wot i red on my hols by alan robson (felis ardens)

Gilbert the Radioactive Cat has Eighteen Half-Lives

I was wrong.

Last month I reviewed the first two books in Andrea Carter’s six volume Inishowen series. I pointed out that while each book was complete in itself in the sense that the central mystery was solved, there was also an overall and open ended story arc which meant that the books really should be read in order so as to avoid spoilers for this longer story. I confidently predicted that the longer story would reach a climax and finally be resolved in the last book of the series.

I’ve now read the next two books and while everything I said before is, generally speaking, still correct, I was wrong in one very important detail. The story arc is resolved in the third book and a brand new arc begins.

Having been completely blindsided by this, I refuse to make any more predictions about how the series will progress from this point onwards in case I get it wrong again. But I do still advise you to read the books in order – my reasons for saying that are just as apposite as ever they were.

The third book, The Well of Ice begins near Christmas. Solicitor Benedicta ("Ben") O’Keefe is working hard to clear up her outstanding jobs before the holidays start. But it isn’t long before chaos descends on Glendara – an arson attack has burned down the Oak pub, the centre of the village social life, and Carole Kearney, the Oak's barmaid, has gone missing. And then, while walking the dog up Sliabh Sneacht, Ben and her partner, Sergeant Tom Molloy, find a body lying face down in the snow. And as if that wasn’t enough, Luke Kirby, the man who caused Ben to flee Dublin and hide herself away in Glendara in the first place, has turned up like a bad penny intent on who knows what mischief and mayhem. The festive season promises to be a bit of a downer…

The events of the fourth book, Murder at Greysbridge take place in the following summer. Ben is seriously considering a job offer she's received from a law firm in America – I actually found this somewhat difficult to accept. Irish law and American law are two very different things and I find it hard to believe that Ben would be even remotely qualified to hit the ground running in an American law firm. But as a plot device, it does have its uses. The relationship between Ben and Tom  Molloy is starting to cool and the American job offer represents a way of getting Ben out from under with the minimum of fuss should it prove necessary.

But she has things to attend to before she can make any life-changing decisions. Her friend Leah is getting married at the Greysbridge Hotel. The hotel has been bought by one Ian Grey. His name is not a coincidence. Several generations ago his family actually owned the hotel, but one of his ancestors sold it to pay off his gambling debts. Now, motivated perhaps by pride and perhaps by a desire to restore the family’s reputation, Ian has bought it back. Ben handled the conveyancing for him which gives her a personal reason for hoping that Ian will make a success of the venture.

Ian has spent a fortune restoring the building from a tumble down ruin to a luxurious hotel and event centre. Leah’s wedding is the first big booking after the restoration and he and his wife have worked hard to make it a success. But the festivities are cut brutally short when a young American, a visitor who is also staying at the hotel, drowns in full view of the wedding guests. Tragedy piles upon tragedy when a second death is discovered later the same evening. Ben now finds herself embroiled in a real Agatha Christie country house murder mystery, where all the guests are suspects. Add to this the gormenghastian architecture of the Greysbridge Hotel itself, together with a promising hint of ghosts, and the mix becomes irresistible.

The strength of these books lies not so much in their plots (though the plots are complex, ingenious and full of delightfully smelly red herrings) as it does in the lives of the characters themselves. The sense of time, place and person is quite incredible.

I’ve long been a fan of Stuart MacBride’s novels about Detective Inspector Logan but I’ve generally been less than impressed by his other, non-Logan, books. Despite that, to begin with at least, I had high hopes for his new stand alone novel In A Place Of Darkness. The hero is one Detective Constable Angus MacVicar and that immediately endeared the book to me as well as triggering my funny bone. Let me explain…

In the 1950s Angus MacVicar was a hugely popular author of children’s SF. He wrote a series of novels about Hesikos, the lost planet. The books were full of rip-roaring adventure and very dubious physics. I vividly remember lapping the books up and I read and re-read them constantly throughout my childhood (though oddly I now remember almost nothing about the plot details). But I do remember that they were enormous fun.

Clearly Stuart MacBride was also an Angus MacVicar fan in his younger days, and naming the hero of his novel after MacVicar is a lovely homage to a cherished childhood hero. All doubt about this is dispelled when, at one point, MacVicar is asked point blank if he was named after the novelist. This makes it very clear, if clarification was needed, that MacBride was doing it deliberately.

So straight away I was predisposed to like the novel. Well done Mr MacBride.

