Tokyo Station by Martin Cruz Smith

A masterclass in how to write an historical thriller without resorting to cheap plot devices or 500 bloody pages.

It's set in Japan on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbour and follows an American called Harry - the son of a missionary who's grown up running wild in Tokyo. He's the cynical club owner with a heart of gold, - a fixer, a conman and a part time spy. A real Humphrey Bogart type, but always comes across as a real character rather than a cliche. He's also got a really interesting and ambiguous relationship to his adopted country.

The plot concerns his plan to get out of Dodge before things get too hot for the gaijin. He's also busy playing one side off against the other - the Japanese army and navy, the thought police, big business zaibatsu and the yakuza. Things are revealed slowly and subtly. And, of course, there's more than one woman in his life.

There's also a crazy old school samuari who wants to chop Harry's head off. His eventual appearance is worth waiting for.

Very well written, and the historical details seem part of the fabric, rather than "the setting for a thriller" if that makes sense.

The only downside is that it's possibly a little too short for all the great characters Cruz Smith is trying to bring in. It feels like I'm getting snapshots of fascinating relationships, but I suppose leaving the reader hungry for more is no bad thing.

Thanks to Bryce for his constant nagging for me to read this - it was worth it. And finish your Mao! Turns out he's a rotter (spoiler.)

I finished this a couple of weeks ago, but I've just got my internet set up here. Inspired by Tokyo Station I'm now a few hundred pages through Embracing Defeat - an absurdly big chunk of Japanese postwar social history. It's really good, and I'll write a review even if I don't finish it.

I've abandoned a couple of books on tape - Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe (turns out he was a whiny wee prick) and the other David Mitchell's book about the Dutch and Japanese in the 18th century. Alright, but not brilliant. Instead I've been listening to dozens of old Russell Brand radio shows. Genius, but not for everyone I'd imagine.

I have just got hold of the audiobook of Al's recommendation - Full Dark, No Stars. More Stephen King short stories but now with 0% haunted paintings.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

I owe this blog a couple of reviews. They do say moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do, alongside accidently killing a prostitute and World of Warcraft.

First off, we've got some bittersweet campery from the humorist David Sedaris - a book on tape read by the author. If anyone's a listener of the excellent This American Life podcast, you'll know his stuff, in particular his very distinctive voice. In fact, these memoirs start with his experiences with speech therapy at school to try and rid him of his effeminate lisp. Instead he becomes expert and not using any words with an "s" in them. It did make me think about the way some gay fellas speak - is it affected or involuntary? A mixture? And does it still happen as much these days when we're all a bit more chilled? Anyway, David's sorted out his "s" now, though you're never going to confuse his voice with Lee Marvin's.

The best bit of the book is when he gets into crystal meth and conceptual art ("either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy civilisations.") His father heckles him at one of his interminable and pretentious one man shows, and finally gets a good review for the masterstroke of using his dad in the piece.

There are also musings on parents, siblings, family pets and the joy of smoking, as well as a section on living in France and learning the language. This, along with the speech therapy, gives the book its title.

Very funny and very frank about himself and his family. It's also inspired me to dig out some of my old Truman Capote books - presumably a big influence on Sedaris.

Coming up soon - Tokyo Station by Martin Cruz Smith. And possibly Russell Brand's second book.

Sister Alice by Robert Reed

Very, very close to being mind-blowingly amazing.

It's set at least 10 million years in the future, when humans have become immortal gods. Some humans at least - the clone members of the "thousand families." It starts as youngsters of some of the families (already hundreds of years old by this point) are growing up, taking part in ritual snowball fights. The action starts when Alice of the Chamberlain family (one of the oldest clones) returns home to Earth with some very bad news.

Despite being fairly short this does feel like an epic. It stretches over thousands of years, the ambition is immense and there's some great character arcs going on. Unusually, it gets better the further you get into it.

The most impressive aspect is how these unthinkably powerful humans are portrayed. They don't need spaceships to travel, but it's not as if they're flying through space like Superman. They still haven't broken light speed, and journeys and battles take hundreds and thousands of years relative to the relatively normal humans on nearby planets. They're made up "talents" - different abilities created from normal matter, dark matter, dark energy and exotic matter. Indescribable, yet described really well.

It reminded me of two books in particular (well three, if you include Marrow, which is Robert Reed's first book) - Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker and Dune. Starmaker's a fairly straightforward comparison because it takes the long view of the universe, and deals with god-like being who create new worlds, galaxies and universes. Dune because of the ruthless manipulation and breathtaking trickery going on between massively powerful families.

It's not perfect - I felt the addition of some of the characters towards the end was a bit redundant. The start drags a bit and the lead character Ord isn't very interesting (clones, eh?) But very impressive stuff overall.

Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks

SPOILERS IN THIS ONE

Quantum of Solace had more recognisable Bond elements than Casino Royale - a car chase, a speedboat chase, a plane chase and a dead girl in a hotel room covered in an expensive commodity. And it was arguably the worst movie in the entire series. It's not all about shoving in as many scenes copied from other 007 movies as you can, as Sebastian Faulks should've realised.

Devil May Care is the official sequel, launched with massive hype a few years back, with respected novelist Faulks writing as Ian Fleming. It's about a villain with a funny hand called Dr Julius Gorner (Dr Julius No) with an inscrutable oriental henchman called Chagrin (Oddjob) who's flooding the west with drugs (Mr Big in Live and Let Die) but he also plans to instigate a nuclear war (Blofeld in You Only Live Twice) to get revenge on Britain, which he detests (Hugo Drax.) Bond's first meeting with Gorner is when he wins a game for high stakes despite the rotter cheating - tennis in this case (golf in Goldfinger, bridge in Moonraker, chemin de fer in Casino Royale.) And the henchman Chagrin is killed when he tries to jump Bond and his lady friend on a train (Red Grant in From Russia with Love.)

I wouldn't have a problem with this mish-mash of previous characters and scenes if it was done well, but there so many missed opportunities. There's the interesting addition of an ekranoplan (A real soviet invention - half plane, half boat) but nothing's done with it! Why not have Bond fighting people on the outside of it as goes at 250 miles an hour a few yards above the Caspian Sea? He ends up deep behind enemy lines in Russia at the height of the cold war, but gets out with the minimum of effort. And there's a twist at the end which manages to be pointless, stupid and obvious.

Some of the action sequences are pretty good, including a fight on board a plummeting passenger jet, and I did enjoy the tennis match. But the bits I probably liked best were about food, strangely. There's a lengthy sequence about an Iranian banquet, descriptions of wine, martinis and coffee, and caviar seems to be mentioned every few pages. This really helped the sense of place and time - I got a strong sense of luxurious living in 1967. Or maybe I'm just greedy.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

An unruly toddler causes trouble at a barbeque in Australia. He goes to hit an older boy with a cricket bat, and gets the titular slap off the other kid's father. This sets off a massive barney; the police are called, it goes to court and friends and family draw up battle lines over the rights and wrongs of whacking this horrible child.

It's told in linear fashion, but each chapter is from the point of view of a different person who was at the party. And it's a wide spectrum - from the mother of the toddler to the man who hit him, but also from schoolkids and grandparents who've been drawn into the drama. You get to see things from changing perspectives and nothing's as cut and dried as it looks at first glance.

Except it is really. This kid's a nightmare. He's fawned over by his creepy mum (still getting breastfed at four), and he parrots slogans like "no-one can touch my body without my permission." It feels like the author's making it pretty obvious he thinks children like this could do with a good slap now and then.

But perhaps I'm wrong - one of the points the books makes is that there are three kinds of people in the world - men, women and mothers. Perhaps a mother reading this book will think it's always unacceptable for someone to slap your child, no matter their behaviour. They'd be wrong, of course.

The whole slap thing is really a way to look at issues of parenthood, love, desire, growing up, growing old, disappointment, money, class, race and roots. It's very skillfully done - the characters are believable and interesting, and the different storylines are well handled with some unexpected twists and red herrings. One of the characters writes for a soap opera, and this is what it reminded me of - a good soap.

This was a book on tape, and I'm now listening to Devil May Care the "official" Bond book by Sebastian Faulkes. I'll be finished that soon. But my reading's taken a bit of a battering this month. I've started four books and finished none. The title of 2666 I suspect refers to the number of pages you have to read before something happens. I've been enjoying Thunderstruck about Doctor Crippen and the invention of the wireless. Pretty interesting, but I don't know if I'll finish it. Also, PJ O'Rourke's latest. He's nowhere near as funny as he used to be. And a miscelleny of weird facts and opinions from ancient Romans. I'll certainly finish that one (it's short) and then I'll have to take stock. My bad old habits are returning.

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

Oh yes, this is the good stuff. The best science fiction novel I've reviewed so far.

I wasn't overly impressed with his short story collection Galactic North, which was very hit and miss, but I did like it enough to give one of his novels a go. This is the first in the series, but works very well as a stand alone.

It's set in the aftermath of the Melding Plague, which is a big deal in the short stories as well. It affects nanotechnology, and there's no cure. It means many people with implants have either frozen themselves until scientists know how to kill it, or bomb about in containers called palanquins so they don't get infected. And cities, which are meant to grow organically, have withered and died. All very dark and gothic.

