Lunchtime read: Weir of Hermiston

The book ends with Archie and his girlfriend arguing as he under duress tries to inform her that for the sake of her reputation they part.

The suggestion that they nip their young love in the bud comes from Archie’s bitter Aunt and the viper in his nest his lawyer friend who is keen to enjoy a heavy dose of revenge.

The plan was to then turn back to the introduction at the start and discover where the novel was planned to be heading before Stevenson was unfortunately struck down and died at 41. Even in the brief 115 pages you can see he was building a novel that could have gone in quite a few directions. The foundations where there with a strong father and son relationship, a budding love affair and the characters on the side who are quite capable of muddying the waters.

A review will follow soon…

spies - post II

Although the characters of Keith and Stephen annoy you because they are not only immature but also slightly dense the idea that they have stumbled onto something does start to stir the story.

The character that steps forward increasingly is Keith’s mother herself. The alleged German spy appeals to Stephen directly to stop following her and to make her life easier after they rumble that she is leaving things in a box for someone.

The box lies through the railway tunnel at the right at the entrance to the drive and the boys still think it is a German spy. But by now the penny is starting to drop that this is a relationship with a man and the boys get closer to not only catching the mother but also to discovering the identify of the mystery man.

The relationship between the narrator Stephen and the mother of his best friend starts to become central and that is the fault he seems to have returned to face up to.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Weir of Hermiston

The Romeo and Juliet story begins and it could be quite a straight forward plot development from there but Stevenson decides to throw another character into the mix.

Another lawyer, who has fallen on hard times and seems to have a vindictive streak, turns up on Archie’s door and soon sets out to find out why the Laird keeps disappearing without him. He manages to pin down the relationship with the young girl from a rival estate and then starts to turn the knife.

He threatens to tell Archie’s father and her family and all the meanwhile spreads gossip around the parts about Archie implying that the man is unstable and has left a dark secret behind.

Your heart goes out to Archie who is being so badly betrayed and you hope that had the novel been finished justice would have been done.

Last bit tomorrow…

spies - post I

The book starts with an old man literally walking back down memory lane to his childhood. As he walks down his old cul-de-sac he can recall with exact detail the same street in the war with the blackout blinds and the bombed out house.

the narrator comes from one of the more shambolic households down the street and recalls a friendship with the more upmarket Keith. The boy dominates the friendship and it is Keith who starts the ball rolling that leads to the events that the old man has come back to recall.

The words “my mother is a German spy” sets them spying, recording everything in a log book and inventing all sorts of potential spying activities for the mother. The result is no doubt going to be awkward and awful. As an adult reader the worst you suspect her of is having an affair but the boys might have guessed right.

More tomorrow...

Lunchtime read: Weir of Hermiston

The blurb on the back of the page describes this unfinished book as a masterpiece. It is hard to agree with that before you have finished but you can see where this is going. Having established the background of Archie Wier through the stories of his mother and father the story now widens with the movement of Archie to the family home in Hermiston.

Waiting for him in the family home is an old spinster as housekeeper and a lot of solitude. He seems to be aloof but he is just unable to break into the community. But inevitably there is a beautiful young girl and the Laird looks set to have a romantic encounter.

The problem is that the beauty is the niece of the housekeeper and before Archie has a chance to get to know her he faces the challenge of healing a minor family rift.

More tomorrow...

Lunchtime read: Weir of Hermiston

It inevitably takes a couple of books before you can start to get into a position where you can start to suggest the themes that drive an author on.

But after a short story collection, including the infamous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it is fair to say that what seems to drive Stevenson on is ideas around the question of personality. In this story it is the idea of the conflict between good and evil that exists in a single person that troubles the lead character Archie Weir.

Brought up by his mother, a god fearing but frightened woman, he rejects the world of his father, a well known ‘hanging judge’ because he views his world as coarse and evil. But with the mother dying Archie has little choice but to live in his father’s shadow.

He does so until he reaches the age of 19 when after starting his legal studies and witnessing the trial and execution under his father’s command of a man that arouses pity in him. He accuses his father publicly of murder and after a confrontation between father and son he aggress to become a landowner on the family estate in Hermiston.

On the one hand he wants to hate his father but whenever he feels a spark of kindness he is torn and he remembers the biblical teachings to honour parents. That source of distress pushed him into a position of complete vulnerability when face on with the hanging judge.

More tomorrow…

book review - Tree of Smoke

The plan was to knock out this review last Friday because it would have been apt to review a big book by an American author on Independence Day. It would have been timely because one of the many questions that Denis Johnson asks in Tree of Smoke is about exactly what America is and what its boys were fighting for in Vietnam.

