If my three regular readers noticed the absence of my usual monthly book blog, they did not see fit to remind me. If any apology is necessary, I have been very busy elsewhere, promoting The Wonder of Life on Earth; getting ready for the imminent release in paperback of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire; working hard at the day job (by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company); and also developing a synopsis for what I hope will be my next book, working title The Taylor Swift Diet Workout. On occasion I have wondered why I continue this blog, as nobody reads it, except me, and, arguably, God. I am wondering if blogs are old hat, and I should reinvent myself as a substack, if I could only think of it as anything other than a variety of club sandwich.
But I digress.
Given that I spend much of the day staring at text for a living, it takes a lot for me to stare at more text for pleasure, even if I had the time. So I listen to audiobooks. especially during the hour or so each day when my dogs drag me out for a walk. Only two of the seven six seven titles below appeared before mes yeux as print on paper. The rest were imbibed via mes oreilles. So here goes.
Mark Gattiss: The Man In Black The Complete Series 1-4. Mark Gattiss is a gifted writer, actor and connoisseur of old-fashioned horror stories. Here he is the sinister compere of a number of radio dramas mainly set in modern times and I suspect originally broadcast on the wireless. None of them really did it for me, but I suspect that what with all the alpha-male shouting and female shrieking (the misogyny of some of these stories does tend to wear thin rather quickly), these tales are best listened to in small doses. I also listened to a precursor of this, a series called Fear on 4, in which the compere was Edward De Souza, which was rather similar but also dredged up some of the old classics including one of my favourites, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, narrated by Anna Massey, which was a treat.
Steve Brusatte: The Story of Birds Following his books on dinosaurs and mammals, the man known affectionately chez Gee as ‘Dinosaur Steve’ has written this page-turner on the amazing and improbable story of the evolution of birds. Bird evolution is a hot issue in science right now so it’s great to have an up-to-the-minute popular account, written with Brusatte’s usual brio. DISCLAIMER: Steve is a personal friend and the publisher sent me a pre-release copy for a puff quote. It’s published in June.
John Le Carre The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Having become rather fond of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers last year, I sought to imbibe directly from the fountainhead. Set in the early 1960s very depths of the Cold War, veteran spy Alec Leamas poses as a defector to East Germany in order to infiltrate the East German apparatus and murder their brutal spymaster Hans-Dieter Mundt, who is apparently responsible for killing several British agents. While still in the UK Leamas forms a relationship with Liz Gold, a young British communist idealist, who also finds herself in East Germany as part of a Communist Party exchange mission. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the labyrinthine plot, except to contrast Liz’s naive idealism with the pragmatism of Leamas and his handler, the self-effacing spymaster George Smiley and especially Smiley’s boss, the mysterious Control, through whose character we see that the methods used by Western and Eastern secret services are equally horrible. Excellent, if somewhat dispiriting.
John Le Carre Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Here the action takes place in 1973. Control is dead, Smiley has retired, and the Secret Intelligence Service is in a state of collapse. Karla, the Soviet spymaster, has broken every British spy-ring behind the Iron Curtain. Suspecting a mole at the heart of the Service, Smiley is brought out of retirement to plug the leak. The discovery has devastating consequences for all concerned, Smiley not the least.
David Mitchell Number 9 Dream This is an author whose works defy categorisation, though if I were forced to try, they would be fantasy. I have enjoyed two so far – The Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks. Number 9 Dream is set entirely in contemporary Japan, and concerns Eiji Miyake, a twenty-year-old from an out-of-the-way island, who travels to the Big Bad and Bonkers city of Tokyo in search of the father he has never met. Thoroughly enjoyable, very funny and occasionally ultraviolent (Miyake gets mixed up with the yakuza) it is so intense that I could only manage a few pages at a time. If ever there were a novel that deserved the epithet ‘picaresque’, this is it. Mitchell does love his literary games, and the ‘Number 9’ in the title makes its appearance in several forms, either as nine, or 333, or in other ways. Loved it? I pitched headfirst into my ramen.
John Le Carre The Honourable Schoolboy This is the second novel (after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) in the so-called ‘Karla’ series, but it can be read quite happily in isolation. The mole in the Secret Intelligence Service has been exposed, but at terrible cost: the credibility of the SIS is forever ruined, and the CIA (known as ‘The Cousins’) is muscling in. Everywhere the SIS is in retreat, which comes to the notice of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, which discovers that the house where the spooks used to inhabit is deserted. One of the journalists is Jerry Westerby, occasional newshound, failed novelist, broke aristocrat (he is the ‘Honourable Schoolboy’ of the title) and undercover SIS agent, who George Smiley brings out of retirement to investigate the business of Hong Kong high-roller Drake Ko, OBE. who seems to be in receipt of a large amount of Soviet money. It also turns out that Ko has underworld connections throughout Southeast Asia — including a very highly placed source in ‘Red’ China that the SIS and the CIA would both love to get their hands on. It’s set just as the Vietnam War is ending, and in many locations — Tuscany, Cambodia (where the Khmer Rouge is in the ascendant), Laos and Thailand, as well as Hong Kong and dismal early 1970s London, and the settings are very evocative. Smiley is once again brought in to sniff out the target, but his relations with the Cousins are nearly as problematic as those with the erratic Westerby, the result being somewhat mixed. I’ve been listening to all the Smiley novels narrated by Simon Russell Beale, and they are a joy, making sense of an occasionally dense and over-elaborate style, transforming what might have been a hard read into an immersive experience. The Honourable Schoolboy is the best so far, nd I’d be surprised if it doesn’t make my end-of-year list.
