HISTORY
- Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War Volume III by Jonathan Sumption ( Faber and Faber)
You have to wait ten years for each volume but Jonathan Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War between England and France is of a scale and scholarship perhaps only matched before by Edward Gibbon with his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and to think that Britain’s leading and busiest QC is researching and writing these books in his spare time is astonishing. Once you open the pages you are in another world where chivalry marches pace to pace with realpolitik, and the actions of these kings, knights and brigands of old (as told by Sumption) have all the immediacy and tension of current affairs. He brings a forgotten past to life revealing the logic of a mediaeval world to be as pragmatic as our own. And meticulously he shows how the economics of war influence politics and decisions as they do to this day. In this volume, England’s fortunes decline after the triumphs of Crecy and Poitiers and the illness of the Black Prince is the prelude to the loss of most of Aquitaine. Tuchman’s ‘calamitous 14th century’ ends in a nadir of misgovernment for both exhausted kingdoms, to be manipulated by ruthless power brokers like John of Gaunt or the Duke of Burgundy, while fledgling parliaments try vainly to control their folly.. The very order of feudal society is shaken when the Men of Ghent rebel in the Low Lands and the Peasant’s Revolt erupts into London. Read this day by day narrative and savour an extraordinary recreation of history – while waiting with bated breath for the next volume in 10 years time!
- One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs ( Arrow Books )
I remember lying awake in a school dormitory waiting for the sky to go red. That was the night President Kennedy was shot and we were anticipating a nuclear dawn. I also remember the day the Cuban Missile Crisis ended. We hadn’t really understood what it was about but Mr Gregor, the Latin master, told us civilisation had been saved. President Kennedy subsequently became our hero. He had eyeballed to eyeball Khrushchev and the latter had given way. Michael Dobbs’ book on the Missile Crisis, published last year, brought back all the paranoia that was part of everyday existence for a generation growing up in the Cold War, but chillingly it also revealed that we did not know the half of it – and nor did Kennedy or Khrushchev. Having had access to released documents from Moscow and Washington about the Crisis, Dobbs is able to give us a minute by minute account of those thirteen days from the point of view of both sides and it is a chronology of near misses, mistakes, ignorance, false suppositions, accidents and cock-up by bit players out of the radar of the Kremlin or the Pentagon, ANY ONE OF WHICH might have led to the pressing of the button by either side. It is an object lesson in human stupidity and the most frightening book I have ever read.
DETECTIVE AND THRILLER
THREE NEW MYSTERIES BY THE INCOMPARABLE BORIS AKUNIN
- The Coronation (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
- She Lover of Death (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
- Pelagia & The Red Rooster (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
George McDonald Fraser is gone and there are no more Flashmans to fill the Christmas stocking each year, so I have transferred my allegiance to the great Georgian Japanologist, Grigory Chkartishvili, better known as the novelist, Boris Akunin, whose books sold in millions round the world have caused him to be described as Russia’s Ian Fleming – as well as a new Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov and Conan Doyle, for many of his allusions in his wittily written thrillers are nothing if not literary, and the reader is always teased and challenged as much as drawn along by the taut suspense, and even after seven novels, one is still not entirely sure what to make of his diffident but always clear-thinking hero, the immaculately dressed ex-civil servant, Erast Fandorin, who has – bashfully, one feels – taken his place in the pantheon of super sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes, Maigret and Hercule Poirot. A superb historical novelist, Akunin seems to know every alleyway of fin de siecle Moscow, through which stalk the devilish assassins and conspirators whom Fandorin and his samurai servant, Masa, will have to thwart. In contrast are Akunin’s Sister Pelagia novels, where a gentle, bespectacled nun lives quietly in a convent in the sort of dull provincial town so familiar to us from Chekhov and Turgenev – but Sister Pelagia, while sincerely devout, is easily distracted when a mystery or murder takes place, and then her passion for Paris fashion comes in handy and, with the blessing of her bishop, she’ll don a disguise to solve unspeakable crimes. The Pelagia novels are in some ways more accomplished than the Fandorins, and this latest and last in the series, which came out this year is – literally – Apocalyptic in its ending. 2009 was a treat for English-speaking Akunin fans – two Erast Fandorin novels and one Sister Pelagia published in one year! But there are at least three more Fandorins to come: He Lover of Death (let’s hope in 2010), The Diamond Chariot and Jade Rosary Beads.