One of the three stories which come together concerns the plague - the captain of a spaceship is in stasis because of the infection, but the crew know someone who can help him. This person - Sylveste - is the leader of a planet where an alien race became extinct a million years ago. He's also their head archeologist and he's obsessed with finding out what happened to them. The third strand is an assassin sent by someone known only as the Mademoiselle to kill Sylveste.

It works on every level. The setting is well realised - I wrote in the last review about it being hard sf with relativity causing time dilation, no faster than light travel etc, but there are other great touches, like inches of slime on the floors of the spaceship, and acres of rotting vegetation because the UV lights in the biodomes have broken. The characters are interesting, unusual and believable if not always sympathetic. And the plotting's excellent. It builds quite slowly, coming to a great showdown in the middle, and the last half goes off in an unexpected and mindblowing direction. But nothing feels rushed, shoehorned-in or surplus to requirements. Fantastic.

I'm now embarking on 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Spanish squiggle on the n implied) which is pretty good, even though it's not actually set in the year 2666. As far as I know.

Caligula by Douglas Jackson

Rome's craziest emperor deserves better than this. I quite liked the start - the main character's an animal trainer who tries to steer bloodthirsty Roman audiences away from the slaughter of exotic beasts by making them do tricks and routines. Animal welfare through circus routines - stick that PETA! Nice idea to look at the violence and spectacle of Caligula's reign through the microcosm of the arena. But instead the trainer has to look after the Emperor's elephant, and the story falters.

Most disappointing was Caligula himself. If you're writing a trashy novel about Rome's third emperor, then you really want to make him balls out bonkers. This guy's a byword for topsy-turvy tyranny. Children of the eighties will remember with fondness Judge Caligula's brief time in office in Mega City One. There's certainly a lot of crazy and brutal behaviour, but I wasn't convinced. Maybe after reading about Stalin it doesn't seem so outlandish.

We don't actually know all that much about Gaius Caesar (Caligula's a childhood nickname - his father was a famous general, and Gaius used to wear a tiny uniform around camp. A caliga was the sandal worn by the soldiers, and caligula is the diminutive.) Tacitus's history of the regime has been lost, and historians rely on Suetonius. He's very entertaining, but kind of like getting your history from News of the World. His lost works include Greek Terms of Abuse and Lives of Famous Whores.

So, many modern commentators thinks Caligula's craziness has been exaggerated for effect. What is clear is that he was very young (28 when assasinated) and the first emperor to realise the true extent of his power. This bears a little explanation.

The old Republic had been devastated by decades of political violence and civil war. The complex, balanced but inherently static political system couldn't cope with a growing empire. First off there was a massive influx of slaves from conquered terrorities. Slave labour led to fewer and richer landowners, which caused a military problem - only landowners could be soldiers.

The General Marius needed an army, and decided to ignore the senate and recruit anyone he wanted. He paid them with the promise of booty and land in the future. A commonsense solution, but one which would have massive consequences in the coming centuries. See, the generals were also the politicians. And the Marian reforms meant that armies were loyal to their generals, rather than the Roman state. A recipe for disaster.

The interminable in-fighting came to an end after Octavian defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium. He decided to make himself king.

Now, the Romans hated and loathed kings ever since they kicked out Tarquinus Superbus back in the mists of time, so Augustus (as he was renamed) was very careful not to seem like a king. He retained and paid respect to the consuls, the tribunes, the senate - all the traditional power structures of the republic - but they were stripped of any real power. And so Rome enjoyed peace and prosperity for the first time in a long time.

Political genius though he was, Augustus hadn't thought this through. Two big problems - no effective curbs on the emperor's power, and no consistent rules on succession. The rot set in quickly. Augustus's successor Tiberius was a gloomy, paranoid and brutal ruler (he always reminds me of Gordon Brown.) He was (possibly) murdered by Caligula, who finally seemed to understand what being an emperor was really about - doing whatever you wanted!

He was murdered by the praetorian guard after a few short, but presumably fun years (for Gaius at least.) But the standard was set. Most Roman emperors were closer to Caligula than Augustus. And the military became increasingly powerful, ending up with the throne being "auctioned off" by the guard a few centuries down the line. The succesful bidder didn't hang on to it very long. Fear of the armies was also a big reason why Britain had so many military bases, Hadrian's and Antonine's walls etc. It wasn't because of constant battles with the Picts in Scotland - it was to keep them as far away from Rome as possible.

I love all this stuff, but if you want more I can recommend Tom Holland's Rubicon, an excellent history of Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great and Crassus (Olivier in Spartacus - a millionaire who ended up having molten gold poured down his mouth.) And there's a great podcast by Dan Carlin called Hardcore History - he's currently wading through the history of the late Republic.