Blogtour review - The Weekenders by David F Ross

The Weekenders (Raskine House, 1) 
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 27 February 2025
Available as: PB, 292pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN( PB): 9781916788305

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Weekenders to consider for review, and to Anne of Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's always great to see a new book from David F Ross and it's even better that this is the first of a trilogy. 

The Weekenders introduces us to the mysterious, troubling country mansion mansion Raskine House. I think I see thematic connections between the troubling goings on there and those in Ross's Welcome to the Heady Heights which was, like this book, partly set in 1960s Glasgow. There are also some common characters. So while she doesn't appear I have hopes that in later parts we may meet Barbara Sherman again.

While The Weekenders mostly takes place in the later 1960s, it also looks back to the Second World War where a central relationship - between Jamesie Campbell, later a Glasgow trades unionist and politician, and Michael McTavish - is forged when they meet as soldiers in the nightmare of the Italian campaign. Nobody comes out well from that section of the narrative, neither Campbell nor McTavish, nor the sadistic officers who pretty much betray them. Rather, these events are a bitter prelude to the later story. The writing here makes no bones about what happened in the war: at times the book is a hard read.

Later we see what the two men have become, and what Glasgow has become, both being discovered by two outsider figures, Stevie 'Minto' Milloy and Donald 'Doodle' Malpass. Milloy is an ex-footballer, dropped from the game after a cruel injury and turned reporter, while Malpass is a courtroom sketch artist who sometimes assists the police. Several years apart, the two investigate the murders of young foreign students which seem to be connected to Raskine House and its rumoured weekend no-holds-barred parties. (one of the links I saw to 'Heady Heights'). 

As a background to that, Ross brings alive a raucous, surface-confident, but, I felt, also a hurting, city which both Milloy and Malpass are part of but are also distanced from. They have their roles, yes, but there is an Establishment, which they're not in. Both men live in a sense on sufferance from that, as does John Meikle, the veteran reporter who's Milloy's mentor. It's an Establishment that has grown fat and canny over the centuries, profiting first from enslavement and Empire, then from war, and more recently, from the ideological polarisation of the 20th century. Money and power before ideology or truth, and these puppet masters aren't going to let go a whit of its money or power.

There is another darkness here too associated with Raskine House itself - a darkness which the muck-and-brass merchants don't wholly comprehend. In this book, Glasgow is far from a safe place, whether you're a visiting student, police, nosy reporter or even one of those who think they pull the strings. Glasgow itself will, I think, have the last word here.

If all that sounds rather remote and grim, this book was, as are all of Ross's stories, also immensely entertaining, featuring rich and vivid characters who don't so much populate the page as march off it and sit down with you for a drink and a chat. Their voices sing in your head, their lives move and affect, their fates - some of them - sadden you as if they were old friends. Ross shows us real people showing how their desire simply to live and enjoy that living is baffled, diverted, sometimes blocked, but never - until the last breath - wholly defeated. (Ross's characters are all the more real for speaking in authentic language).

I am really looking forward to the rest of this trilogy!

For more information about The Weekenders, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Weekenders from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.

#Blogtour #Review - The Grand Illusion by Syd Moore

The Grand Illusion (Section W, book 1)
Syd Moore
Magpie, 4 April 2024
Available as: HB, 368pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780861541607

I'm grateful to Syd Moore and to Magpie for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Grand Illusion to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's Random Things blogtour.

The Grand Illusion - set during the Second World War - takes place in the same world as Moore's Essex Witch mysteries (we meet Septimus!) It isn't I think a direct prequel - but this is the first of three, so who knows where things will go...

Daphne Devine is assistant to stage magician Jonty Trevelyan. Adept at being cut in half, tied up, and handling concealed doves, she's about to face a whole new scale of challenge as she and her boss are recruited to a shadowy branch of the UK's Security Service. In the first half of the book we're shown a bewildering number of different activities of Section W, with the two unclear exactly where they fit. I rather enjoyed this tour d'horizon, which creates an authentically wartime sense of barely-controlled chaos, of being sent from pillar to post and back again. Are they engaged in valuable work or is everyone just going round in circles? 

It's a world where the brilliant and war-winning plan may sit on the same table as the bonkers and time-wasting one. Indeed, they may come from the same pen, on the same day. There is a sense of near panic, of a nation and Government which are, behind Churchill's stirring rhetoric, ready to try anything that may bring victory, or avert defeat.

So we see elaborate deceptions, suited to a stage illusionist. These are things it's known took place (although my understanding is that some of the details have never been revealed). We also see more troubling plans - ostensibly directed at a known weakness of the Third Reich, its obsession with occult ritual and pseudohistory. Playing on such a weakness might seem wise, and again, Jonty's and Daphne's talents in illusion and deception might boost the effect of that, but is there more going on here besides? We are in the Essex Witches universe, after all.

