wot i red on my hols by alan robson (vita bello)

Life During Wartime

Despite the hints in the title, David Baldacci’s novel Strangers in Time is not a science fiction story. It’s a historical novel set in London in the early 1940s during the blitz.

Charlie is almost fourteen. He was born and bred in London’s East End, a poverty-stricken slum neighbourhood which was bombed on an almost daily basis during the blitz. Charlie’s father died fighting the Germans in the retreat from Dunkirk and his mother was killed by a bomb. Charlie lives with his grandmother, scrounging and scrimping a living, trying to eke out the miserly daily ration as best he can. He does any odd jobs that come his way and he’s not above doing a bit of casual thieving should the opportunity present itself.

Molly, on the other hand, was born to a wealthy upper-middle class family in the rather posh and affluent West End of London. When the war broke out, she was evacuated to the countryside, well away from the risk of the blitz. She has picked up a lot of useful skills during her exile – she has been co-opted as a nursing assistant to look after wounded servicemen. Despite her young age, she has seen more than her fair share of blood and horrific injuries. She is quietly proud of the way she has learned to look after those broken men. Although she doesn’t know it yet, this skill will stand her in very good stead when she eventually returns to the carnage of London and she finds herself dealing daily with civilian bombing casualties.

Failed financial circumstances force Molly to go back to London where she expects to be welcomed into the bosom of her family but, to her surprise, the big house is empty apart from her old nanny. Her mother and father have both disappeared and her nanny is reluctant to talk about what might have happened to them.

Both Charlie and Molly have been forced by (very different) circumstance to be quite self sufficient. The times have moulded them and in many ways, although they are still children, they have never really had a childhood. War forces you to grow up very fast.

Ignatius Oliver is the proprietor of a bookshop. Once it had belonged to his wife Imogen, but after she died he took over the running of it in an attempt to preserve her memory. It is clear that he was hopelessly in love with her and the shop is almost a shrine to her. Her name still appears on shop front: I. Oliver, Proprietress. This puzzles both Molly and Charlie. Why is I(gnatius) Oliver described as a Proprietress? It’s just one of many riddles that the three of them have to come to grips with, separately and together.

Molly, Charlie and Ignatius are three lonely people who have been drawn together by a series of events that have left them with an aching sense of deep loss. Each of them seeks comfort with the others. Each of them has a lot to contribute to the ties that bind them together.

The plot, such as it is, is largely non-existent. It’s weak, long drawn out, and very predictable. Oddly that works as a strength, rather than as a weakness. The purpose of the book lies not so much in the working out of the somewhat routine story line, but rather in its utterly brilliant evocation of the daily tribulations and hazards of life during wartime. It emphasises and closely examines the differences between the haves and the have-nots of London society in particular and, by extension, of British society in general as each tries to come to grips with the stresses brought on by the war. This is a novel of contrasts, which means that it is also a novel of social commentary. British class differences flattened out a lot in the decades after the war (though they do still exist today, albeit slightly watered down and subtly changed). I caught the tail end of the older, more sharply defined class system in the first twenty or so years of my early life and I can tell you that David Baldacci has absolutely captured it perfectly.

The novel paints a very scary picture of daily life during the blitz. It was a time when everybody knew that on any given day any one of them could lose everything to a German bomb – their home, their family and maybe even their own life. Will today be that day? Can you imagine the stress of living like that day after day after day? I certainly can’t, except perhaps very dimly indeed. My parents lived through it – my father was an Air Raid Warden. He spent his twenty-first birthday on patrol watching the bombs fall out of the sky, listening to the sounds of explosions going off all around him and helping to pull broken bodies out of the rubble. But whenever the topic came up in conversation, my parents always made light of their wartime experiences. Perhaps playing it down was their way of coming to grips with what must have been a very traumatic time.

But despite the nightmare of the bombing raids, the novel manages to invoke a sense of hope as the fiercely close friendship developed by the protagonists transcends the barriers of social custom and proves that people on both sides of the divide have much to contribute to the war effort as well as to each other. It’s a very clever and utterly absorbing novel.

David Baldacci is an American author and it is clear that, because of the setting he has chosen for his story, he has tried very hard to anglicize his prose. By and large he has done an absolutely marvellous job. Ignatius’ shop is burgled rather than being burglarized, which is what would have happened to it had it been located in America. But enough solecisms remain to break the spell and they do tend to knock the reader out of the story when they appear.