What’s the story all about? Well, the central mystery of the book concerns the so-called Fortnight Killer. Every two weeks, like clockwork, the killer strikes again. His motives are obscure and his choice of victims shows no obvious pattern. But nevertheless, every fortnight someone dies a gruesome death. The police are baffled and, clutching at straws, they enlist the help of an American crime profiler who has done sterling work for the FBI. His name is Doctor Fife and he has a remarkable line in rude, sarcastic comments about all and sundry. DC MacVicar is assigned to Doctor Fife as his dogsbody and factotum.

Unconvincing though the idea of the Fortnight Killer is, I was willing to accept it for the sake of the story – the humour, the gore and the extreme grue propel the novel at a breakneck pace and I thoroughly enjoyed the first three or four hundred pages. But it all fell apart in the last section when we finally find out just what is really going on and what motivates Doctor Fife himself – he really is the successful FBI profiler he claims to be, but his background is murky and once that starts to clarify itself and take centre stage the novel descends into pointless melodrama and dumb action scenes whose only purpose seems to be to increase the page count.

Both Fife and MacVicar are well drawn and fascinating characters but the sheer unbelievability of both the Fortnight Killer and of Doctor Fife’s own twisted motives eventually overwhelm the story and I lost all patience with it.

If you ever start reading this book I suggest that you stop reading it round about three quarters of the way through. Up to that point it’s utterly brilliant, but then it all falls apart as MacBride completely loses control of his story and the novel turns into the very definition of a curate’s egg.

Mark Billingham started life as a stand-up comic and actor. If you ever stumble across an old BBC series called Maid Marian and Her Merry Men you will see Mark Billingham playing one of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s henchmen. And a jolly good job he makes of it too.

Billingham has also had a very successful career as a writer of detective novels starring one Detective Inspector Tom Thorne. Oddly, despite Billingham’s comedic background, his Tom Thorne novels are very grim and dark with barely a trace of humour to be found anywhere within them. However in the last couple of years, Mark Billingham has reinvented himself again and this time he has started to write a series of absolutely hilarious novels about one Detective Sergeant Declan Miller. The Wrong Hands is the second novel in the series and I’m finding it difficult to wait for another year before the third one appears. Yes, they really are that good.

Miller’s life contains both tragedy and triumph. His wife was murdered shorty before the events of the first novel in the series and her murder is still under investigation. Miller is a good detective – he finds it very helpful to discuss the details of whatever case he is working on at the moment with the ghost of his dead wife. Her insights are often quite valuable – but that doesn’t really compensate for the fact of her death about which, it seems, there is nothing he can do.

As the story opens, a young man has just appeared on his doorstep carrying a briefcase which contains a pair of severed hands. They are, of course, the wrong hands (hence the title of the novel) but Miller doesn’t know that yet.

Soon he finds himself tangled up with a hitman who is obsessed with Midsomer Murders, a psychotic welder, and a woman driven over the edge by a wayward Créme Egg. Can Miller use any of this as leverage to influence the officers investigating his wife’s murder? Yes, of course he can, and both he and the reader can have more than a few laughs along the way while he does it.

The ending is both hilarious and heartbreaking. You really do owe it to yourself to read this utterly brilliant book.

Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books is a delightfully satirical look at the reasons for, and the consequences of, attempting to ban books.

Beverly Underwood and her life long enemy Lula Dean both live in the tiny town of Troy in the American state of Georgia. Beverly is on the school board, and finds herself at loggerheads with Lula who has become something of a local celebrity by embarking on a campaign to remove all inappropriate books from public consumption. Of course, she herself hasn’t read the books that she wants to ban, but nevertheless she just knows that they are all pornographic, communist propaganda. The objectionable books are duly removed from the public library and stored in a safe place until a final decision can be made about disposing of them. Meanwhile, as a replacement for all that filthy communist pornography, Lula starts her own lending library. She installs a cute wooden hutch with glass doors in front of her house.  In the hutch she sets up neat rows of the worthy literature that she deems suitable for the town’s readers.

But unbeknown to Lula, Beverly’s daughter Lindsay sneaks in by night and sabotages Lula’s library. She fills it with the books that Lula has banned. In order to hide what she has done from Lula, she disguises the naughty books by wrapping them in the dust jackets of Lula’s more "wholesome" books. So, for example the dust jacket of The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette is now wrapped around The Girl’s Guide to the Revolution and the cover of Our Confederate Heroes disguises The Catcher in the Rye. One by one, neighbours who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library realise that their lives are changing in unexpected ways as they find themselves reading the books that Lula wanted to keep away from their eyes. Eventually the tables are turned on Lula herself – her shocking past indiscretions finally catch up with her and she is exposed to one and all for the hypocrite that she really is.

