set bears the scars of war and the gangsterism that flourished in the margins of that conflict. 

And yet even the most unpleasant of her wholly believable characters are treated with an extraordinary empathy by Erskine. With the brilliance of her writing, she forces the reader to understand that even the extortionist, or the disagreeable schoolteacher, whose stories she tells are still human beings with their own hopes, their own tragedies which have shaped who they have become. 

There may be few unambiguous happy endings in these stories. But they are filled with tenderness, lashings of pitch-black Belfast humour, and enough optimism to hope that some of these characters may yet see better days, even if that is only the quiet needed to read, the friendship of a new neighbour, or the chance of promotion for a shop worker. 

In a world of tawdry illusions and cheap tricksterism, Erskine’s stories are the real deal: the rarest of enchantments that the Irish call great short stories, and the rest of the world calls enduring literature. 

Magic.

The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker

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Summary: a fine novel of Cassandra that suffers in comparison with Barker’s initial foray into the stories of Troy

The Voyage Home continues Pat Barker’s feminist retelling of the tales of Troy, following the return of Agamemnon to Mycenae with the enslaved Cassandra in tow. This guarantees that the reunion with his wife Clytemnestra is going to be awkward. Just how awkward Agamemnon, even if he was a cleverer man, could not imagine.

But Cassandra, gifted with prophesy, but cursed that no one ever believes her, knows. In the bloodshed that she foresees she also discerns some measure of justice for the genocide that the Greeks have inflicted on her homeland. 

For this story, Barker replaces Briseis, the narrator of her previous Trojan books, with Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid: slave to a slave, or, as she describes her lowest of the low status, a “catch-fart.” 

The Voyage Home dealing with the beginning of the Oresteia, is, I think, a considerably better book than its predecessor, The Women of Troy. But neither of these books say much additional thematically to the stunning originator of this series, The Silence of the Girls.

Still, it is elegantly written, and Barker’s continuing focus on how war affects civilians and the sexual violence endured by women is important. In addition, Cassandra is always a compelling figure, and Ritsa is a fine creation. 

The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

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Summary: “You tried to bury us, but we were seeds.”

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 it was quickly recognized as a classic. An all too believable dystopian thriller, it is set in a United States that has been transformed into a theocratic dictatorship of the sort imagined in the fevered dreams of the legions of Trump’s incel supporters. 

It is told in the first-person, recounting the experiences of a young woman enslaved under the name Offred as the mistress of a leader of that state, Gilead. Such mistresses are prized because environmental devastation has rendered so much of the population sterile and it is a chance for the elite to reproduce. 

The compelling world that Atwood created in this book, and the open-ended nature of its ending could have seduced a lesser writer into a commercially successful career with spin-offs and sequels galore. However, Atwood waited over 30 years before returning to this fictional universe. That is, she waited until she finally had something new to say about it. 

The Testaments has stylistic similarities to The Handmaid’s Tale, but this time with three first-person narrators, including Lydia, a former judge now an “Aunt” – an older woman tasked with helping Gilead oversee and control its young women. In her deepest conscience however, Lydia is part of the Resistance, and The Testaments tells the story of how she plots to strike a blow to the heart of the dictatorship. 

Both books are gripping, building considerable tension as the protagonists strive to assert some aspects of freedom and free will in the cause of a more moral future, and hence place their fates in the balance. Both books are also deeply satisfying complements to each other, with Offred’s grim struggle for survival given context by Lydia’s more strategic overview of the battlefield. 

Lydia doesn’t have a cat. But she is doubtless the stuff of JD Vance’s nightmares. Such a brilliant character was well worth the 30 year wait.