Robert Harris: Precipice This exponent of the well-researched historical and occasionally alt-history thriller, often set in Nazi Germany (Fatherland) or Ancient Rome (Imperium, Pompeii, etcetera) sometimes steers very close to actual reality, dramatising real events that happened to real people (An Officer and a Spy, Act of Oblivion). And that is the case here. The novel starts in July 1914, a few days after Franz Ferdinand had been shot, and describes, in agonising day-by-day detail, the machinations of Herbert Henry Asquith’s Liberal government as Britain was dragged into the ensuing conflict; and continues until May 1915, after the Gallipoli disaster, when Asquith had to enter into a coalition with Bonar Law’s Unionists. It is told largely through the medium of Asquith’s surviving letters to his muse, Venetia Stanley, who was very much younger. Asquith discussed government business in his letters, some of it secret, and the letters are, in some cases, the only record that survives of cabinet meetings of the time — stuffed as they were with pointed pen-portraits of Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener and their contemporaries. Stanley’s letters do not survive, but Harris makes a good stab at reconstructing the prose of an intelligent, well-bred and well-read woman from an unconventional family (her father was an atheist; her immediate relatives included a Muslim convert and a Catholic bishop, and she married a Jew, Edwin Montagu). Harris makes the argument that the downfall of Asquith’s government was linked to Stanley ceasing to write to him and announcing her engagement to Montagu — and also adds a clever subplot involving the nascent secret intelligence services. What struck me most about this novel (apart from the unbelievable privilege enjoyed by a very small group of people, set apart and insulated from the common herd, and all of whom knew one another) was that these were simpler times. The Prime Minister could afford to spend weekends away at house parties, and walk from Downing Street to go shopping without being recognised. And also that there were at least six deliveries of mail a day. As always with his novels, Harris wears his voluminous research very lightly. One does, however, get rather tired of the amatory declarations in the letters, my dearest darling, my only muse, light of my existence, &c &c. And I couldn’t help reading the title as ‘Prepuce’. Other than that it’s terrific.
Alice Thompson: The Book Collector Within the eldritch and be-tentacled genre that is horror fiction lurks a sub-genre, feminist horror, perhaps best exemplified by The Yellow Wallpaper, a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which the protagonist, a woman suffering what we’d now called postpartum depression, is locked by her husband, for her own good, so he says, in an upstairs room. The story charts the protagonist’s mental disintegration as she becomes obsessed with the patterns of the room’s yellow wallpaper. As it is told in the first person, the events are recounted by an unreliable narrator, so one is never sure whether they are real, or going on inside the narrator’s own head. The Book Collector is a short novel in much the same vein. A young woman called Violet marries the eponymous Bibliophile, and at first her life is idyllic. A fairy tale, in fact. Fairy tales feature very strongly in this story. Especially the old-fashioned kind. You know, the really gruesome ones that the Grimms and others told before they got cleaned up by Disney. But I digress. After Violet gives birth to Felix, her life falls apart and her husband confines her to a lunatic asylum for similarly ‘hysterical’ women. An asylum from which women are being abstracted, mutilated and killed. The novel has all the trappings of the Gothick: dark forests, secret caves, madness, grand houses, bookcases stuffed with dusty grimoires that one really, really shouldn’t look at, let alone read. The writing style, though, is clipped, well-trimmed to a degree and far from the edge of floridity, dissolution and decay that should match the locales. H. P. Lovecraft (very much at the florid end of the spectrum) wrote that the key feature of horror fiction should, above all, be atmosphere, something that stays with you once you’ve closed the book. Atmosphere doesn’t require that the writing is any more than good enough to drive you through the story. Lovecraft’s writing is so bad, it’s brilliant. Thompson’s writing, on the other hand, is perhaps too well-crafted for its subject. So, although parts of this tale are very gruesome, it doesn’t have quite the effect it perhaps should. Fun fact: connoisseurs of 1980s pop trivia will know Alice Thompson as the founding keyboard player in a combo called The Woodentops.