Naturally a satire such as this can only work properly if the characters themselves are portrayed as caricatures of the attitudes that prevail on each side of the question under discussion. Kirsten Miller has done a superb job of bringing to life the extremes of bigotry and ignorance that allow such ideas to flourish. Though having said that, I can’t help wondering how much of what she makes her characters say and do is exaggeration for dramatic and satirical effect and how much is simply pure reportage. There is a very active Reddit discussion group called ShitAmericansSay in which non-Americans (re-)post American comments that they  have found on various other social media platforms and about which they then point out, with much joy and laughter, just what utter nonsense the original posters are spouting. My very favourite example was a post that simply said:

Celsius is for Communists,
Fahrenheit is for Freedom.

Any and all of the attitudes expressed by the American posts in this discussion group would fit, without any alteration whatsoever, into the mouths and the minds of the characters in Kirsten Miller’s novel. And that’s a very scary thought indeed.

To be fair to the Americans, there is also a Reddit discussion group called ShitEuropeansSay in which Americans can comment on the bigoted and ignorant posts that Europeans make about American lifestyles and values. Interestingly it attracts very little traffic...

In an author’s note at the end of the book Kirsten Miller says:

I want to make it clear that the issues addressed in this novel – book banning, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, etc. – are by no means unique to the South. These are American problems. Pretending they [only] occur in the South has allowed them to flourish unchecked elsewhere in the United States.

It seems to me that Kirsten Miller has identified a very real problem and she has dramatised it extremely convincingly. Laughter is always the very best medicine. I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to ban a book again or to discriminate against some other social group after reading this novel. On the other hand I have absolutely no idea how to persuade the book banners to read this book in the first place. Clearly their preference would be to ban it immediately, sight unseen. Better education will certainly help to address the problem but I’m not at all sure that it’s the complete answer.

I strongly suspect, as Kirsten Miller herself suggests, that this really is a uniquely American phenomenon. Certainly I’ve seen no real evidence of it in other countries since at least the middle of the last century. Is America really that far behind the times?

I must confess that until I actually read 1967, the autobiography of Robyn Hitchcock, I had never heard of the man. The only reason I even bothered to pick up 1967 in the first place was because I found its subtitle far too intriguing to ignore. In full, the title reads, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left.

The 1960s were Robyn Hitchcock’s formative years, just as they were mine. The cliché says that if you can remember the 1960s you weren’t there, but both Hichcock and I were there and we both have very clear memories of the times. While reading the book, I was astonished to discover that although our lives could not have been more different, we nevertheless had a lot in common, and the things that were happening in the world of the 1960s were the things that have continued to resonate with both of us ever since.

Hitchcock was born to upper middle class parents in the south of England. I was born into a working class family in the north of England. Hitchcock attended a famous and expensive public school (Winchester). I went to an ordinary state school that nobody has ever heard of (Crossley and Porter).  Hitchcock defines the public school ethos that he experienced in one cynically pithy sentence:

One of the main functions of private education in Britain is to stunt people emotionally and then send them out to run the country

The last three decades of incompetent British governance clearly demonstrate the truth of what Hitchcock is saying here. Fortunately he himself seems to have successfully avoided the emotionally stunting part of his education, and I, of course, was never exposed to it at all because I didn’t go to a public school. Doubtless that means that the establishment will assume that the system has failed both of us...

Hitchcock found himself at school with several people who went on to find fame and fortune in music and the arts, most notably Brian Eno of Roxy Music fame. His deadpan descriptions of Brian Eno's more surreal escapades are side-splittingly funny. Nobody I knew ever became famous or influential in any field at all, so I have no way of matching that.

But for both of us the 1960s were years of revolution in every sense of the word. Complacency was being blown away by the winds of change. Songs were being written that are still as bitingly appropriate today as they were back then. And the artist  who encapsulated it all quite brilliantly and definitively was Bob Dylan. Both Hitchcock and I were completely mesmerised by Dylan’s music. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963 and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965 were, and still are, the very definition of the zeitgeist of the 1960s for each of us.

As always, Hitchcock says it far better than I ever could:

Then something earth-shattering bursts out of the radio, albeit at ant volume. SKRONK-SKREEKSKRONK-SKREEK: WHA-DA-DA-FANG, DA-DADA-FANG—"Purple Haze all in my brain/Lately things they don’t seem the same"— Jimi Hendrix detonates Pig Town. The ghost porkers jive in the wasteland. Bill and Fred do the Watusi in their floury shed. My moldy magazines sprout fresh pages that turn themselves before my eyes. I am a teenager on fire— oh, holy fuck, this is music to levitate to.

