Blood, Iron & Gold - Christian Wolmar

A nicely put together history of railways around the world.  Perhaps a little Euro-biased and suffers from a reliance on English language histories that have been previously published, rather than seeking out primary evidence in local languages.  Nevertheless, this is a useful one volume introduction and a worthy addition to the range of books that the author has published on the subject of railways.

The last book by Wolmar that I read was 'The Subterranean Railway'.  That seemed to zip along with relish, whereas at times, surprisingly given some of the amazing tales being recounted, this felt a little flat. Perhaps he is more at home with domestic railways rather than trying to cover their history around the world.

My favourite sections had to be those on the Cape-to-Cairo project and particularly the Victoria Falls Bridge. This will be a useful addition to my library of transport history books and one that will turn to in the future for information and inspiration.

The Last Englishman - Roland Chambers

This should have been the perfect read, combining two of my favourite subjects - Russian history and Arthur Ransome.  Sadly, it was anything but.  The book wore its research uncommonly heavily, making even subjects like Ransome's involvement with Oscar Wilde seem mildly tedious as opposed to interesting.

The sections in Russia were of a little interest and a writer with more flair than Chambers would have made much of Ransome's ailments and discomfort.  I have to admit to struggling through to the end in the way I would expect from an academic tome rather than a mass-market history book on the shelves of an airport branch of Smith's.

I learned from this that Arthur Ransome was not a great human being and that his life was one of no little incident.  I appreciate that this book tries to take on that life from a different vantage point to that portrayed by his most famous literary works. Unfortunately, those works represent the Ransome legacy, not the Russian tales, so relegating them to a few pages at the end of the book was a folly.

Overall view - I appreciate the work and research that went into the creation of the work, but I can't rate it even a decent read.

The Last Hundred Days - Patrick McGuinness

It is always difficult to create a work of fiction around real events.  Notable examples include 'The Day of the Jackal', where we know that Jackal can't possibly achieve his goal, but the tale is so gripping that becomes totally unimportant. I started reading this on a tiny plane hopping between an archipelago in the Taiwan strait and Taiwan proper, so the opening could not have been better.

McGuinness here is describing the last days of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania as 1989 comes to a close.  Anyone with a passing knowledge of recent history knows the bare bones of what happened there and this novel fleshes out events through a variety of characters. Romania in the late 80's was not a very nice place for many reasons and this work gets to the heart of the problems there.

Our narrator, and perhaps the least successful of these characters, is a young Englishman who has ended up teaching English in Bucharest by mistake.  The reason that I say least successful is that the traits, tropes and abilities of this character who must be at best in his early twenties are quite remarkable.  He has insight into language and culture alongside an uncanny ability to seduce Romanian women from very different backgrounds.

There are a few clanging errors that set me off course a little (truckers on the hard shoulder of the U-Bahn?), but overall it was a fascinating romp through a time I remember vividly from the BBC reports. The pacing was excellent, but ultimately the plot (such as it was) petered out by the end, overtaken by events.

The events of winter 1989 in Romania are murky to say the least and this book describes one of the strangest interluded - the mystery of the 'broken' leg.  Some of the characters felt more convincing than others, but overall it was that curious beast, a literary novel with a certain Ruritanian flair.

Highly recommended - I know that I have enjoyed a book when I find myself trying to visualise and cast the film or BBC miniseries as I read.

William Boyd

I've finally given in to temptation and 'Waiting For Sunrise' is sitting there on my Kindle as if butter wouldn't melt.  I've long enjoyed Boyd's output and thought that 'Any Human Heart' and 'Restless' saw him at the height of his powers, but for very different reasons.  'Ordinary Thunderstorms' I must read again, parts of it didn't sit quite right for me.

So, what are we to make of this news?  I have to admit that I loved 'Devil May Care', the Sebastian Faulks attempt at a Fleming pastiche, possibly because of the inclusion of the Ekranoplan rather than the faintly tedious villain.  I have yet to succumb to the charms of Jeffrey Deaver's oeuvre (though of course that day may come, there are some examples lurking on my Kindle and it is always possible that I could be snowbound in an airport one day), so didn't try 'Carte Blanche'.

To be perfectly honest, this sounds like one of those times where one of your favourite bands covers a song by another of your favourite bands.  The outcome is usually technically accurate yet somehow unsatisfying.  Can Boyd, a writer of some wit, inject life into his attempt, or will it simply be Fleming-lite?  Only time will tell, but it will doubtless be an essential read.

Hot Enough For June - A Speedy Review

On balance, this was not a bad watch.  Once you get past the clunking opening sequence clearly designed to comfort viewers weaned on the recent outpourings of the nascent Bond francise, it has enough of a flavour of the book to keep you reasonably enthralled and some half decent performances.  However, for anyone with knowledge of the book, the idea of Pan Whistler being a) Dirk Bogarde and b) somewhere in his forties, is a little much to take.

