The Broken Compass by Peter Hitchens

MORE THINGS PETER HITCHENS DOESN'T LIKE (see also The Abolition of Britain)

....the media, the parlous state of political reporting with its focus on manufactured "scandals" and "gaffes" in place of analysis of policy, lazy and stupid journalism, the centre-left bias, cosy lunches between reporters and MPs, opinion polls (a device for manipulating public opinion, not measuring it), the vicious media bullying of Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, the backroom deals which decided the Tories were now "electable", our new permanent centre-left UK government.....

....communism, western apologists for communism, the TUC's decision not to support striking Polish dockworkers in the 80s, former communists in positions of power (John Reid, Peter Mandelson), the singing of communist anthem The Internationale at Donald Dewar's funeral, P Hitchens' own past as a Trotskyist agitator....

...Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech, the switch from the idea of "racialism" to the more nebulous "racism", the concept of "institutional racism", mass immigration, the impossibility of discussing mass immigration because of accusations of racism, the BNP, laws against homosexuals, laws in favour of homosexuals, laws in general which pertain to your private life, the lowering of the age of consent, civil partnerships, the oppression of women, Mick Jagger's misogynist lyrics, the pressure on women to become "wage slaves" aka having a career instead of having children...

..the decline of standards in British education, the abolition of grammar schools, the hypocrisy of the elite who move to expensive areas to get their kids into a good school but who decry any selection on the basis of academic merit, the consequent decline in social mobility...

...Doctor Beeching and the dismantling of Britain's rail network, generous public subsidies for the road network, the increase in traffic, the detrimental effect on small towns and villages...

...the war in Iraq, left wing commentators making common cause with US neo-conservatives (both heavily influenced by Marxist utopianism), "strong" foreign policy being used as a distraction from left-wing and undemocratic agendas on the home front....

......the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the outmoded conceit that there's such a thing as "left" and "right" in our political system, the decline of the adverserial nature of British politics, the widening gap between the public and the parties who hold them in such disdain..

And I've actually found a list in the last chapter of people Hitchens blames for much of today's problems...Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Antonio Gramsci, R.D. Laing, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Marie Stopes, Monty Python (?), John Lennon and Mick Jagger.   But I've already mentioned him.

THINGS PETER HITCHENS LIKES

ummmm....nope, I'm out.   Changing your mind, I suppose.  He was going to write a book with that title, but thought nobody would buy it.  Who likes to admit they're wrong?

I've got one - a good index!  This has got more than 30 pages of entries for a book which is under two hundred pages long.  Includes the classics "Wolstonecraft, Mary - eloquent pleas reduced to grunts and squeals of 'Girl Power'" and "G, Ali - author smells rat when asked for interview by"

The Popes: A History by John Julius Norwich

Popes, popes, popes!  More popes than you can shake a stick at.  They're all here, from Peter (who was almost certainly never a pope) to Benedict XVI  (who gets a bit of a pasting on paedo priests) and all the assorted bigots, psychos, doddering fools, sickly wimps, nepotistic bastards and occasional good eggs in between.

Here are some of the best bits:

• The 9th century Pope Formosus being put on trial for heresy - seven months after he died.  And yes, they actually dug up his body and put it in the dock.  He failed to clear his name.  
• Rome being so disease ridden, violent and generally horrible in the Middle Ages that the papacy moved to Avignon in France for the best part of a century.  
• The Papal Schism, which saw rival popes in Avignon and Rome.  Cardinals from both sides attempted to fix the problem by electing a third pope.  It didn't work.
• Pope Julius III in the 16th century, who after being elected immediately made his 17 year old boyfriend a cardinal.  Classy
• Various Borgias, Medicis and other scumbags during the Renaissance, who had a great time and at least made Rome a bit prettier.
• The Jesuits being kicked out of pretty much every Catholic country in Europe in the 18th century for winding everyone up the wrong way.
• Napoleon treating more than one pope as a Corsican peasant treats his donkey.
• Pius XII turning the blindest of eyes to the Holocaust.  Not that he condoned it exactly, but he was never a massive fan of the Jews.
• The recent absurd growth in canonisations (Pius XII's is in the post.)  By 2068, we will all be saints.

This is a first rate history covering the best part of twenty centuries at breakneck speed, and it's always entertaining.  A couple of things struck me when reading it - firstly, European history (when compared to British history) is insanely complicated.  I'm still not entirely sure what the hell the Holy Roman Empire was, but I'm pretty sure it was stupid.  And I learned that Catholic countries appear to hate the pope even more than protestant ones.  Especially France.

In the end, the Catholic Church doesn't really come out of this book smelling of roses.  And yet, I know if my sanity finally does snap and I start thinking there's a God, there's nowhere else I'd turn.  If I ever become a protestant, kill me.

