wot i red on my hols by alan robson (februarius furioso)

Bingo Twenty Eight.

Joe Haldeman’s novel The Forever War is generally agreed to be his masterpiece and I certainly have no quarrel with that point of view. But I’ve recently re-read Worlds (the first volume of a superb trilogy) and I think it is at least as good as, and perhaps even better than, The Forever War.

The main protagonist, Marianne O’Hara, was born and brought up in New New York, which is one of a multitude of the eponymous worlds – large orbital habitats supporting huge populations. The various worlds epitomise several distinctly different social organisations, giving Haldeman a perfect opportunity to have a lot of fun pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Marianne is sent on a one year sabbatical study trip to Earth in order to immerse herself in Earth culture and society with a view, perhaps, to seeing how much is applicable to life beyond Earth.

Marianne has two sexual partners in the New New York orbital and she soon forms two more relationships on the Earth. She spends much of her time in (old) New York before embarking on a school sponsored tour to explore other countries. This permits her (and the author!) to once again compare and contrast quite a few different cultures. It’s a tried and true literary device, probably as old as literature itself. But it remains just as effective as it has always been...

In the interests of research (initially at least) Marianne and Benny, one of her partners, join a political agitation group which gives her more insight into the resentments that some political and social systems engender – an experience that will certainly prove useful when she returns home. And perhaps not all political resistance is pacifistic. That too is a valuable lesson for her to learn.

In the larger story, the worlds themselves are inexorably moving towards independence from Earth. They provide energy and materials to Earth and in return they receive specialised manufactured goods, and hydrogen, itself the basic building block of pretty much everything. However the discovery of hydrogen deposits in space gives the worlds the political and economic leverage they need to dictate terms and it is clear that autonomy is their ultimate goal.

But then it all becomes moot. Disaffection in America quickly sets off a catastrophe which will eventually spread around the globe. Society on Earth collapses in on itself and Marianne barely makes it back home on one of the last shuttles to leave before Earth descends into anarchy and chaos – I was inevitably reminded of the harrowing news footage of desperate people clamouring around the last helicopter to leave Vietnam as the victorious Viet Cong took over the country and the American sponsored system in the south collapsed. Given Joe Haldeman’s military service in Vietnam, I strongly suspect that this image would have been firmly in his mind when he wrote these scenes.

Whether the worlds like it or not, they have now had independence and isolation forced upon them. How will they cope?

The novel was published in 1981 and in some respects it is a little dated. Haldeman’s technological vision is very much a product of its time and, judged by today’s standards, life on the worlds as he describes it sometimes seems more than a little quaint. But Haldeman’s social and political vision is spot on and the novel is eerily prescient in its description of a world moving inexorably towards the right of the political spectrum. The speed with which the structure (and infrastructure) of society collapses as the movement gains momentum is quite frightening and it is this vision which, I firmly believe, makes the novel truly great.

And as a bonus, the story is a lot of fun. Marianne is one of Joe Haldeman’s more memorable, believable and well written characters.

* * * *

I have no idea why Bernard O’Keeffe has chosen to give the viewpoint character of his novels the surname Garibaldi. The man is not Italian, he doesn’t speak Italian and he’s never been to Italy. There are Italians in his family tree, but so what? It seems to be an unnecessary bit of business. Oh well...

Detective Inspector Jim Garibaldi of the Metropolitan Police likes country music (which means that I, along with most of the rest of the people in the novel, are predisposed to dislike him) and he is the only policeman in the world who cannot drive a car. He lives and works in a quiet little village called Barnes which is just outside London, between Hammersmith and Richmond.

In The Final Round we are introduced to Melissa, Greg, Fay, Julia, Nick and Chris. They all met each other when they were students at Oxford University. Over the years since they graduated, they have drifted apart. However they make a point of meeting once a year to take part in an annual quiz organised by Melissa. Over the years this event has grown into a flamboyantly large event called The Melissa Matthews Charity Quiz. It is held at the Ocean Bar and, as the name implies, all the proceeds are donated to charity. This year’s quiz will be the 25th, a very special anniversary indeed.

The fortunes of the friends have varied over the years. Some have done rather better for themselves (financially at least) than others. Melissa and Greg are married to each other – she is a TV news presenter and Greg is a famous novelist. Fay is head of a prestigious school which Melissa’s daughter Lauren attends. Julia is a lawyer, Chris, a journalist, and Nick is a mystery to them all.

As the 25th anniversary quiz progresses, it becomes clear that none of them really like each other very much these days. They snipe at each other, quick to take offence and equally quick to put each other down. The spouses of Julia and Chris, who are not Oxford graduates, are clearly despised by the snobby Oxford crowd. Furthermore feelings are running high between Melissa and Julia, because Julia’s daughter has gained herself a place at Oxford, and Melissa’s daughter hasn’t. One-upmanship at its worst.