C J SANSOM’S TUDOR DETECTIVE SERIES
- Dissolution (Pan paperback)
- Dark Fire (Pan paperback)
- Sovereign (Pan paperback)
- Revelation (Pan paperback)
I came late to C J Sansom’s mysteries, by way of his novel on the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Winter in Madrid, An excellent book, but it did not prepare me for the charm of his 16th century historical detective series, featuring the hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake. A reluctant investigator, each novel pitches him into the politics of Henry VIII’s England, a Renaissance police state that Sansom brings alive in all its squalor, exuberance and cruelty. The books combine cracking plot and a scholar’s historical touch. I listened to the series on Talking Books while doing my exercises on the treadmill, and never have I been so healthy, as I rushed to the gym each day to find out what happened next, devouring all four novels in the space of a month. Read them in order.
A HEROINE FOR THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FROM STIEG LARSSEN
- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Quercus)
- The Girl Who Played With Fire (Quercus)
- The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest (Maclehose Press)
It is like a new sun on the horizon when an original writer comes and transforms a tired genre like the murder mystery into something surprising, exciting and new. Such is The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, the last volume of which came out this year. The novels are dark to the point of diabolism but they are firmly set in the societies of our day and the evils are topical, social and political ones. As thrillers they are un-put-down-able but they tear not only at the nerves but also at the conscience and the deepest shreds of one’s compassion. Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander, with her extraordinary bravery, resourcefulness and vulnerability is a heroine for our modern times, her every action a shout of defiance. She is terrifying in her vengeance and our hearts go out to her. The only tragedy of reading these three books (which will take out a week of your life because you will not be able to think of anything until you’ve finished them) is that there will be no more to come, because Stieg Larsson died shortly after completing them. It is literature’s loss.
LITERARY FICTION
- The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (Chatto & Windus)
The flyleaf of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones tells us it is the War and Peace of the Twentieth Century. In scale, scope, philosophy and accomplishment it matches the ambition of Tolstoy – but it is not a book of grand armies and generals; this is the story of the attempted extermination of the Jewish race, and the narrator is an SS officer. It is through his eyes we observe the war with Russia, the pogroms in Poland and Ukraine, the hell of Stalingrad and the bureaucratic nightmare of the Final Solution. Littell’s anti hero is no sub-human monster; on the contrary he is a cultivated, educated, philosophy-trained Francophile – that is Littell’s point: the horrific crimes of the Germans in World War Two were directed by the flower of European civilisation. This novel explores the uncomfortable proposition that anybody, in the same circumstances, the same historical period, under the same pressures, could have become a willing Nazi.
There are times that this huge, strange book enters avenues of the mind and soul that are properly the territory of the Marquis de Sade; it requires a strong stomach to continue reading. But Littell is a skilful artist who can write lyrically; he has an exact eye for detail and he is a conjuror of powerful metaphor when it suits him. He knows how to hypnotise, poison and seduce his reader onwards. Usually it is through the emotionless quality of his prose that he recreates the inexorable Nazi war machine. Long passages read like history. This is a military bureaucrat making his report, and after pages and pages of advance and slaughter, the mind is so numbed that one is almost transported physically into the apparatchik’s mindset and, horrifically, begins to accept the pragmatism and necessity of unspeakable actions. In literary terms it is a remarkable sleight of hand and sometimes you have to lift your head from the book and tell yourself, “No, what’s going on is unacceptable.” But, without knowing it, you have already been part brutalised; you realise that for long uncomfortable minutes you have mislaid your moral bearings. For the length of time you have been reading you have been living in the mind of a Nazi.