This book comes with the blurb on the dust jacket informing you of its high qualities but for the first 200 pages you are wondering just what the critics were on about. Part of the problem is that the story is disjointed and the background is being painted in but it is not until you get the chance to stand back and see the picture that it starts to make sense and become an easier and in place gripping read.

There are relationships between families that are used as pivots to move the story on. The two most important characters are Skip Sands, a man wrestling with his own motivation for being in the war working for the CIA but more directly working for his uncle ‘the general’.

Then there is James Houston who joins up despite hearing how miserable life is from his elder brother who is in the navy. The teenager lies about his age to get straight into the war zone and joins the infantry to go in as a grunt into Vietnam.

Meanwhile after bumbling around the Philippines cataloguing a card file system established by his uncle Skip finally makes it to the war. In the meantime he has met some shady characters that are working their own mini-war within a war.

Once in Vietnam the world melts and the line between good and bad disappears and in the case of Houston his moral compass cracks. Sands is also stuck in the middle of a war but it is between one half of the CIA and his Uncle. The Washington-based half is fighting a war different to those that have understood the horror of the conflict on the ground.

It would be too simple to describe this as a war novel but the fighting scenes are delivered brilliantly but what is more powerful are the post combat passages where a character like James is killing innocent women one day through his drug fuelled battle shocked state and is then home just a few days later.

You sense that the point Johnson is making is that the reason why the veterans were failed is that no one really understood the transition they had to make from world of unreality to world of mundane domesticity.

But there are other questions being asked about just how you fight any way, with the tree of smoke a reference to the idea of confusing the enemy with a confusing series of double bluffs. The general wants to wage a psychological warfare that is alien to those counting body bags and strategic hits by bombers. Skip caught in a world on the sidelines doesn’t seem to know who to support and in the end ultimately pays for his personal apathy with his life as he is hanged for gun running years after the war ends.

There is also a religious question with Skip’s affair with Kathy the widowed missionary’s wife who sees the horrors of the war through the eyes of someone trying to save children. What is right more than where is god? Seems to be the question that this book challenges you to find an answer for.

The reason it works so well and grips you is because the tree of smoke plan grips those who knew the general and they never stoop believing that the old man died in an accident in the middle of the war. The search for the general, which turns up a handful of potential gravesites but no living body, goes on until the end of the book. The search for the rights and wrongs of wars like Vietnam continue up to this very minute.

Version read - Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardback

book review - Devil May Care

It is hard not to get wrapped up in the hype before even opening this book. The amount of pre-launch coverage was intense with the main angle being that this James Bond novel had been written by a literary figure. Sebastian Faulks was expected to deliver a book that combined the best of his writing style, developing characters and drawing out emotions, with the best of Ian Fleming’s fast paced action and tightly controlled plots.

The question should not whether or not he manages to deliver that but whether or not you enjoy reading the book. The response to that has to be a qualified positive. The qualification comes from a couple of moments when it became hard to see what was being gained by stringing scenes out.

But before launching into that a quick reaction to the story. Picking up where Fleming left off this is a Bond in the 1960s managing to sidestep the oncoming hippy revolution and the summer of love and stick to fighting shady characters against the cold war background.

The other change though is the focus on drugs that could ironically place the action bang in 2008. Mind you these were early days with drugs and the idea of corrupting an entire nation with narcotics is a novel one. The irony is that even with drugs now firmly established and by all accounts quite widely available the collapse in society hasn’t happened. Or has it? Let’s not start that debate.

Aside from the drugs and the swinging sixties much is the same. This is a Bond reliant on his fists, strength and quick thinking rather than on gadgets galore. This is also a man quite happy to spend some serious time in the company of women as well as evil megalomaniacs.

But his is also a Bond with frailties and the book starts with him weighing up the prospect of retirement. He is never quite away from those thoughts until close to the end when it becomes clear that this is a world he could never leave, except as a result of taking a bullet.

The fight between the mad chemist thwarted by the British establishment and his Vietnamese henchman who goes in for tongue clamping removal as a form of torture is enjoyable but sometimes stretched. It seems to take ages for Bond to complete a game of tennis with the arch villain Dr. Gorner and likewise a passage of events on a plane when Bond is struggling to stay alive seems to take just that bit too long.

The other criticism comes with the womanising. It takes Bond an age to take the lead female to the bedroom and then when he gets there he takes her “roughly” in a moment that makes you think of Mill & Boon. The sex has to be there but is clearly not somewhere Faulks feel comfortable writing about.

But give him credit this is an enjoyable book with several plot strands running in parallel that he manages to all pull together at the end. This is enjoyment and is not meant to be much more. The skill is writing a believable plot with a leading character that is not only known the world over but in most reader’s minds already carries the face of a Connery, Brosnan or a Craig and their behavioural patterns.