At the very end of the quiz, Melissa is surprised to hear a woman’s voice on the public address system announcing one more round of questions in honour of the six friends who started the quiz. Each question accuses one of the six of committing a social or legal crime ranging from plagiarism, bribery, and shoplifting to sextortion and murder. All that people have to do, says the mysterious voice, is to work out which of the accusations is true.

For the sake of smoothing the ruffled social waters, Melissa takes responsibility for the mysterious final quiz round and dismisses it as a joke. But two weeks later a man’s body is found beside the Thames. He has been stabbed and he has an Oxford college scarf stuffed in his mouth.

The identification of the body brings Garibaldi’s attention to the quiz and to the allegations made about Melissa and her friends at the end of it. The further Garibaldi investigates, the more truth there appears to be in every accusation that the anonymous woman made...

Right from the beginning it is fairly obvious to the reader just who did the murder. The fun lies in figuring out why they did it. You might think you know the answer to that as well, but trust me, you are wrong!  But that’s not really the point of the story anyway, fun though it may be. The story is much more about bringing the somewhat eccentric Jim Garibaldi to life on the page, and also to highlight and ridicule the social snobbishness of Melissa and her friends, than it is about solving a fairly straightforward crime. The novel succeeds brilliantly at both of these things. I am quite looking forward to reading more about Detective Inspector Jim Garibaldi. I learned enough about him in this book to whet my appetite for more.

Some readers might assume that the attitudes displayed by the Oxford graduates in this novel are a ridiculous caricature. Such readers would be quite wrong. Even in this day and age Oxford and Cambridge universities (collectively known as Oxbridge) are bastions of upper class twitishness. A boyhood friend of mine did actually manage to pass the Cambridge entrance examination and he spent three thoroughly miserable years there, a fish completely out of the water. He was working class (an oick) and so he didn’t, and couldn’t fit in. The social barriers simply could not be breached. If anything, the brilliant satirical light that this novel shines on the Oxbridge class system is understated and, in my opinion, nowhere near condemnatory enough. Nevertheless, the story remains enormous fun!

* * * *

Black Dog by Stephen Booth is the first of a series of detective novels (currently eighteen volumes long and counting) known collectively as the Fry and Cooper novels. They are named for the two main protagonists. I suspect that it might well also be the first novel that Stephen Booth wrote because I found it horribly over-written in places with far too many repetitive infodumps for comfort. As a result, the working out of the plot is glacially slow. Nevertheless, the book is not completely without interest…

Unusually for this kind of novel, Fry and Cooper strongly dislike each other – in most detective stories involving pairs of detectives the two of them are generally fast friends and sometimes even lovers.  Not here though. And their enmity is only exacerbated when Fry gets a promotion that Cooper felt should have gone to him. Their squabbles add a spicy touch to the narrative.

The story is set in the Peak District of England and the sense of place is beautifully invoked. The bleak landscape and the sometimes appalling weather will easily force you to don an extra layer of clothing as you read. It is very clear that Stephen Booth is definitely writing about what he knows well.

The story is essentially quite simple – it is built around the disappearance of a 15 year old girl. She is the daughter of the nouveau riche couple who own the biggest house in Edendale. Inevitably, I suppose, her body is eventually discovered and a simple missing person case turns into a murder inquiry.

Once all the twists and turns are ironed out, the story actually becomes rather simple. Those of you who are well versed in the ways of crime fiction will almost certainly work out who did the dastardly deed quite early on in the story, but I guarantee that you won’t really understand why it was done until close to the end.

Stephen Booth writes in the rather old-fashioned style of the classical nineteenth-century omniscient narrator, taking the reader deep into the thoughts, feelings and experiences of each and every character. He does this very well indeed, though of course it has the side effect of slowing the narrative down to a crawl as digression follows on from digression. But most importantly, because we find ourselves overhearing the musings of so many of the characters we often find ourselves privy to information that the people in the story do not share with each other. As a consequence we are generally one step ahead of the investigation. That’s a rather satisfying place to be.

As a result of this technique, the novel turns out to be more of a character study than it is a murder mystery. Fortunately the characters are well worth studying – the three grumpy old men are an absolute hoot and the assumption of privilege by the dead girl’s (rich) father is uncomfortably spot on.

It’s a curate’s egg of a book, but fortunately the good bits outweigh the bad bits and I certainly don’t regret reading it.

Dancing With the Virgins is the second book in the series and it is a huge improvement on the first. The plot is ingeniously complex and the setting is appropriately eerie. I devoured this one in one great big gulp.