Richard Osman: We Solve Murders Yes, it’s him again, the Man on the Telly, and best-selling author of the deservedly acclaimed Thursday Murder Club series of thrillers that have re-invigorated that subgenre known as Cosy Crime. Osman, being a canny sort of chap, has realised that continuing a successful series can result in diminishing returns, so We Solve Murders is the opener to what promises to be a new series. Amy Wheeler is bodyguard, hired out to protect celebrities. Her current client is Rosy D’Antonio, high-living and bestselling author of raunchy crime thrillers. Amy’s father-in-law, Steve, is an ex-cop living in a sleepy village in the New Forest whose weekly highlight is the pub quiz. All three are involved in a twisty turny plot involving the serial deaths of internet influencers and international money smuggling. I have forgotten the plot already, but I did enjoy the ride, very much. Although the canvas is much broader than in the Thursday Murder Club series — inescapably so, as that was, as you’ll recall, an upscale retirement village in Sussex — Osman’s readers will be comforted that the tone is very much the same. Cool, crisp, deft and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
Elsa Pancirolli: Beasts Before Us Readers with long memories will remember my review of Steve Brusatte’s book The Rise and Reign of Mammals, reviewed here. Pancirolli’s book covers the same ground, and was actually available before Brusatte’s, I believe, but like many things, the plans of mice and men gang aft agley, especially during a pandemic. It covers similar ground, too, concentrating on the oft-forgotten ‘first’ age of mammals that occurred before the ascendancy of the dinosaurs, when the world was dominated by what used to be called ‘mammal-like’ reptiles; before switching to the small, fierce and furry residents of the nocturnal forests when dinosaurs were ascendant in the daytime. It’s a fun and engaging read, especially the parts when the author talks of the often very uncomfortable conditions encountered while prospecting for fossils on windy and rainy Scottish coasts in winter. I didn’t always get the humour, and there was a mite too much political correctness for my taste, but that’s just me. A book done with brio — highly recommended.
Robert Harris: The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium/ Lustrum/ Dictator) You’ll have seen I’ve already read one of Harris’ closely-worked historical novels this month (Precipice, above). The Imperium trilogy is a fictionalised biography of the lawyer, orator, statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) during one of the most exciting periods of Roman history, when the old Republic gave way to the Empire. That we know Cicero existed is attested by a wealth of material. Perhaps less well-known is that much of it was recorded by his slave and personal secretary, Tiro, who devised a shorthand method of recording speech verbatim. Some of his shorthand survives today: the abbreviations ‘e.g. and NB’ were his, as well as the ampersand (&). It is also known from other sources that Tiro, who long outlived his master, wrote a biography of Cicero, though the biography itself is now lost. It is this that Harris recreates, with his usual attention to detail, sensitive characterisation and matchless readability. Imperium records Cicero’s early life and training, rising through the political ranks from the relatively junior quaestor, through aedile, praetor and finally consul, during which Cicero made his name by the high-profile prosecution of Gaius Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily. Lustrum covers Cicero’s tumultuous year as consul and the years immediately following, in which he helped foil a conspiracy to destabilise the Republic, during which he condemned several men to death without trial, a circumstance that was to dog him ever afterwards. Dictator charts the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the various civil wars, and Cicero’s eventual downfall by order of Mark Antony. I learned a great deal about the organisation of Roman life from these books, and grasped how much of modern society, especially the legal system, owes to Roman law: the idea of a constitution; debates in the Senate; the whole concept of prosecution and defence; and trial by jury. The whole courtroom drama scenario, in fact, which this series exploits beautifully. Characters from ancient history, too, shine out as real people. Not just Cicero, who is supremely clever, cunning and cultured — as well as crotchety, driven and vain — but the majestic if rather dopey Pompey; the fanatically stoic Cato; the vulpine Julius Caesar; Cicero’s ferocious and clever wife Terentia, and, in Dictator, the precocious Octavianus, who becomes the Emperor Augustus. It might not sound like it, but it’s a nail-biting thrill-ride as Cicero navigates the treacherous shoals and sometimes lethal hazards of Roman political life — especially as you just know it’ll all come to a sticky end. The dramatisation of Julius Caesar’s assassination is brilliant because, even though you know what’s about to happen, it’s so shocking. I had read Imperium before in dead-tree format but had forgotten much of it by the time I came across Lustrum and Dictator, so I listened to the whole thing as audiobooks.