A character uses a thumb tack rather than a drawing pin – actually I rather like thumb tack. I think it describes the object much better than the somewhat nonsensical British name does. How do you draw with a pin? But that’s just me...

The past tense of the verb to dive is written as the American dove rather than as the British dived and the past tense of the verb to get is written as the curiously archaic (to British eyes and ears) gotten rather than as the shorter and more modern got that the British prefer.

Characters look out the window rather than look out of the window and they walk on a sidewalk rather than on a pavement or on a footpath. People work in their yard rather than in their garden.

Clearly David Baldacci’s editor did not do a very good proof reading job. Tut, tut!

* * * *

The bulk of Kate Atkinson’s novel Transcription tales place during the same wartime years as David Baldacci’s Strangers in Time. But the two novels couldn’t be more different from each other – Transcription is a spy story. It is very plot heavy and it is much concerned with politics and with shifting allegiances.

In 1950, Juliet Armstrong, a producer of children's programmes for the BBC, sees Godfrey Toby in the street, quite by chance. Toby was a man who she had known very well during the war. However when she approaches him to say hello he denies knowing her and hurries away. In one sense this is perfectly understandable. During the war they had both worked for MI5 and together they had been involved in various clandestine operations. Presumably Toby is still working for the intelligence services and acknowledging Juliet might have broken his cover should anyone have been watching. A spy’s paranoia insists that someone is always watching. Nevertheless, she is a bit miffed by his reaction. Once upon a time they had been very close indeed. Each had saved the other from the consequences of their mutual follies.

The incident causes Juliet to think back to 1940 when she had been a recently orphaned18-year-old…

She is recruited by MI5. Initially she is little more than a glorified typist. She is required to transcribe tape recorded conversations that have taken place between an MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby, and a group of Nazi sympathisers who believe that Toby is a Gestapo agent who is sending their reports back to Germany. By reporting their fifth column exploits to Toby, the group have effectively been neutralised since Germany, of course, never hears what they have been up to. Their schemes lead nowhere and in any case their plotting is largely driven in relatively harmless directions by instructions handed down, unbeknownst to them, from MI5. There are short excerpts from Juliet’s typed transcriptions scattered throughout the novel. They make deliciously ironic reading.

The whole eavesdropping operation is being run by one Perry Gibbons who soon realises that Juliet has rather more going on inside her head than people give her credit for. He persuades her to involve herself more closely in the operation. He instructs her to ingratiate herself with one Mrs. Scaife, who is rumoured to posses a copy of the Red Book, a ledger containing the names of influential Nazi sympathisers among Britain’s movers and shakers. Obviously if MI5 can get hold of this list they will be able to identify and entrap many more members of Germany’s espionage personnel who are currently working under deep cover in the country.

At the same time as this is going on, Juliet receives additional instructions from Perry’s immediate boss, Oliver Alleyn. He asks her to report to him in detail about what Godfrey Todd is up to. Alleyn is suspicious about Todd’s loyalty. Because of Juliet’s close relationship with Todd she is ideally suited to report on his actions. Alleyn swears her to secrecy – neither Todd nor Perry are to be told about her extra-curricular activities. Juliet does indeed keep a close eye on Godfrey Todd, but for reasons of her own she does not report back on everything that she sees him doing...

The operation against Mrs Scaife goes horribly wrong and an innocent person ends up dead. Nevertheless, Mrs Scaife is eventually arrested, tried in camera and imprisoned thanks largely to information provided by Juliet. Perry’s private life and his operational life come under close scrutiny. As a result of certain indiscretions, he is disgraced and is required to leave the service under a bit of a cloud.