Half Read Round Up

There've been a few interesting and not so interesting books I've made a stab at in the past month or two.

Somersault by Kenzaburo Oe - I made it to page 70, when two characters started to disect the work of an obscure Welsh poet.  No.  Pretentious and dull.

Man Without a Face by Markus Wolf - The memoirs of East Germany's legendary spy-master.  A fascinating and well written account by a man clearly still wrestling with his conscience.  Turns out they never even told him the Berlin Wall was going up.  Plays havoc with your spy network, that kind of thing.

 

 Byzantium by Judith Herrin - Right up my street, but never grabbed me for some reason.  I can recommend a book I read a year or two back called Justinian's Flea, which looks more closely at that Emperor's reign, and the devastating impact of the Black Death.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - Alright, I've thrown in the towel on this one.  Brilliant first half - grimy fantasy steampunk with sentient beetles and cacti.  A wonderfully realised world with lots of colour.  Unfortunately half way through all the plot lines seem to be abandoned while everyone looks for a monster.  Lost interest.

Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Shoenhals - A fascinating period of history.  It takes balls to start a revolution.  It takes massive swinging counterintuitive balls to start a revolution in a country you're already in charge of.  This is a very well researched and detailed account of who did what, when.  But I think the problem is, not of that really mattered.   None of the cultural revolution made any sense, so the maneuverings of various loathsome apparatchiks (with names which are way too similar) became depressing and repetitive.

The Man Who Ate Bluebottles by Catherine Caufield - A list of first class weirdos, from psychopathic duelists to rich tramps and from hermits and misers to clergymen who decided to eat everything on Earth (William Buckland of the title - bluebottles and moles came bottom of his list.)  I also liked the first entry - John Alington, who made his estate workers build replicas of the streets of London, the Battle of Sebastapol and even the British Isles in the duck pond.  He performed religious ceremonies on a four wheel bike, while wearing a leopard skin and shoving snuff in people's faces.  Alington also enjoyed being carried around his estate in an open coffin.  Proper bonkers.

The Osterman Weekend by Robert Ludlum

SPOILERS


Godawful garbage, but not without its quirky charms.

I do have a soft spot for Ludlum - his thrillers are easy to digest, they have a unique feeling of paranoia and hysteria and they always handle the most ridiculous things with the utmost seriousness.  But the balance here is far too heavy on the ridiculous.

The main character is a TV executive called Tanner who lives in a upmarket village on the outskirts of New York.  He's got a wife and kids, and he's close friends with three other couples - two of which live in the same village; the third couple work in Hollywood.  These are the Ostermans, and their visits are known as Osterman Weekends.  It's a great pulpy title, if nothing else.

As often happens in Ludlum, our hero is taken to a secret room by a CIA agent and told what's really happening.  Turns out some or all of his friends are ruthless, deep cover KGB moles who are due to bring down capitalism in just under a month.

This nefarious plot's quite intruiging actually - the spies gather blackmail info on key people in the US economy, and at the right time each is told to, say, withhold a loan or issue a stock warning or whatever these people do.  Recent events have thrown light on the precariousness of our system (though not capitalism itself) so I was hoping this would figure in the story.  No - it's just the maguffinest of maguffins.

What it's really about is Tanner trying to figure out which of his friends are spies.  The CIA rattle their cages with late night calls and mysterious encounters to make them suspect Tanner.  This does make them nervous, but it becomes clear very quickly that none of them are secret agents.  It's a case of the reader being a step ahead of the book, which always sucks.

So when the eponymous Osterman Weekend finally arrives, there's no dramatic tension because you're already pretty sure none of these people are in the KGB.  Luckily there's some shooting and a dog gets decapitated to keep you interested.

What it felt like was less a spy thriller and more a bad dream.  That Ludlum hysterical paranoia is pumped right up, but when you take a step back none of it makes any sense.

Having said all that, I polished it off in two sittings.  I didn't feel good about it though.  I've got some highbrow fare out the library as penance.  I'll see how far I get through Somersault by Kenzaburo Oe.

Wireless by Charles Stross

Science fiction, the Cold War, HP Lovecraft, PG Wodehouse.  King.

I'll just do a quick description of some of my favourite short stories here.

"Missile Gap" sees the cold war of the 60s transported onto a massive flat disc in the Magellanic Cloud.  The Americans and the Soviets try and explore seemingly endless oceans and continents, and have to deal with the physics of living on a flat surface, rather than on a globe.  It also features Yuri Gagarin re-imagined as Captain Kirk, on the bridge of an ekranoplan, which is used to far greater effect than in that awful Bond book.

"A Colder War" sees the cold war of the 60s, 70s and 80s dealing with the Cthulhu mythos.  Features a Shoggoth under tarpaulin at a May Day parade in Moscow, and Colonel Oliver North at the Mountains of Madness.

