wot i red on my hols by alan robson (filius pirum)

Keith – A Pearson of Interest

A month ago I’d never heard the name Keith A. Pearson, but since then I’ve read four of his novels and now Keith A. Pearson is my new favourite author.

My enthusiasm for his writing all started when I read The ‘86 Fix which, the blurb told me, was not only the first novel in a series, but also the very first novel that he had written. Neither of these facts reassured me and the story summary described by the blurb did not attract me at all – it described a very clichéd SF scenario, one that we’ve all read a million times before. Someone travels back in time so that they can adjust history in an attempt to make their life turn out better than it did the first time round. So far so boring.

But despite all that, something made me start reading the book anyway and somehow I got hooked, By the time I’d finished it, I was amazed by the story’s complexity and cleverness. I was astonished at the way that it subverted all my expectations. It wasn’t just a bunch of clichéd temporal paradoxes like these things so often are. Actually, maybe it was, just a little bit, but that didn’t stop it being fun, funny and sophisticated as well so perhaps that sin could be forgiven. When I finally turned over the last page I knew that  I wanted more. Fortunately that was easily achieved. Keith A. Pearson has been quite prolific.

As The ‘86 Fix opens, we meet Craig Pelling. He is 46 years old. He’s unhappily married and he’s worked at the same boring, dead-end job for the last 26 years. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, it looks like he’s about to lose his job and he’s not too sure where to go from here. He’s overweight, which makes him vaguely annoyed with himself, and he doesn’t really have any friends any more. They seem to have just drifted away from him over the years. He’s miserable and his life is just marking time.

He knows the exact reason why his life has become so unbearable. It all stems from an incident that happened to him thirty years ago on a very special day in 1986. He was just sixteen years old at the time and it was the day that he lost his virginity. Everything went downhill from that point. Most teenage boys would regard the events of that day as being the high spot of their youth, the best thing that ever happened to them and, to begin with at least, Craig feels the same way. But, thirty years later, with the wisdom of hindsight he comes to see just how the ramifications of that event have messed up the whole of his life. If only he could go back to 1986 and put things right…

Well, perhaps he can. With the help of an old Commodore 64 computer, 46 year old Craig Pelling travels back to 1986 where he takes over the body and mind of 16 year old Craig Pelling. This is definitely an example of cut price time travel. No DeLoreans required.

I’ve just noticed that 46 is 64 backwards. I’d be willing to bet that’s why Keith A. Pearson made Craig 46 years old and why he used a Commodore 64 as his time machine of choice. That would be quite typical of the fun and games that he plays with his stories.

Teenage Craig retains all the memories and experience of his adult self and therefore he knows exactly what he has to do to make things work out better for him. Or at least he thinks he does. He only has 48 hours to remake the world, he only has 48 hours to repair relationships and prevent future losses. That’s a lot to ask of a 46 year old teenager. As you might expect, the results of his meddling are more than a little mixed…

The novel is half over before Craig takes his journey back in time. We spend those initial pages learning about the ups and downs of Craig’s life. This is just scene setting of course, but it’s vitally important scene setting. Without this information we couldn’t possibly understand what Craig has to do or why he he feels so strongly that he has to do it.  Fortunately these opening chapters are a skilfully written comedy of manners which are full of acute social observations. By the time that Craig is ready to take his fateful journey back to his youth we have come to know and understand him very well indeed which makes it quite easy for us to appreciate just what he hopes to achieve.

The story, while it is complete in itself, does end on a little bit of a cliffhanger and it leaves some unanswered questions. The second book in the series,  Beyond Broadhall starts exactly where the first book leaves off. I strongly suspect that the original story was written as a single book which was then split into two parts on publication for size reasons – this is pure guesswork on my part, I have no concrete evidence for it. But it feels right.

Craig is now back in 2016 and his life, if possible, is in even more of a mess than it was when he first started meddling with the time stream. Clearly history can be altered but, equally clearly, change is not always for the better. However now that Craig has experienced one set of life changes as a result of his meddling in 1986, he is quite convinced that he now knows exactly where he went wrong. The revelations of the knock-on effects on the lives of his family and friends leave him feeling extremely guilty. He desperately needs another chance to remake the future. He’s sure he’ll get it right this time. I’ll let you be the judge of how well he succeeds.

