Daniel Finkelstein: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad I am sure you both know that Daniel Finkelstein is a journalist and Conservative peer, and you probably are also aware that he is, like me, a Red-Sea Pedestrian, whose world view is inevitably coloured by the Holocaust and its consequences. His perhaps more than most, as the families of both his parents were all but wiped out, one by Hitler, the other by Stalin. His mother’s journey began in Berlin and came to Hendon via Amsterdam and Belsen (her family knew Anne Frank’s family well). His father’s started in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and progressed via the steppes of Kazakhstan, though his grandfather was transported to the Arctic Gulag. I should say that the little humour this book contains is dark, and very far from books with similar titles such as, oh, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall by Spike Milligan. It is, though, calm and measured, and the author has trenchant things to say concerning the contemporary airbrushing out of Stalin’s crimes compared with those of Hitler, which tends to allow the modern Far Left an easier time of it than it deserves. That the book is a rip-roaring read, despite its complexities, is a product of the author’s own skill, though I note that the acknowledgements include thanks to Robert Harris, who as you know is one of my favourite novelists, and crafts thrillers from well-researched events, whether in Ancient Rome, Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia.
Bernhard Schlink: The Reader (translated from the original German by Carol Brown Janeway) offers another picture of the war and its consequences though from a very different angle. The protagonist is an intelligent young man growing up in West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His teenage sexual awakening comes through the chance meeting of a woman more than twice his age and less than half his intellectual accomplishments. It turns out that the woman has a very grim past. At the risk of spoilers, the book is a sensitive examination of the conscience of a country trying to come to terms with its collective guilt, which, while fresh in the memories of some, many others would rather forget. I came across this book in a pop-up book exchange on the route of one of my regular dog walks. I was intrigued as the cover gave very little indication of its contents and so, intrigued, I dived in.
The Magnus Archives You’ll be aware that many of the books I read these days are audiobooks, so I don’t read, so much as am read to. This year I have also begun to listen to podcasts, and my tastes gravitate towards horror (I especially enjoyed The Lovecraft Investigations). I don’t include podcasts in my list of books, because they aren’t, though I felt I should add a note to explain why my recent listings of books have been less full of late, for I am currently consumed obsessed with The Magnus Archives. The schtick is this: The Magnus Institute, centuries old, is dedicated to the recording of paranormal incidents. One of the tasks of head archivist Jonathan Sims is to read the statements made by members of the public onto cassette tape – for some reason, paranormality corrupts digital attempts to capture such testimony. Each episode corresponds to one testament. At first, the stories seem unconnected but as the series progresses, certain themes emerge, and in the climax of series one some of them squish wetly up from the basement. Series One comprises forty episodes – each one is twenty minutes long or so. There are five series. At the time of writing I have reached the end of series four (some 160 episodes in). And then it turns into The Magnus Protocols. I may be some time.
Simon Toyne: Sanctus Action-packed thrillers with touches of religion, conspiracy theories and secret codes have long stuffed the shelves of departure-lounge bookstores. I picked this one up from the same pop-up book exchange that produced The Reader (above). If you have an aversion to the genre, you should stop reading this now, for if you thought it wasn’t possible to get any worse than The Da Vinci Code — it is. The setting is Ruin, a fictional city in south-eastern Turkey, dominated by a mountain-sized monolith in which lives an ancient order of monks devoted to guarding the Sacrament, an object whose nature they have closely guarded since before the dawn of history. But matters get decidedly wobbly when Kathryn (an American investigative journalist) and Liv (a charity worker) get ensnared in the secretive sect’s malign machinations. The action sequences are fine, but come at the expense of characterisation, so much so that I found it so hard to tell the difference between the two main protagonists (Kathryn and Liv) that I often had to backtrack to discover who was who. Second, the fantasy elements (for there are some) are extremely ill-thought-out. Third, the implausible name of the city should have been a clue to the apparent lack of any kind of research into the setting. Ruin might plausibly be the name of an abandoned gold-mining town in Nevada, but not a city in Turkey. The residents of Ruin are strangely colourless. They talk in Americanisms (which is odd, as the author is English); and live in a town that might as well be Akron, Ohio. I understand that orientalism is a dirty word nowadays, but a town in Turkey should feel — well — Turkish. There is no sense of the heat, the smells, the sounds or even the contemporary politics of a city in the Middle East (and one that’s fairly close to the Syrian border, noch). There are no mosques, no muezzins, no clash of tradition with modern western culture. The police detectives have names straight out of central casting (Arkadian, Suleiman) and behave just like American cops, working in an American law enforcement system. This is a great shame as the concept is a gift for laying on some gothic sensory overload — mad monks in the mysterious East prepared to go to any lengths to protect the occult nature of ancient artefacts — what’s not to like? But it is an opportunity not only missed, but completely abandoned. In his rather good and surprisingly sane essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft writes that the one thing a weird or gothic tale can’t do without is atmosphere. Sanctus has all the atmosphere of the Moon.
Peter F Hamilton: Exodus: The Archimedes Engine Another day, another vast epic space opera from Peter F. Hamilton. When the Earth receives a signal from aliens known only as the Elohim of plentiful terraformed worlds to inhabit in the Centauri Cluster, millions of people set forth in giant ark ships. By the time the first ark ships get there, the Elohim are no more, but the planets’ bounty allows the humans to settle. 40,000 years later, the ark ship Diligent finds that the earliest humans to get there have evolved and stratified into a rigidly controlled society dominated by the post-human Imperial Celestials. Finn, a scion of a grand family of post-humans created by the Celestials as planetary administrators, yearns for freedom and, by fair means or foul, seeks to acquire the Diligent and fit it out as a starship. At the same time, an orphan gas giant planet is approaching the Centauri Cluster from deep space. Rich in iron, its presence is likely to destabilise the entire economy. To foil this, various parties seek to subvert the Archimedes Engines (relics of Elohim technology), the only devices capable of steering a planet. Add the usual Hamiltonian mix of detective stories, political intrigue, spectacular action sequences and imaginative locales, and the sesquipedalian author is at the peak of his game. I listened to it on audible — I believe the dead tree version is some 900 pages long, and this is the first of a two-novel sequence. Books like this pose a problem. Consuming them all at once is rather like being forced to eat an entire selection box of rich chocolates. But taking it in easy stages runs the risk of losing the threads of the labyrinthine plot.
Mark Dunn: Ella Minnow Pea Back in the day, I believe trainee typists were often assigned the task of typing the pangram the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Hence this charming novella, set on the fictional island nation of Nollop, just off the coast of the Carolinas, named after one Nevin Nollop, founder of the nation and supposed creator of the one-sentence tale about the swift vulpine’s leap across the body of the indolent pooch. The residents of Nollop love language and are keen letter writers (the entire novel is epistolary). Nollop’s statue has pride of place in the town square, along with the pangram, each letter of which is inscribed on a single tile. When the tiles begin to fall off, the island’s council forbids the use of the fallen tile in any speech, correspondence or reading matter. At first, the losses of Z, Q and J hardly signify, but the situation becomes dire and the increasingly inarticulate Nollopians are forced to bear ever more authoritarian rule, while being less and less able to express their dismay. Ella Minnow Pea is transparently an allegory about authoritarianism, very much in the style of Animal Farm. I am glad it was short, for the effect was tragic and somewhat agonising to listen to. I listened to it as an audiobook, with each letter-writer voiced by a different actor. It was great, but I expect that the paper version would be even more affecting.