From a publishing point of view it has already been a great success for Penguin and in terms of the highlights of this year it will be included in most lists. The real test is if it is remembered for anything than being yet another attempt to resurrect the Bond character and that is of course far too early to judge.

Version read – Penguin hardback

book review - Venusberg

For some reason this just doesn’t work very well. Anthony Powell has tried to take the world of social intrigue and politics and set it in a mystery country in the Balkans but the effect doesn’t quite come off.

There are several reasons why this doesn’t quite get it right including the location. Setting it in a country that you hazard a guess at but is never actually revealed is an odd move that makes this hard to connect with.

Then add to that the odd feelings that the main character inspires and it is hard to care about the world that he inhabits and the love lives he plans to lead. Things start with a literary correspondent for a newspaper, Lushington, being sent off to cover foreign parts. Much as the world described in Scoop all this really involves is hanging round government and diplomatic circles waiting for a revolution or something else to happen.

The select circles that Lushington moves in take him into contact with an old acquaintance Da Costa, who his girlfriend in England had turned him over for, as well as a series of generals and diplomats from the country and US diplomats.

Central to experience in the East is the boat trip on the way there where he meets the woman with whom he starts an affair on board and carries on in the city. The irony is of course that she is married and much in the same way that Lushington himself was the spurned element of a threesome so the husband finds himself wondering just why his wife is acting so strangely.

The problem is the detachment that the central character displays to almost every situation. Having made friends with a Russian émigré on the boat he then fails to show anything other than the interest of an observer when he visits the Russians incredibly crowded flat.

Likewise even after his mistress and lover’s rival XXX have been killed in a botched attempt to kill the chief of police he still seems to drift back to London and into the arms of his old girlfriend.

That detachment might work when the world around the central character is interesting and organic in terms of developing in different directions and as a result provoking the main character. But none of that happens and when an event does occur, like the murder of his mistress, it seems to have very little impact.

Presumably there is meant to be humour in the book but it is not as easy to spot as What’s become of Waring? one of his other pre Dance to the Music of Time novels. The target of amusement in a stereotypical sense seems lost here as well as the focus seems to be partially on the buffer states coping with the communists in charge over the border.

This is a book that has sadly dated. The world described is incomplete and of partial interest, the problems of revolutions and shots at police chiefs soon were far from comic once the true extent of the Stalinist horrors emerged and the characterisation just doesn’t have enough to engage.

Version read – Penguin paperback

Unconditional Surrender - post IV

For a moment it feels as if this book should have been called The Death Wish because as a theme it is one of the strongest throughout. But of course the title refers not just to what happened to the Germans but also to Guy.

He makes an unconditional surrender not just to the prospect of facing death but also to whatever life might throw at him. Guy left widowed by Virginia’s death sits in Yugoslavia waiting out the war as he watches those in a rush around him either literally bursting into flames or in the case of Ritchie-Hook crawling up to the enemy and getting shot.

Guy ends the war with a new wife, two sons of his own and plenty of money. As he meets his brother in law Box-Bender there is bitterness and jealousy. But Guy won by being prepared to lose everything and of all those around him he played no political games so perhaps justice is done.

A review will follow soonish…

book review - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

For quite a short book this manages to pack in quite a few genres. On the one hand Dai Sijie’s look back at the cultural revolution in China have the feel of an autobiography but it is also a rites of passage tale for more than one of the main trio of characters.

In addition to those styles the content is also varied with a mixture of history as well as a story that charts the power of literature, reminding everyone of the costs of banning books.

Two students, who both have parents in disgrace with the Moa regime, are sent into the countryside for a spell of re-education. The years spread out before them with all hopes pinned on a change to their circumstances that will get them recalled to the City.

Because the author tells you fairly early on you know that their future lay abroad but for the other characters liberation came inside the mind rather than in a physical sense. The key to that growing imagination and freedom in terms of thought comes in the form of a dog eared translation of Balzac.

The world that the Frenchman describes, not just in terms of colour and variety but also emotionally about love and lust, has a tremendous impact on the two students. It also touches the world of those they describe the passages to, including the tailor in the next village and his daughter the seamstress.

Of all the characters she is the most transformed starting to understand that she is beautiful and that a Balzac character in the same position uses that beauty as a weapon. She leaves the two students behind not just in a physical sense but in terms of her reaction to the written word.

Unlike the students, who both have a high opinion of their own worth, it is the seamstress who allows herself to come alive with the magical words of the great banned Western writers. She drinks it in and then changes her life. The students however are stuck worrying about much more mundane concerns about sex, getting away from the mountain and acquiring and then destroying the books.