I suppose we have to think of the books as science fiction / fantasy because of the time travel gubbins upon which they depend, but really they are much more mainstream novels than they are SFF. Their primary concern is with how people fit together and what makes their relationships tick. In other words, despite their superficial lightness of tone, these books are really examinations of that inexhaustible (and undefinable) thing we call the human condition. And they are stunningly good at what they do.

They are also very funny.

The next Keith A. Pearson novel I picked up was Tuned Out. It is probably one of the most cleverly plotted novels I’ve ever read. It is a completely stand alone story which also happens to be the third book in the ‘86 Fix series, following on from (and answering some of the questions raised in) Beyond Broadhall. Not only that, it somehow also manages to be a prequel to The ‘86 Fix itself!  How’s that for convoluted plotting? Three for the price of one – what a bargain!

Toby Grant is an unsatisfied, rather spoiled and narcissistic millennial. Everything that happens to him is always somebody else’s fault. The universe owes him a living and, in Toby’s opinion, it is falling down on the job.

Toby works for a digital marketing agency and, of course, he isn’t happy about it. Life, he feels, is grotesquely unfair. He and his generation have clearly been victimised by society. He himself is fast approaching his thirtieth birthday and he has absolutely nothing to show for it. His future is looking bleak and grim. His finances are stretched beyond breaking point and he doesn’t know which way to turn. He is not a happy chappy. His parents’ generation had it so much easier than his, so clearly they can’t understand his problems. Where and when did everything go wrong and why did it have to happen to him? Moan, moan. Whinge, whinge.

Then stuff happens to him, mostly involving alfresco sex, and for his sins Toby finds himself sentenced to sixty hours of community service in a care home. Here he meets an irascible old git called Vernon who is more than 50 years his senior. Toby learns that the old man’s life was soured way back in 1969 when the love of his life was violently taken away from him. Somehow Vernon had actually managed to return to 1969 in order to try and put everything right but he failed in that endeavour and now he can never go back again. It seems you only ever get one second chance…

He teases and cajoles Toby into going back to 1969 in his place. Toby can save the love of Vernon’s life for him. What an opportunity! Now Toby has a chance to see for himself just what life was like for his parents and their generation. Somewhat to his surprise he finds that life in pre-decimal Britain was not quite as simple, straightforward and stress free as he had envisaged.

The thing that makes this book work so well is Toby’s slow realisation that every generation has its challenges. Millennials aren’t any more privileged than anyone else and the world doesn’t actually owe them a living any more than it owed a living to the generations that came before. Add to Toby’s gradually increasing maturity an ingenious love story that is absolutely guaranteed to wrench your heart strings and you’ve got the recipe for a perfect novel. As a bonus, the whole story is narrated in a prose style which exhibits such an extremely dry wit that you will often find yourself laughing out loud at its apt phrasing. Not only that, the story also has an amazingly accurate sense of time and place. The world of 1960s Britain is brought brilliantly to life. Believe me, I was there, I know whereof I speak.

Though having said that, I must admit that I did spot one error (there’s always at least one). Toby asks his boss for a ten shilling advance on his wages and his boss hands Toby two crowns (five shilling pieces). That would never happen in real life. Crowns certainly were legal tender and they did have a face value of five shillings, but they were never circulated and they were never spent or given in change.

Crowns were commemorative coins, minted to celebrate special occasions. For example, a crown was minted in 1953 for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, another was minted in 1965 to commemorate the death of Winston Churchill and another in 1977 to mark Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee. Crowns were generally regarded as collectors items rather than as currency and usually they were only ever seen in presentation cases because there weren’t very many of them around. I myself own a nicely presented coronation crown and an equally nicely presented jubilee crown.

Because they were collectors items, crowns generally changed hands for more than their face value. So of course it would make no sense to spend a crown on five shillings worth of groceries when it was worth at least twice its face value, and possibly even more. And anyway, a shopkeeper presented with a crown over the counter probably wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it, never having seen one before…

Of course, maybe this wasn’t a mistake at all. Perhaps Tony’s 1969 is an alternate time stream, a 1969 where crowns are regularly minted and circulated just like all the other coins in the average pay packet, a time stream that has been brought into being by all of Toby’s messing about. Or, much more likely, maybe I’m over-thinking things and reading far too much into a single trivial episode.

Putting all that to one side, let’s ask ourselves what could possibly go wrong? And the answer, of course, is absolutely nothing. Tuned Out is clever and witty and wise. What more could anybody ask for? You owe it to yourself to read this one.