Only a writer of genius could have achieved this and Littell deserves the Prix de Goncourt and all the other honours he has received. The world has been waiting for a book to help us understand and internalise the Holocaust – after all,what else characterised the Twentieth Century but genocide? It still goes on – in Iraq, in the Congo. What IS this savagery under the veneer of civilisation? Are we always to be cursed by it? Can we ever exorcise it? Littell’s answer is not optimistic. There is no Tolstoyan consolation. In Littell’s post modern novel, moral certainty is absent. As the novel builds up to its surreal ending in the burning flames of Berlin, Mythology has become more valid than Reason. The edifice of civilisation collapses. The book ends in a Dance of Death. We are reverting to our primitive, pagan state, which he vividly evokes with images of tribesmen offering human sacrifice to nameless gods on the steppe. This reversion, Littell seems to be suggesting, is where the contradictions within our civilisation are leading. It is the human condition of our times.
This is not a book to love. It is too cruel and uncompromising, but there is no denying its brilliance, power and sometimes intoxicating beauty. For all its length it is a page turner, albeit often with horror and fearful anticipation. It is probably the greatest work of fiction to have been written during the first decade of the 21st Century.
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate Ltd)
I lived for many years in Putney, and the Green Man pub at the end of our road was always said to stand on the site of the smithy where Thomas Cromwell was born. I’d always secretly admired him. Clever villains are attractive, and ruthless, devious Cromwell was the cleverest of the lot, or so all our history books said. In this brilliant and prize winning historical novel, or rather historical memoir and meditation on the lines of Margaret Yourcenar’s marvellous Memoirs of Hadrian, Hilary Mantel, in her re-telling of Cromwell’s life, has certainly made him as devious and ruthless as history has him to be, but in getting inside his mind (for this whole book is told in a Virginia Woolf like internal stream of his consciousness) Mantel has delved deep and found Thomas Cromwell to be an honest, strong and – what is surprising – a good, even admirable man. In so doing she has created a fictional hero worthy of standing beside any in English literature.
In recreating her Tudor world, Mantel has focussed on its danger and corruption – not only from the cutthroat politics at court but also in the air and the plague that takes away Cromwell’s family. Mantel is telling a familiar story, that of Henry VIII’s passion for Anne Boleyn, but in her treatment it becomes new and exciting. Every sentence convinces us we are back in the Sixteenth Century. It is a world where conformity is survival and only the pragmatic can survive. Mantel’s Cromwell has been a mercenary in Europe, a textile merchant in the Lowlands, a banker in Florence and a lover in Venice, and this experience uniquely equips him to deal with the politics of a country that is abandoning the Pope to establish a modern state, whilst never compromising his character or his conscience. If you’re looking for a political thriller, you’ll find it in the pages, but this Booker prize winner is far, far more than that: it is a study of human strength and frailty, at the same time it is a meditation on how morally to behave in impossible times.
- A Whispered Name by William Brodrick (Abacus)
A Whispered Name, William Brodrick’s novel about the executions of deserters on the Western Front during the First World War, is a deeply humane book. Brodrick, an ex priest and lawyer, could be called a novelist of conscience, and what comes out of this, his third Father Anselm novel, is a message of hope, which is why I recommend it. It is beautifully written, with phrases and similes that linger in the mind. There is also a generosity of spirit in every characterisation. The officers and generals who mete out so-called justice to poor shell-shocked deserters are not evil men; on the contrary they are decent human beings doing what they think right (such were the army mores of the time)- and they become victims themselves too, because they have to live with the remorse for their decisions for the rest of their lives. The heroic sacrifice of one Irish soldier at the centre of the novel, which the clever plotting slowly reveals, is astonishing – but in Brodrick’s world there is redemption for everybody, even the bit players. The individual can choose whether he is to be brutalised or spiritually strengthened by war. In the short term one may not be able to stop evil, one can’t avoid being hurt by it, spiritually or otherwise, but one can make an internal vow not to accept it. Ultimately, Brodrick seems to indicate, it is through an understanding of communal suffering that societies can better themselves. A beautiful haunting novel.
THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
- Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About the Vote? by Humphrey Hawksley (Macmillan)
Top BBC journalist Humphrey Hawksley, travels on assignment through the third world looking at the question of how the introduction of democracy to a country – without an existing structure of law and civil society to bolster it – can often bring more harm to its people than good. The joy of this book, which has been widely reviewed, sparking much debate that goes to the crux of political thinking for the next century, is in the anecdote and the characters as we travel with Humphrey up rivers, into jungles, slums and sometimes the firing line of Iraq, to find out who are democracy’s victims – and then watch him go up the chain to take those responsible passionately to task.
- The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James Lovelock (Allen lane)
If ever there has been a prophet not listened to in his lifetime it is James Lovelock, the scientist who decades ago identified global warming and came up with the term Gaia to describe our imperilled planet. In his latest book he reluctantly concludes that it is now too late to stop the worst of its effects but remarkably has not lost his optimism or his scientific discipline. Not for him the fashionable palliatives of wind farms and carbon trading, still less organic foods. What is most refreshing about Lovelock is how politically incorrect he is as he steers us towards nuclear power and ingenious scientific options to keep human civilisation (ones suspects a quintessentially British version!) surviving. Whatever his idiosyncrasies we should certainly be listening to him before it is too late.
- The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars by Patrick Hennessy (Allen Lane)
An iPod blairing, testosterone-running, rap chanting, video rolling update on how a modern British officer fights a traditional war. Patrick Hennessy, whose articles I first admired in the Literary Review when he was serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, wittily, amusingly and always with eye to the immediate sensation – the buzz, the feel – takes us from officers’ training school in Sandhurst (surely the best description of a British boot camp ever written) to his first boring postings in Germany (FOR GOD’S SAKE when are we getting to A WAR!) , eventually to Iraq where if not the action at least he scents the real smell of war and finally to Afghanistan, where he finds in Helmland more action than he ever quite imagined he could take. If you want to know what modern warfare is like it’s all in these pages. As the world now questions whether it’s right that our troops should be there, this book serves an essential service in telling what the boys serving on the ground feel about it. As a father with a son at Sandhurst right now, it concentrated my mind mightily.
CHINA
Living and working in China, and writing about China, as I do, I tend for my own amusement to read about other things, but this year produced a particularly good crop of China books, of which I most enjoyed:
- City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China by Jasper Becker (Allen Lane)
Jasper Becker has written a beautiful and elegiac description of China’s capital city through the ages, with a bitter indictment of the communist party, which in its early years and to this day has presided over destruction of some of the city’s most beautiful buildings, above all the city walls and the loss of thousands of priceless artefacts.
- The China Lover by Ian Buruma (Atlantic Books)
The China Lover is the story of Yoshiko Yamaguchi who reinvented herself more than three times. Loved and hated as a young girl, she was Manchukuo’s most popular ‘Chinese’ actress, Ri Koran, who only escaped punishment as a collaborator when it was discovered she was in fact Japanese. On her return to Japan she was again a patriotic heart throb as Japan recovered its pride by building a democracy during and after the McArthur occupation, but she abandoned the new film movement to go to Hollywood in the personality of Shirley Yamaguchi. She was a flop and in her later years she became a journalist and politician espousing left wing causes, including support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and in this role was as inspirational for young revolutionaries as she had been as a patriotic actress. This is more than the story of a life; it is a history of how Japan developed through and after the Second World War centring on one woman who seemed to symbolise each stage but whose own real personality remained an enigma or a fiction, which is why Ian Buruma chose to write this extraordinary and compelling story as a novel rather than history. In doing so he produces a chilling portrait of the vacuity that underlies the collective fantasies that have impelled politics in our age.
- China Cuckoo by Mark Kitto (Constable)
The story of a foreigner who came to China and made and lost a fortune (that’s a perennial China experience that dates back to the days of the tea clippers) but Mark made a new life for himself afterwards, running a café in a piece of paradise on the mountain of Moganshan. I haven’t been there yet although he’s invited me many times, but the joy of reading his funny, wise, witty and utterly charming book is certainly an inducement!
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