Ultimately the message is not just about the power of literature to change lives and minds but also the different reactions to it that means that the most surprising reactions can come fro m the most unexpected quarters.

It also shows that no matter how tightly the restrictions the mind can still wander and imagination can still liberate those held in intellectual and well as physical captivity.

Version read – Vintage paperback

The Soldier's Art - post IV

Of all the Powell books so far in the Dance to the Music of time series the last two, The Valley of Bones and The Soldier’s Art have been the most unsatisfactory to read.

The reason I think has to do with the timing. On the way ion on the train it struck me that both Waugh and Powell were writing about a time and experiences that they both went through but importantly at the time and for the few decades afterwards so did their readership.

Coming to this story, which is predominantly about the randomness of death and the politicalling of those looking for promotion, it is describing a world that is not only lost but of marginal interest.

At the end a rash of movement engulfs Jenkins, who seems for most of the time to be totally unable to control his own destiny. Widmerpool hears of a promotion to the Cabinet Office, other figures get promoted out of the division and even Stringham moves to the mobile laundry unit and accepts the prospect of death overseas as the unit is posted to the Middle East.

A telegram at the end asking Jenkins to report to the War Office in London is the bridge into the next novel. Hopefully with the last of the war novels it will return to a more accessible tale of colourful characters from the past.

However the death count is rising with the artist and womaniser Barnby being shot down at the end of the book to join the ranks of deceased with Lady Molly, Chips Lovell and Priscilla Tolland.

A review (so many to get through I apologise) will come soon…

Unconditional Surrender - post III

With hindsight it was perhaps not the wisest thing to read both Powell and Waugh’s military novels at the same time. It not only gets slightly confusing but there are also incredible similarities.

Having been sent back to rest at his uncle’s with a damaged knee a desperate Virginia sets her sights on remarrying her husband. She hopes she can charm him but Guy admits he no longer loves her and instead steps up to the altar after she has admitted that she if pregnant with another man’s child.

The child is born but the marriage is short lived as a V2 falls on Guy’s uncle’s house and kills Virginia. Guy is told the news in the Balkans where his is working as a liaison officer with the Yugoslavian partisans.

One of the many odd people he meets informs him that he has a death wish. Something that Virginia seemed to have wishing the bombs would fall on her and something that Guy also appears to possess.

Quite what the title refers to other than the capitulation of the Germany Army is still possibly open to interpretation. With the marriage to Virginian Guy surrendered himself to pit but is he also capable of surrendering himself to love, possibly in the form of his son Gervase?

More tomorrow…

The Soldier's Art - post III

Powell is often criticised for writing about a closed world but he manages to convey, primarily in the figure of Odo Stevens, that the war gave some people the opportunity to break through the barriers.

The normal conventions are in flux and given the chance some will rise. Stevens manages to have an affair with Jenkin’s sister-in-law Priscilla, someone he would have struggled to have met before the war gave him the opportunity.

Likewise the war can also give those who were previously in positions of relative comfort a knock and Stringham’s appearance as a mess waiter being baited by a more senior soldier called Biggs disturbs Jenkins.

But it is a return to the world of London and some of the familiar characters that brings this book back from a world of limited interest. Describing the war is all well and good when it is battle scenes but the endless political movements well behind the lines gets slightly tiresome.

The trip by Jenkins to London sees him reintroduced to Moreland, who has now taken up with the ex-wife of the suicidal critic Maclintick, as well as meeting Chips Lovell who confides his worries about the affair his wife is having with Stevens.

Then in a cruel twist of fate both Chips and his wife are killed by different bombs in the blitz with several other known characters also biting the dust including Lady Molly, the central character of book 4.

In a few pages the war hits home before it fades away again as Jenkins returns to toe world of reports and Widmerpool.

More tomorrow…

The Soldier's Art - post II

Powell is using a slightly different technique revealing that something is about to happen before it does so the next few pages are already set up. It mixes up the style a bit but it does remove some of the elements of surprise that were integral to the earlier volumes.

There is also a sense of reduced surprise as some of the old characters turn up.

If Jenkins thought he had fallen far working for Widmerpool he is disturbed to find Stringham working as a waiter in the mess. He tries to reach out to his old friend, a reformed but clearly damaged alcoholic, but he fails because Stringham cannot cope with the possible upheaval.

Meanwhile just as in the war time world portrayed by Waugh there is plenty of opportunity for characters to get bogged down in the politics of the labyrinthine command structure of the army. Widmerpool is determined to make enemies if he feels it will benefit his career but it looks as if he might have bitten off more than he can chew.

Jenkins almost benefits from bumping into a general who tries to fix him up with a job with the Free French but Jenkins blows the written and oral parts of the test. That starts his week of leave.

More tomorrow…