Who Sent Clement? is the first book of a series about a rather special man called Clement. As the story opens, we meet Beth Baxter, the failed author of seventeen uncompleted novels, soon to be joined by an eighteenth. She is also the owner of a not-very-successful book shop from which she manages to make a meagre living.

Beth is in trouble. She is being threatened by thugs in the employ of a loan shark. It turns out that her (soon to be ex) fiancée Keith has forged her signature on a contract for a £20,000 loan. Keith has now vanished without trace and Beth is being pressured to repay the money.

Support arrives out of the blue from an unexpected source. Clement turns up in the nick of time to help her out. Clement is six feet tall in every direction and even his muscles have muscles on them. When Clement wants to persuade people of something, they stay persuaded. The thugs depart to lick their wounds.

Beth is grateful, of course, but she has no idea who Clement is or where he came from. This puzzles her and also it frightens her a little. Clement himself isn’t any help – he doesn’t know what’s going on either. He claims that he died in 1975, more than forty years ago, following an unfortunate incident with a cricket bat. He remembers nothing after that. All he knows is that he has been sent to help Beth out of her difficulties. He has no idea who sent him.

Beth finds his story hard to swallow even though Clement clearly thinks that flared trousers and a Zapata moustache are the ultimate in fashion statements. He is also absolutely horrified to find that beer costs more than £5 a pint. He claims never to have seen a mobile phone before, and he is quite amazed by all the many things that Beth’s phone can do. He’s never heard of the internet. Most of the words Beth uses in her day to day speech puzzle him. He is a walking, talking anachronism. His twentieth century habits and prejudices make Clement stand out as extremely politically incorrect in the moralistic, prudish, sensitive and highly intolerant twenty-first century world – a situation which Keith A. Pearson takes full advantage of to generate lots of lovely satirical jokes.

But Clement has a job to do and despite his attitudes he manages to do it well. The loan shark problem proves to be rather more intractable than it seemed to be at first glance. There are wheels within wheels here and nothing can be taken at face value. Will Clement be up to the job that he’s been given now that it has become so complicated? Of course he will. And Who Sent Clement? anyway? We never find out for certain, though some heavy hints are dropped. Perhaps later books in the series will have more definitive answers.

This is a complex, intricate, hilarious and very satisfying story.

While we’re on the subject of time travel, let’s talk about The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The book describes itself as:

...a time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all...

and that’s a pretty good description.

Not very many years from now, a government Ministry is gathering people together from all across history. The goal, we are told, is to establish the feasibility of time travel – can the human body survive the stress of journeying through time and, more importantly, how will the fabric of space-time itself react?

The unnamed main character is an employee of the Ministry. Her job is described as being a "bridge" – she has to live with, monitor and work with one of these expat historical people. Specifically, in her case, with Commander Graham Gore who has been brought to the present day from 1847, shortly before he died in "real-life". As far as the historical record is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic so the fact that he vanished into the future shortly before his "actual" death is unlikely to have much effect on the time stream.

Gore is not always comfortable with his new domestic situation. His bridge, he is alarmed to discover, is an unmarried woman who regularly displays her calves in public. He finds this behaviour quite scandalous. But it is only one of many disconcerting ideas he is now being forced to come to grips with. What on earth is a washing machine, what is Spotify for, and whatever happened to the British Empire? The Empire doesn’t seem to exist any more. Oh woe!

Over the next year the relationship between Gore and his bridge evolves into something best thought of as a trans-temporal love affair.  By the time the true reasons that lie behind the Ministry’s project are revealed, the bridge is forced to confront the choices that have brought her and Gore together. What happens next has the potential to profoundly change the future.

I have ambivalent feeling about this book. The beginning, when the expats and the bridges are getting to know each other, is brilliantly written and enthralling. The ending, when everyone finds out what is really going on (as opposed to what they have been told is going on) is ingenious. But the middle section seems to ramble a bit. It is made up of anecdotes and incidents which, in themselves, seem to have little purpose other than to increase the page count . Certainly the events are well written and often quite funny – describing Guinness as being "...like angry Marmite" is sheer genius – but by and large the middle section rambles rather formlessly. A few more bits of business or a few less would make little difference to the final working out of the story. I think perhaps this book is really a novella trying hard to be a novel but not quite succeeding. So it’s very much a curate’s egg of a book.