Sylva Koscina as Vlasta is suitably statuesque and can any film with John Le Mesurier, Leo McKern and Robert Morley in the cast not be worth watching? I had a slight problem with the way the actual 'Night of Wencelas' was filmed.  Perhaps a filmmaker today would revel in the claustrophobia and limitations of the 'square' and Whistler's increasing panic as the night went on.  Back in 1964, director Ralph Thomas seems to have gone for more of a travelogue approach, the Czech setting being mined as exotic fodder in the way of 'From Russia With Love', released a year before.

While I would hesitate to call it a good film, it captured the attention and held it until the denouement. Had I not been aware of the source material, I would probably have dismissed it as a cash-in vehicle for Bogarde on the back of Bond, which in one sense it is.

'The Night of Wencelas' is a cracking story that could be better served on screen than through this.  Is there enough in there to sustain a modern feature film?  My view is sadly not, especially when we see what was done to 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' recently. That was a very different kettle of espionage agents of course, but I can picture Davidson's work being dismissed for only having one linear plot line.  Perhaps a quality period drama is the way forward.  The Radio 4 version would be fine starting point

Hot Enough for June (3 out of 5)

Brevity in consideration - does length ever equal quality

It is far from being a new phenomenon, but it seems that to be successful writer of fiction these days, you need to put out a vast amount of product.  What would have been seen as a perfectly reasonable length novel from the thirties to the eighties now seems to be dismissed as a ‘novella’ and not of suitable substance for serious consideration.  Can a work that is limited to around two hundred pages have the same impact as one that runs to a thousand or more?  Does limiting pages lead to better, more considered writing or place too many restrictions on authors with unlimited imaginations. Let us consider the place of the vast tome through the ages.

I’ve always been aware of ‘Clarissa’, published in the mid-eighteenth century and written by Samuel Richardson, which weighs in at a not insubstantial 1534 pages and as near as dammit a million words.  Most impressive from a time of limited literacy and lower levels of printing technology, mere chicken-feed in the world of the internet and fan fiction.  But, and here is the important question, is it any good?  I am sure that there are many devotees of Richardson’s work around, but I can’t ever recall meeting any.  A work of that length, written such a long time ago, somehow doesn’t seem worth the effort.  I may be wrong and hope one day to find out, perhaps on a trip on the Trans-Siberian with heavy delays that free version I have put on my Kindle will come into its own.  Until then, I will only be able to ponder and consider starting with Richardson’s previous effort ‘Pamela’ which is almost a short story in comparison at 594 pages.

The real reason behind this question was a recent reading of ‘1Q84’ by Haruki Murakami.  Now, before defenders of his work jump up to declaim that the work is in fact three books and by reading them together in one volume, I am not really reading it as the author intended, I will hold up my hands.  I did by the 3-in-1 version and ploughed through it reasonably quickly, questioning as I did whether it was actually any good or just a very long book that didn’t really get anywhere.  Had I read the first two books together and had the twelve month gap that the original readers had before part three appeared, I think my reading experience would have been enhanced.  It was too much as one vast tome and would have been better sold and indeed promoted as three short, linked novels.  I wonder how much marketing pressures from publishers have led to that brick of a book, a veritable Readers Digest compendium of a publication, being on the shelves of bookstores both virtual and physical.

This got me thinking even further about the size of books.  The ‘Harry Potter’ series is another case for consideration here.  I have to admit here to only having read the first two. Reasonably sized, nicely plotted and very enjoyable they were too. As the series continued, the width of the spines increased and with that my desire to read them decreased at a roughly equal rate.

Continuing with historical considerations, almost a century after Richardson’s heavyweight offering, Charles Dickens opened his account as a novelist with ‘The Pickwick Papers’.  Take a trip to the book store today to purchase a copy of that work and you will leave with a volume of around 750 pages, which at first glance seems to support a theory that long novels have been around for centuries and are a legitimate form.  Consider, however, the form in which that work was conceived and released to the public.  Even more so that in the case of ‘1Q84’ above, ‘The Pickwick Papers’ was developed to be read in instalments, in this case monthly oned. Reading the whole thing today as a continuous narrative is a bit like watching all twelve episodes of ‘Fawlty Towers’ back-to-back and coming away wondering what all the fuss was about.  I concede that in both those examples the quality of the work is high enough for that not to happen, but the idea still stands.

More recently, I blame the rise of both the airport novel and the ‘bonkbuster’ for perpetuating the idea that size is everything in fiction.  Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Arthur Hailey et al, you are to blame.  The idea that all your holiday reading could be sandwiched between two luridly illustrated covers is surely one that has gone forever in the era of the e-book?

