The Distant Echo by Val McDermid

A cracking whodunnit set in Fife, which is a lot nicer than most Scots would have you believe.

The first half is set in St Andrews in the '70s when four students who've been friends since childhood stumble across a murdered girl on their way home from a party.  With no other suspects, suspicion falls on them, leading to breakdowns, violence and more tragedy.  The second half picks up twenty five years later as the case is re-opened and someone starts targetting the four friends.

I'm not going to go into too much detail, as the joy of a good thriller is having everything laid out for you at just the right time.  And the pacing here is great.  The question of who-actually-dunnit isn't addressed until surprisingly late in the game, but the plot grips throughout.  The main focus is the relationship between the friends and how that changes when something horrible happens to them.


As well as friendship, the big themes are false assumptions and prejudice.  It comes out in the characters as well as the plot - two or three of them just don't act how you'd expect them to in a book like this.  Very refreshing.  And although it might seem unlikely, I really liked the fact that people automatically think the four friends murdered this girl when there's nothing at all to suggest they're guilty.

We like to think the world is fair and reasonable, but anyone can find themselves behind bars if they're in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Ask Amanda Knox or Luke Mitchell.  And if the unthinkable does happen to you, try to avoid being a Marilyn Manson fan or doing cartwheels in the police station.  When there's a dead girl knocking about, people tend to think the worst.

1985 by Anthony Burgess

Another bonkers dystopian novel, but not a good one.

This is a sort of re-imagining of 1984, and you've got to wade through a lengthy critique of Orwell's book first.  There are some good points, a few laughs (Burgess calls A Clockwork Orange "not very good") and quite a bit of abstruse nonsense.  It means you've only about 115 pages for the novel itself.  If it had been much longer I don't think I'd have finished it.

Here's the set up - the unions are all powerful, and every line of work is a closed shop.  Constant strikes have crippled the economy and the country's in hock to the Arabs, who're plotting to turn the country into an Islamic state.

Now, this is pretty strong stuff, and seems carefully crafted to wind up Guardian readers.  And it's the most enjoyable aspect of the book.  It's both bizarre and believable, at least for the time.  Remember, this was written in the late '70s.  The Winter of Discontent was just around the corner and OPEC was holding the west to ransom.  A worrying time to be looking to the future, and I think this vision of the '80s would've seemed a lot more likely at the time than the one we got.

 The problems of the novel are pretty deep though.  The plot's very episodic and the main character moves from scene to scene making speeches about freedom.  Dramatically unsatisfying.  And some things are just plain odd.  There are violent gangs of teenage rapists, but instead of listening to Beethoven, they quote Latin and beat people up for not looking like Don Quixote (yes, this happens.)   They're supposed to be rebelling against the dumbed down, politically correct education they get at school, but it's just silly.

What's even stranger is the treatment of the main character's 13 year old daughter.  She's a slack jawed moron who watches TV constantly and tries to get her dad to fondle her.  I thought she just represented overly-sexualised, under-educated youth, but we find out pretty late on that she is actually brain damaged.  And yet she's always treated as an object of disdain and disgust.  She ends up being given over to an Arab prince as a concubine with her father's tacit consent.  It all feels very unpleasant.

Here's my recommendation:  give 1985 a miss and read 1984.  If you've read it before, why not read it again?

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Don't call it a comeback, and no - I didn't retire.  I'll have you know I've been doing some hard reading over the past month!  I managed to plough through this modern epic, and left another couple of books abandoned at the side of the road.

Lanark's got a bit of a reputation as a difficult read but although I started flagging a couple of times, something great always managed to pop up in time.  It's really two novels welded together into one.  It starts in a dystopian version of Glasgow called Unthank where the sun never rises and people vanish as they turn into dragons.  It feels more like a bad dream than science fiction, and it's never completely convincing.

The book takes a turn for the better as the lead character (Lanark himself) is shown his previous life from a child to a tortured young painter.  This is the most successful part of the book, and it's strongly autobiographical.  It doesn't stop Gray painting the character Thaw as a weird, selfish, socially dysfunctional little prick.  I think there's more than a touch of self-flagellation going on here from the author.

The last part of the book picks up Lanark's story again.  I liked this better than the first fantasy section, as our hero travels back to Unthank with his beloved girlfriend (who clearly hates his guts) and accidently becomes a prominent political figure.  There's a lot of really sharp satire here - stuff I haven't seen before.  How Scotland changed from a manufacturing to a public sector economy; the transformation of Glasgow's skyline over the decades (not least the M8) and the way the elites in local government and business behave.

But the biggest target of the satire is the book itself.  Alasdair Gray himself turns up towards the end, ripping right into his own masterwork.  There's even an "index of plagiarisms" which show what ideas, scenes and dialogue he's stolen from where, even down to where he's stolen the idea for a boring fake index in a novel.  What's really interesting is when you notice many of the entries are about chapters which go beyond the end of the book, and give you clues about what happens next, even while mocking the whole stupid plot.  We've seen this kind of po-mo thing before with mixed results, but I loved it here.

Not a perfect novel by any means, but really enjoyable.  I wonder though if I got more out of it from growing up in Glasgow.  The Cathedral and the Necropolis especially loom large both in Thaw's city and Unthank.  It does feel like he's writing his hometown a valentine and poison pen letter in one.  All great cities deserve such a treatment

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.