Jonathan Strahan (ed.) New Adventures in Space Opera If you’ve enjoyed Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, or practically any popular SF that’s made it to popular cinema, you’ve experienced a sub-genre known as ‘space opera’. Space Opera is fairly easily defined (by me) as westerns, but set in space. Some of them are really sword-and-sorcery fantasies dressed up with technology (Star Wars is very much in this vein). There is usually a lot of violence, high-tech macguffins (faster-than-light travel, light-sabers, photon torpedoes, matter transportation); what SF nerds call ‘sensawunda’ (fantastic locales, killer robots, Martian princesses, exotic aliens who unconventional word order when they speak, use they must); and plot trumps characterisation. Space Opera used to be the domain of pulp magazine SF from the 1920s to the 1960s, a period that saw the flowering of the careers of many exponents of the genre such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and … er … L. Ron Hubbard. After an eclipse under the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s (Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and so on) that used SF to explore more social and political themes, Space Opera enjoyed a resurgence with the works of Iain M. Banks. Justina Robson, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, which, although they use all the props, tend to be more cerebral and sophisticated. But Space Opera moves on, finds new writers and audiences (such as Cixian Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy), and it moves on still, to find new means of expression, and, in particular, diversity. New Adventures in Space Opera is a collection of SF stories exploring the outer reaches of contemporary Space Opera. Many of the authors are female (welcome), and there were some creative uses of pronouns (understandable, if sometimes confusing). I have to say, though, I found them a bit disappointing. One of the features of Space Opera — like cheap music — is that it’s catchy. The images it evokes stay in the mind. Nobody who has ever seen The Day The Earth Stood Still will forget the giant robot Klaatu. No-one who has ever read Asimov’s Foundation will forget Gaal Dornick’s first experience of the planet-spanning city of Trantor. No reader of Dune will forget the sandworms. None of the stories in this collection stayed in my mind for more than a few moments after I had finished reading them. Okay, there was one by Alastair Reynolds, but it read like an inferior out-take from his full-length novel House of Suns. The story by Israeli author Lavie Tidhar, like many of his works, resonated with what I shall euphemistically call Current Events. But apart from that — nothing. I think the problem was that I found it hard to engage with the characters. Many of the stories started without context, and this was too hard (for my brain at least) to pick up from the narratives. Maybe I am rather past it, and the new audiences for Space Opera are, to me, like aliens, with philosophies and modes of thought that cannot interface successfully with my own neural structures.
Eric Idle: The Spamalot Diaries I did not realise until recently that Spamalot is a stage musical based extremely loosely on my favourite film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was largely the brainchild of Eric Idle, the Python who wrote a lot of the songs (most famously, ‘Always Look On The Bright Side of Life’). The Spamalot Diaries charts the story of how the musical was brought to life — the backstage drama, the egos, the constant re-writes, the songs written, the songs scrapped, and, poignantly, the wondering why anyone works hard on something they love, only to be frustrated when it never seems to achieve perfection. This could have been a tedious luvvie-fest, but is saved by the touches of darkness that evoke genuine emotion. Oh yes, and there are jokes. Which are funny. I liked the one in which Idle, riding a rickshaw in New York, pretends to be Michael Palin making one of his travel documentaries. You don’t have to know the music to read the book, but it helps, so after I read it I downloaded the musical soundtrack. Spamalot uses the already very thin plot of Holy Grail to send up the whole business of musical theatre itself. ‘The Song That Goes Like This‘ is a brilliant satire on the paint-by-numbers tedium of an Andrew Lloyd Webber score (I appreciate that some readers may disagree, but I’ve sat through Cats and Starlight Express and these are hours I shall never have again). ‘You Won’t Succeed On Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews)‘ warmed the cockles of this Red-Sea Pedestrian.
Karen G. Lloyd: Intraterrestrials Before we start to search for life elsewhere in the Universe, there is much still to learn about the life beneath our feet. Deep beneath out feet. Scientist Karen G. Lloyd tells us about organisms that live in boiling hot springs, inside volcanoes, in the driest deserts, on the highest mountains, in permafrost, and in mud in the deepest depths of the sea, and how they have metabolisms that allow them to survive — just about. To breathe, they don’t necessarily use oxygen, but iron, sulphur, even uranium. Though sometimes they grow so slowly that it might take them millions of years to reproduce. And this, of course, allows us to set some parameters about the necessities for life, not just on Earth, but anywhere in the Universe. So we come full circle. In a text that combines a rigorous work-out of the principles of thermodynamics (TRIGGER WARNING: there are equations) with breathtaking all-action adventure, our intrepid heroine ventures from the high Arctic to deep-sea hydrothermal vents in search of the limits of life. This is one of the most exciting pop-science books I’ve read in ages [DISCLAIMER: The proofs were sent to me so that I could consider writing a blurb].