Lovecraft returns in "Down on the Farm" but on a lighter note.  This is a satire about a branch of British intelligence which deals with magic.  Really fun and creative but with enough of that creeping horror and nameless dread to give it an edge.  Stross has written a few novels in the same world - The Jennifer Morgue and The Atrocity Archives - which I'll be keeping an eye out for.

And "Trunk and Disorderly" is Jeeves and Wooster in the far future.  Features a dwarf mammoth and a drunken dalek.  Nowhere near as terrible as it sounds.

The Looking Glass War by John Le Carre

Whether it's James Bond, Jack Bauer or Danger Mouse, most fictional secret agents have one thing in common - they're good at their job.  You don't often get an inept spy, unless it's played for laughs.  There aren't many laughs in this book.

This isn't set in the Circus, home of George Smiley (though he does have a shadowy supporting role), but in "The Department" which deals with military intelligence.  A force to be reckoned with in the Second World War, certainly, but in terminal decline for the two decades since.  The novel starts with a juicy lead about possible missile deployments in East Germany, which gives the out-of-touch spymasters a chance to get the upper hand on the Circus once more.

The story's in three parts - a courier picking up a roll of film in Helskini; a member of the Department sent to Finland to find out what happened; and the re-training of a dusted-off spy who'll be sent behind the Iron Curtain to investigate.  Blunders abound and hilarity doesn't ensue.

There's a lot of good spycraft in this - cover stories, radio communications, the relationship between agent and handler - but more importantly it shows you what happens when good practise isn't followed.  Le Carre was a spy himself for MI5 and MI6, and there's a sense of anger here at good and perhaps misguided people being put at risk because of sloppiness and red tape from those higher up the food chain.

Still plenty of unanswered questions at the end, but for once that was completely justified in the story.  The only problem was a few impassioned and unrealistic outbursts towards the end, but that's pretty minor.  Having said that, this isn't nearly as good as Tinker Tailor, but that's because few books are.

The City and the City by China Mieville

This is based around one of those ideas which hit you like a punch on the nose:  simple, original and convincing, but which seems so obvious, you wonder why no-one's thought of it before.

It's really a murder mystery set in the city of Beszel, somewhere in Eastern Europe.  But the policeman protagonist soon discovers the victim was actually killed in another city - Ul Qoma.  This is a problem, because both cities are in the same place.

Now, this could've gone down the line that the cities are in different dimensions (think Zelda or Metroid games) but here it's all done psychologically and culturally.  Some neighbourhoods and streets are all in one city or the other, while some are in both.  And they don't interact.  The system's kept running, in the main, through taboo.  People of each city are trained to "unsee" people and things in the other city.  The way that folk walk and talk, architectural styles, even certain colours will tell a citizen that they've seen something which they should immediately disregard.  Driving seems to be a particular problem, although at least they both drive on the same side.

But the masterstroke here is the realism.  You've got certain dynamics being played with - East and West, democratic and authoritarian, Christian and, well not exactly Muslim.  The Ul Qomans seem to follow Zoroaster or Mani more than Mohammed, but you get the idea.  But these aren't abstract ideas of cities; they're convincingly fleshed out.  You've got the broad strokes of a deep history between the two which means, for instance, that Bezsel has coke while Ul Qoma has Canadian cola because of a US embargo.  And there's certainly no good city/bad city thing going on either.

What I really liked about this book is how it plays with the idea of cities split by history, politics and culture.  Berlin certainly, but also Belfast, Istanbul, Budapest - even Edinburgh.  Most cities, in fact, have a bit of that duality going on.  Here it's taken to ridiculous, but believable extremes.  I also love the notion that it's the people themselves who're conditioned to perpetuate it.

Now there is another force called "Breach" keeping the people seperate, and the way it's gradually explained is nicely handled, but I'm not convinced it was really needed in the book.  In fact, it raises more questions than it answers.

Looking at the plot, this is a fairly conventional thriller with some politics and archeology thrown in.  Some of the parts work better than others.  There's the traditional Hollywood double-baddie reveal towards the end. The first part concerns the most minor and shoe-horned-in of characters, and is pretty unconvibcing.  It also expressly refuses to explain the significance of the Maguffin, which I was a bit annoyed by.  The last baddie reveal is handled much better.  Not a massive surprise, but a lot more convincing psychologically and thematically.

Still too many unanswered questions overall for my taste, but there's certainly scope for more thrillers set in the city and the city , so fingers crossed.

I'm actually halfway through another book by Mieville called Perdido Street Station which is a big, sprawling, Dickensian, steampunk affair.  It's also really good, but it's a book on tape and I've been listening to a lot or music and podcasts recently.  I'll finish it when I finish it, but I will finish it.