We return to the 1950s, and Russia, a friend and an ally during the wartime years, is now seen as the new enemy. The cold war is becoming very frigid. Juliet has long ago left MI5 and has a new career at the BBC. But nobody ever truly leaves the intelligence services and she still performs the odd task for them. She is asked to provide a temporary safe house for a Czech defector passing through England on his way to America with a briefcase full of secrets. Old friends and old enemies surface again as the vultures circle around the defector. The important papers he carries with him are a significant prize in the great game. Perry and Oliver Alleyn still have a role to play in Juliet’s life. The plot becomes very twisted indeed, and chock full of surprises, some of which shed a little more retrospective light upon what Juliet was really up to when she was an active MI5 agent in the 1940s. I can’t say any more about the plot details without giving away massive spoilers, so I’ll stop there…

In the hands of another less competent novelist this book might have been just one more routinely complicated spy novel. It is indeed very convoluted, as these things are supposed to be – friends become enemies, enemies become friends, then roles are reversed again. Motives are murky, and subject to change without notice. In other words, it is a typical example of the genre. But what rescues it from the slush pile of tropes is Kate Atkinson’s wonderfully magical prose, her exquisite sense of time and place and her quirky insight into the way that Juliet’s mind works.

The prose reminded me very much of the style used by the SF writer Jack Vance (one of my very favourite writers). The dialogue is excessively polite and very (Britishly) understated, full of courteous circumlocutions which, when you untangle them, often turn out to mean a lot more than they actually say. Insult and threat are expressed obliquely, but there is never any doubt about what has truly been said. The observations are sharp and penetrating, insightful, cynical and witty. I found myself laughing out loud again and again despite the fact that much of the story is extremely tragic. This is high art and the novel is an utterly brilliant example of it. I cannot praise it too highly.

And oddly enough everything in the novel is based on a true story, as they say in the trailers of all the world’s very worst movies. Kate Atkinson provides chapter and verse for this underlying truth in an utterly fascinating afterword.

* * * *

Alex Scarrow is perhaps best known for his highly entertaining YA Time Rider novels in which three teenagers who have cheated death now travel hither and yon across the time stream, fixing broken bits of history and returning the narrative to what it "should" have been in the first place…

Lately he has sought out a different audience and to that end he has started writing a series of police procedural novels for adults which chronicle the cases investigated by one Detective Chief Inspector William (Bill) Boyd.

Two years before the events narrated in Silent Tide, the first novel in the series, Boyd’s wife and his four year old son were killed in a car crash. Boyd took a lengthy compassionate leave from his job as an inspector with the London Metropolitan Police. Now he has finally returned to work after those years of therapy and mourning. However he is unable to bear the thought of continuing to live and work in London. The place holds too many painful memories and he is still too traumatised by them. So Boyd and his 22 year old daughter Emma have relocated to the seaside town of Hastings where predatory seagulls steal his lunch and poo on his head. He likes that. It’s  a new start and a new life away from the darkness of his past life in London.

Silent Tide opens with Boyd’s very first day on his new job with the Hastings police.  He certainly gets thrown in at the deep end – a sinking boat has been spotted a few miles out to sea. Clearly something very violent has happened. The boat is full of blood (you can literally wade in it), but there aren’t any bodies on board.

Not only does Boyd have a complex case to solve, he also has to meet his new colleagues, learn how best to work with each of them and how best to come to grips with their individual strengths and weaknesses as together they investigate what lies behind this gruesome discovery.

To an extent the novels in the series are all a little bit formulaic. Boyd gets involved in an odd case, usually rather bloody. His investigation throws up various leads, some of which suggest that perhaps some of the movers and shakers in his own police force might be corrupt. Things come to a climax, Boyd gets involved in a violent confrontation and the bad guy gets arrested. No firm conclusions are reached about possible police corruption.

The Last Train, the fourth novel in the series, sort of reverses the formula. The violent confrontation takes place at the beginning rather than at the end. But everything else is pretty much the same...

What rescues these books from the feeling that they might have been written by numbers (or by ChatGPT) is the genuine fascination of the extremely odd cases that Boyd is presented with together with the character of Boyd himself. He has a life outside of the police force and his off duty life is possibly even more fascinating than his on duty work life. He has a big new house to settle in to, his daughter is (not quite) a mother hen as she tries to keep him on the straight and narrow, and he has a dog, a rescue spaniel called Ozzie who is probably the most interesting and entertaining character in any of the books. There’s a genuine humour lightly leavened with cynicism in the novels that kept me coming back for more.