Deep in the moors of the peak district are nine megalithic standing stones, the virgins of the title. Outside the stone circle is one more solitary stone known as the fiddler. The myth says that long ago the virgins, dancing in circles to the tune the fiddler played, offended the powers that be who turned them all into stone as a warning to others. The stones have danced there since time immemorial. But today something new has been added to their company. A young cyclist, her lifeless limbs arranged in a mocking caricature of a dance, lies dead in the centre of the circle under the gaze of the virgins. Who is she? Why is she there? Who killed her?

On the face of it, everything seems quite straightforward but as Fry and Cooper learn more about the dead girl’s life everything starts to seem more and more complicated. There are so many wheels within wheels here that at time I almost lost track. Unexpected connections between seemingly unconnected events, places and people keep popping up and the final explanation will definitely take you by surprise.

By now I’d got rather more used to Stephen Booth’s omniscient narrator and I found it much less intrusive here than in the first book. There’s no denying that it does slow the story down but the information that it reveals is so fascinating that I was willing to put up with it. Again, in the final analysis, this is a character study bolted on to the side of a murder mystery but both are so cleverly presented that I didn’t mind it at all. And as before, some of the characters are an absolute hoot. I was particularly taken with the two hippies living in a broken down truck close to the virgins – imagine Neil from The Young Ones, only with far fewer brain cells…

If you’ve got the time and the patience I promise that you’ll find this book much more rewarding than the first one.

* * * *

Television chefs cooking on the small screen are almost as old as television itself. I well remember watching Fanny and Johnny Craddock in glorious black and white on the BBC in the 1950s. Fanny was always dressed to the nines in a shimmering ball gown and her face was caked with so much make up that if she smiled I was certain it would all crack and fall off into the dish she was stirring. Johnny would bumble around in full evening dress with a monocle screwed firmly into one eye. Fanny would demonstrate the preparation of something enormously elaborate, yelling at Johnny to fetch her this and that ingredient or utensil as the notion took her. Invariably Johnny would get it all wrong and Fanny would berate him unmercifully. Eventually Fanny would pop whatever concoction it was that she had prepared to within an inch of its life into the oven and then, reaching down into the recesses of her kitchen bench she would proudly produce the elegantly appetising final result with the words, "And here’s one that I prepared earlier." Clearly no matter what kind of a mess she and Johnny had made of the preparation on screen, producing the one she’d prepared earlier would inevitably fix every mistake. The phrase quickly entered the language…

TV chefs came and went. Towards the end of the twentieth century I came across the man who remains my very favourite TV chef – Keith Floyd (1943-2009). Stirred But Not Shaken  is his autobiography, completed just before his rather untimely death.

Floyd, as he liked to be known, was the polar opposite of Fanny and Johnny Craddock. He was often scruffy – though if the occasion warranted it, he would proudly wear a bow tie. He liked to gulp from a large glass of wine as he cooked. "Time for a quick slurp" he would announce to the camera – another saying that has entered the language. Most importantly, he never showed you a dish that he’d prepared earlier. What you saw was what you got. Furthermore, he never demanded an elaborate kitchen – all he wanted was a source of heat and a cooking utensil. Over the years he could be seen cooking on everything from an open fire made of gathered driftwood through to a portable gas grill on which he would produce mouth watering dishes in everything from an old oil drum, through an ancient blackened wok and all the way to a battered old casserole dish. Floyd didn’t care. Heat and a container. What else could anyone ask for?

He also made mistakes, and he didn’t mind admitting to them. Once I watched him cook a crab curry on a beach in Thailand. The programme finished with him sitting down to eat it. The next programme opened on the same Thai beach with Floyd saying, "Well, that was bloody awful. I think I know what I did wrong. Let me cook it for you again. I’ll try to do it properly this time."

You have to admire the man.

On the other hand perhaps you don’t. In Stirred But Not Shaken  he tells us of his four marriages and four divorces, his acute alcoholism and his several business failures that took him from rags to riches and back to rags again. Clearly he was not always a nice man, neither was he a particularly shrewd one. But no matter how high he flew or how low he fell there was a never failing optimism and strength of character there which cannot be denied. It is possible that, had I met him, I might not have liked him. Nevertheless I continue to admire him and his autobiography has only served to reinforce that view.

The book is beautifully written – Floyd was clearly very well read and the text is full of literary references. He also had a wonderful sense of humour and the pages are crammed with jokes. One of the jokes was told to Floyd by a friend and Floyd took the opportunity to pass it on to his readers. It’s one of the most hilarious jokes I’ve ever heard, so I will take the opportunity to pass it on to you. It’s also a very appropriate joke for a television chef. It might almost be a motto:

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One cannibal turns to the other and says, "Does this taste funny to you?"