A Killer of Influence is J. D. Kirk’s twentieth novel about Detective Chief Inspector Logan and it is quite clear that Kirk is now fed up to the back teeth with his hero. This book reads like a contractual obligation novel, and it never really springs to life. It would be a shame to end the series on such a low note, but I really do hope that he doesn’t write any more novels about Inspector Logan. Though, of course, if he does write more novels in the series, I will definitely read them because I’m a completist and I’m not afraid to contradict myself.

The book itself is a direct sequel to Where The Pieces Lie which ended on a huge cliff hanger. So it’s nice to finally have all the plot points rounded up and tied together neatly with a bow, implausible though those plot points are.

Although the book itself is something of a drag, it does have a lot of individual giggle-worthy scenes. The central conceit is that eight influencers are being held captive by the killer who is taking votes from the internet hive-mind to decide in what order they should all be killed. Logan’s job, of course, is to find and rescue the influencers before they all die horrible deaths. Predictably, the internet is going crazy with up- and down- votes, emojis and memes – all the usual dumb illiteracies. Not everything about the book is completely imbecilic – there are lots of good jokes poking satirical fun at the vapidity of the influencers themselves and the stupidity and shallowness of Tik-Tokkers in general. Though having said that, I have to admit that joking about influencers is such a very easy thing to do that it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

I firmly believe that Kirk is indulging himself in some sort of wish fulfilment here. After all, who among us has not wanted to lock up an annoying influencer and subject them to ingeniously painful punishments?

The convoluted and overly-complex schemes that the killer is setting in motion are so unutterably over the top as to completely destroy the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. Add to that nonsense the killer’s unbelievable and utterly twisted motivation and the whole thing just falls apart in front of your eyes (or in my case in front of my ears because I read it as an audiobook).

Kirk’s sense of humour is as sharp and as pointed as ever, and the set pieces are still funny even when you are half-expecting them. The dialogue is still crisp and witty. But the plot is just plain dumb, and even all of Kirk’s writing skills cannot rescue it from that. What a shame.

The mystery and detective novelist M. S. Morris is actually two people – the husband and wife writing team of Margarita and Steve Morris. They have a couple of series on the go but so far I’ve only read some of their Bridget Hart series, also known as the Oxford murder mysteries because that city is where the stories are set. And I’m thoroughly enjoying them so far. Move over Morse. Make room for the new talent.

The first novel Aspire to Die defines the formula for all the subsequent ones (at least, all the ones I’ve read so far). In this novel a student is found dead in her room in one of Oxford's most prestigious colleges. Detective Inspector Bridget Hart is called in to investigate and she soon finds herself enmeshed in a complex web of intrigue centred around the closed and claustrophobic world of academia. Spires dream and dons conspire. Detectives detect and the bad guy is cornered, often on a very high place – roofs, balconies and the like feature frequently. The bad guy confesses all and the danger passes. The End.

And so it goes from book to book.

The identity of the body changes from novel to novel and so, of course, does the identity of the bad guy. But that aside, it’s true to say that when you’ve read one Bridget Hart novel, you’ve read them all. However that’s not really the point. A crime is a crime is a crime and, to be frank, many detective stories turn out to be very much of a muchness simply because crime is common and crime is mundane except in some of the sillier serial-killer plots beloved by other writers (J. D. Kirk, I’m looking at you). So why do we keep reading the things? In my case it’s because I enjoy keeping company with the people who are investigating the crimes. If the team of detectives is well fleshed out then the domestic arrangements between them, the feuds and the friendships keep me coming back for more – as long as it never descends into soap opera, of course. That’s a fine line to draw of course but, generally speaking, it’s usually obvious when the line gets crossed.

The Bridget Hart novels are particularly good at this and as an added bonus, all the police personnel are themselves competent and professional. That’s not always the case in other books by other writers. I get very fed up with the artificial drama shoe-horned into some detective novels through the all too frequent introduction of an inept senior policeman or an incompetent underling. The Bridget Hart novels exhibit none of these weaknesses and they are all the better for it.

Bridget herself is obviously the main focus of all the stories and learning about her is both a joy and a delight. But I must confess that I myself have a sneaking fondness for Detective Constable Ffion Hughes, the motorbike riding Ice-Goddess from Wales. She’s my very, very favourite...