My favourite bit of business took place in one of the later novels. Boyd, Emma, his work colleagues and his new not quite girl friend Charlotte organise a working bee to clear up the untamed wilderness that is Boyd’s back garden. Boyd provides beer and a barbecue and everyone sets to with a will. They make an enormous bonfire from the undergrowth and the overgrowth that they have hacked down and once the conflagration is firmly blazing they settle back to enjoy the fruits of a job well done. However, quite unknown to Boyd, the previous owner of his house had been growing a large number of marijuana plants in the garden and it isn’t long before the billowing clouds of smoke roiling off the bonfire leaves everyone high as a kite. Hilarity ensues…

There’s nothing earth shaking or very deep about these novels, but they are undeniably a lot of fun, and very well worth reading for no other reason than that.

* * * *

Michael Connelly’s major claim to fame is as the author of a superb series of approximately 25 novels (depending on how you count them) starring a Los Angeles detective with the almost unbelievable name of Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch. Several of the books have been turned into an excellent TV show streaming on Amazon Prime. However by the end of the last novel in the series, Bosch is very old, very retired and very sick with terminal cancer. There really isn’t much more that Michael Connelly can write about him. Perhaps for this reason, he has started a brand new series featuring a detective called Stilwell – I presume that Mr. Stilwell has a christian name, but unless I blinked and missed it, the novel doesn’t tell us what it is…

Nightshade is the first novel in this new series and despite Mr. Stilwell’s lack of a first name, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting him.

Stilwell lives and works on Catalina Island, a small island off the coast of Southern California. The police department there comes under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles police force. Catalina is thought of as being a bit of a backwater and, generally speaking, being assigned to work there is regarded as something of a punishment detail – it’s where officers who have made too many political enemies (and / or made too many investigative mistakes, which often amounts to much the same thing) are sent in order to keep them out of sight and out of mind.

We don’t find out exactly what caused Stilwell to be posted to Catalina until quite late in the story, so I’ll say no more about it here because describing it would be a little bit of a spoiler. Suffice it to say that Stilwell is not flavour of the month with some of his colleagues.

Stilwell actually rather enjoys his life on this quiet island. He has fallen in love with Catalina in general and with a local lady in particular. He has generally been accepted by the community. As the novel opens, the worst crime he currently has on his books is an investigation into the poaching and mutilation of a buffalo. Since the animals are a protected species, this has caused rather an uproar. But Stilwell has an idea about who might have done it…

Then he gets a report that a body has been found in the harbour. It’s the body of a woman who has a distinctive purple streak in her hair. She has obviously been murdered – the body has been stuffed into a canvas bag which has been weighed down by a rather large and heavy anchor. Stilwell knows that this crime is rather outside his jurisdiction. The murder will be investigated by a team from the mainland and, generally speaking, he is happy to leave them to get on with it. But even though he has been explicitly ordered to stay out of the case, aspects of it keep intruding into his other investigations and he can’t help but keep digging – for example, his investigation into the theft of a valuable carved figurine from an exclusive club throws up some clues that lead Stilwell to the identity of the dead woman, something the mainland police have not yet been able to find out for themselves. They are not best pleased that he managed to get there before they did!

Stilwell also starts to suspect that there might be a connection between the murder and the poaching and mutilation of the buffalo. It’s all very Zen. All things are connected…

It doesn’t help that Stilwell and the chief investigator from the mainland, a man called Ahern, cannot stand the sight of each other. Ahern insists on calling Stilwell "Stillborn" and, in retaliation, Stilwell refers to Ahern as "Ahole". It’s all rather childish, but the name calling is just the surface symptom that is camouflaging a very deep enmity. As you might imagine, the bickering feud between the two men greatly hinders the investigation. Their squabbling eventually leads to both men being severely spoken to by their commander. They are ordered to cooperate, or else! Will they do as they have been told? What do you think?

As a murder mystery, it’s all pretty much run of the mill. I guessed who the guilty party was quite early on in the piece and I was eventually proved correct. But the journey to the final conclusion was quite fascinating. I really enjoyed watching all the pieces of the jigsaw click into place, but I enjoyed even more learning about the details of life on this quiet backwater island. It is a very slow moving and casual lifestyle, though on occasion it can also be surprisingly formal, which makes for an interesting contrast. All in all, the laid back culture is very different from the much more frenetic pace of life on the mainland. Stilwell approves of that and so do I.

The novel is an excellent start to what promises to be an enjoyable series. I look forward to meeting Mr. Stilwell again.