That last sentence truly captures the emotion of the moment. Now watch me fly!

Everything came to a head in 1967. That was the highlight year of the decade because  that was the year when The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, the world’s only perfect album. Life, the universe, and everything else all began to go down hill after that.

Hitchcock went on to have a successful career as a musician and songwriter. I didn’t achieve any of that, though I did eventually carve out my own (very) small niche in the world. These days Hitchcock lives in Nashville, Tennessee, USA and I live in Havelock North, New Zealand. We’ve never met and we never will. But the 1960s in general, and 1967 in particular, still live on in the heads of each of us, and in many ways neither of us has ever left those formative years behind.

Hitchcock’s book is funny, insightful and more than a little bit cynical. It’s a very 1960s book in and of itself. I loved every word of it.

Exactly by Simon Winchester is a history of the development of modern technology which focuses itself on the single idea that made that development possible in the first place – the definition of precision and the importance that it gives to the reproducibility of components that incorporate it. Even something as simple as a screw is less than useful if one day it breaks and no replacement can be found because no other screw has the same characteristics. But if the screw can be well defined and manufactured in a uniformly precise manner, then the problem disappears and the component becomes useful in many different ways.

In eighteenth-century England, such ideas were starting to be debated by the founders of what came to be called the Industrial Revolution. Standards of measurement were established and engineers began to build machine tools – machines that can be used to make other machines which themselves can manufacture objects. From there it’s only a small step to the mass production of items such as guns and mirrors, lenses, and cameras, motor cars and aeroplanes. Eventually investigations into the application of precise measurements to smaller and smaller structures led to breakthroughs such as gene splicing, microchips, and the Large Hadron Collider which (paradoxically) is itself quite huge but which concerns itself with explorations of the infinitesimally small.

Simon Winchester takes us on a chronological journey through the development of the Industrial Age. He devotes much time to the pioneers who made the Industrial Age happen, people such as John Wilkinson who invented a machine for the reliable manufacture of canons by boring them out to precise standards, Henry Maudslay who devised a lathe that could reliably manufacture standard screw threads such as those defined and perfected by Joseph Whitworth, Joseph Bramah, a manufacturer of ingenious locks and inventor of the hydraulic press and Jesse Ramsden, a scientific instrument maker.

In describing the people who developed the ideas that drove the industrial revolution, Simon Winchester asks (and answers) some very important questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the imprecise (the "natural" if you like) co-exist in society?

That’s a lot of very deep thinking for a comparatively small book.

The Alice Behind Wonderland is Simon Winchester’s attempt to describe and define the life and times of Alice Liddell, the little girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Alice’s life is so inextricably tangled up with Dodgson’s that it is quite impossible to address the one without also addressing the other and therefore this book is also a potted biography of Dodgson himself.

Dodgson was an early, and very enthusiastic, adopter of the hobby of photography. Simon Winchester, never able to resist the siren song of the minutiae that lie behind a technical subject, devotes quite a lot of space to a detailed description of just how the photographic process worked in those pioneering days. I found this discussion quite fascinating. I’d never realised before just how complex, laboriously frustrating, messy and extremely time consuming the whole business was. As a result I’m astonished to find that not only did Dodgson manage to take a lot of photographs, but also that so many of them were of very high quality indeed. The man was certainly a master of his sloppy hobby!

Many of Dodgson’s photographs were of Alice herself, of course, and also of her brothers and sisters. Later he took a lot of photographs of other children as well and it is this seeming obsession with taking pictures of children that have led many twentieth and twenty-first century critics to accuse Dodgson of being a paedophile, at least passively if not actually actively.

Simon Winchester addresses this question head on and concludes that the charges are almost certainly nonsense. It is well known that Dodgson always asked the parents’ permission to photograph their children. Indeed, quite often the parents were present at the photographic sessions. Furthermore, as Dodgson’s reputation as a skilled photographer grew, parents actively sought him out specifically so that he could photograph their children. By modern day standards he might have exhibited a certain naive innocence of behaviour, but by the standards of his own time he was behaving perfectly properly and correctly.

In my opinion the accusations of paedophilia say rather a lot about the smutty minds of modern day critical prudes who go actively searching for vice and who completely fail to identify virtue when it is waved under their noses because virtue doesn’t match their agenda. Conversely the accusations say very little indeed about the proper subject of the criticism because that’s not what the critics are interested in. To quote Spike Milligan, "It’s all in the mind, you know..."

This is a fascinating and beautifully written book, as you’d expect from Simon Winchester. It seems that he never puts a word wrong. So to speak.