Another set of books that got me puzzling over this conundrum were the three that make up ‘The Millenium Trilogy’. Stieg Larsson’s doorstop collection amazed me (and the publishing industry no doubt) by their ‘reach’ into the range of people I know.  A word-of-mouth hit too, no multi-million pound advertising campaign there, not until the recent film anyway, and little good did it do there.  I liked them; I have to admit that from the start. The premise of the first book carried me along (it harks back to the locked-rooms of the likes of John Dickson Carr) and the slightly clumsy written style I put down to being a mass-market book delivered in translation.  Yet, when I looked back at them and considered from a distance, my feeling was that there was at least one very good book indeed in there, possibly two and definitely not three.  Careful editing would have produced a very different result.  Was the published version a result of the publishers having a free hand due to the unfortunate demise of the author, or am I reading too much into it?

My position on this question is that books should never be sold or read on the ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ principle. A book should be as long as it needs to be, whether it is ‘Clarissa’ or ‘Kidnapped’.

     

On the 'To Read' pile

There is an always growing number of books on my 'must read' pile.  Usual routes to that stack are recommendations from friends, reviews from newspapers, radio programmes or blogs and almost never the Amazon 'people who bought this also bought this' link.

So, here follow the next candidates;

i) Bella Bathurst - The Lighthouse Stevensons. Biography of a family that would have been remarkable enough for their tenacity in building lighthouses in the face of enormous difficulties.  That one member of the family decided against the family business and instead gave us 'Kidnapped', 'Treasure Island' and more is an even more fascinating tale.  This should be a great read.

ii) Giles Foden - Zanzibar.  This is around a decade old now and I have to admit it was an impulse buy in HMV on Oxford Street, the two quid price sticker drawing me in.  I have something of a 'problem' with GIles Foden. I love 'The Last King of Scotland', but found both that and 'Ladysmith' terribly difficult to read, despite the end result being ultimately rewarding.  With 'Zanzibar', I suspect that I will find out whether it is him or me!

iii) Patrick McGuinness - The Last Hundred Days.  I've been saving this, hoping that I can really savour it. It is a book that I really want to enjoy. The unfolding drama of Christmas 1989 in Romania, the bloody conclusion and mindboggling aftermath of events like the Mineriad protests with legions of workers propping up a government that looked remarkably similar to what came before. I've always wanted to know more and I'm hoping that this will be the book to tell me.  I'm also delighted to see that there is more to Mr McGuinness than his appearances as sidekick to Peter Kay and a shouty Cilla for the new generation on ITV1.

iv) Simon Winder - Germania.  ''Don't Lets Be Beastly to the Germans'' sang Noel Coward, yet so often we are,  This was a purchase as part of that most heinous of offers, 3 for 2 in an airport branch of WHSmith.  The companion volumes in this unholy triumvirate were 'Blood River' by Tim Butcher, which was exceptional, and 'The Last Englishman' a biography of Arthur Ransome which has been so dry that reading it is redolent of those competitions to scoff cream crackers without water.  What am I expecting from 'Germania'?  A well-written introduction to Germany would be good and a few jokes too.  A greater understanding of a fascinating and somewhat alien (to a Brit at least) culture would be a bonus.  We shall see.

Hot Enough For June - Lionel Davidson at the cinema

I've long been a fan of Lionel Davidson's sparse but remarkable output.  'The Night of Wenceslas' was his first success, a tense but amusing tale of antics behind the Iron Curtain in 50's Czechoslovakia.  I'll find time to discuss the book in full, but I was astonished to find that there was a film version, the 'Hot Enough For June' mentioned in the title of this post.

Check the IMDB entry here. That is some cast list, an assistant to Basil Brush, Rumpole, The Master (well, one incarnation anyway and Dirk Bogarde.  I have sourced myself a copy and look forward to comparing it to the original book and the rather splendid Radio 4 dramatisation that was made some years back.

Now all we need is someone to start work on a film or small screen adaptation of 'Kolmsky Heights' and I will be very happy.

Blood River - Tim Butcher

I've just finished the fabulous 'Blood River', a gritty and epic description of a trip up the Congo in the footsteps of Stanley.

Butcher doesn't hold back on the poverty, terror and sheer horror of some of the places that he visits.  He also leaves the reader to decide their own view of the colonial period in that part of Africa, offering enough insight into the technological developments in the way of trains and ships that changed the region, but only for a fleetingly brief period.

Another thing to mention is the humanity that he comes across in what would be considered an inhumane environment, not only from aid workers and missionaries, but from the locals too.  There is tragedy in this tale and hopelessness, but there is beauty too, a rare feat in a 'mere' travel book,

A hybrid of regional history, travelogue and journalistic reportage is a difficult thing to pull off.  Butcher does it here brilliantly and leaves the reader glad they didn't accompany him, but very glad that he made the trip on their behalf.