Gradually, and teasingly, Moore creates a setting filled with distortions and red herrings, one where it's not clear just who is manipulating who. What matters more, illusion or reality? Is the febrile wartime atmosphere perhaps fertile ground for thinkers who are normally marginalised? Might they use it to their advantage, even if ostensibly what's going on is simply psyops? Just who is falling victim the that "grand illusion"?

Questions, questions - with some answers, but many, teasingly, withheld.

Everything that has happened may have a rational explanation. Or there may be other stuff going on. As tempting as it may be to rush through this book to the conclusion, it bears careful attention though because I think there are some clues... and I'll be looking forward to future novels in this series for some of those answers.

Turning to the characters, I loved Daphne. Trapped by circumstances in a difficult corner - her family connections make her an objection of suspicion to some, and give the Government leverage over her so that in many respects she's not free to say "no" when the Ministry comes knocking - she plays a difficult hand well. Even though those around her frequently underestimate her capabilities (being female, they often don't seem to expect much of her) she continually steps up and sees the way through. Jonty and the others are perhaps a bit less-well defined, but as Daphne is the focus that works fine for me. What does come through, as external circumstances get more desperate, is a rising sense of internal tension in Daphne. She's clearly being swept to some major trial or crisis and she responds to that knowledge, but Moore gives little away and while there is a respite by the end of the book I didn't think that matters had come to a head. In a story with plenty of menace, threats and talk of spies, Fifth-columnists and collaborators it isn't clear whether the threat is of espionage or the supernatural, or both, and I suspect there is more of it to come. 

I'm really looking forward to the next part of this series!

For more information about The Grand Illusion, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Grand Illusion from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Lazarus Solution by Kjell Ola Dahl

The Lazarus Solution
Kjell Ola Dahl (trans Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 27 April 2023
Available as: PB, 295pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585685

I'm grateful to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for sending me a copy of The Lazarus Solution to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

In The Lazarus Solution, Kjell Ola Dahl gives us a satisfyingly murky, noir-infused thriller set in Stockholm in 1943. The characters are exiles from the Nazi occupation of Norway, spies of various nations, patriots, collaborators. (There's even a femme fatale). Some of the people we meet are several of these things at once. 

Our hero, Jomar Kraby, seems an unlikely participant in all this. A writer (whose works have been censored by the Swedish government, anxious to place the Germans and not be drawn into the war) he's asked by the Norwegian government-in-exile to investigate the killing of one of its couriers on occupied soil. Kraby, whose daily business seems to be drinking and failing to write, proves an unexpectedly skilful, resourceful and determined investigator, so much so that one feels there is more to him than we are being told.

Indeed that's one of the pleasures of this book - while comparatively short, it gives the impression of a peek into a larger world, whether through the presence of the Soviet embassy (which is clearly up to something) under its grizzled spymistress, Kraby's messy unfinished business with his ex back in Norway or the administrative rivalries between various branches of the Norwegian legation. Romantic, professional and ideological motives become confounded - and that's even before we learn more about the dead man, Daniel Berkåk, and his connections to refugee Kai Fredly and his Nazi-supporting brother.

Kai's history and that of his brother provide the opportunity for a bit of necessary exposition, detailing both Marxist and Nazi ideologies and showing the events that might have shaped young men and women in Norway before the invasion. Again, it's complex, and Kjell Ola Dahl illustrates how divided loyalties can become - this isn't a book that deals in moral absolutes at all. For a crime novel, that is of course wonderful as it makes absolutely everybody suspect, but it also drives a story in which what matters is less who was where at a given time, or what the condition of a body tells us about a death, but rather, how each character stands in relation to all of the others.

As such, a writer like Kraby, used to dealing in motivations and weighing characters, is perhaps just the right figure to be investigating what happened. Less a sleuth, perhaps, than the author of a story, he moves through the shadows of wartime Stockholm - as well as Norway itself - to dark corners where all manner of mischief is going on with surprising bedfellows (in both senses of the word) up to a world of chicanery. 

I loved Kraby as a central figure, recognisably walking the mean streets yet keeping his humanity, a witness to what happens in the dark without consenting to it. A witness, one feels, who will be ready to give evidence when the war ends and the reckoning - which many here, on all sides, hope for or fear - finally comes.

Simply a brilliant, compelling novel of humanity and collusion, ably translated by Don Bartlett into flowing English.

I would definitely recommend this one!

For more information about The Lazarus Solution, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Lazarus Solution from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - V For Victory by Lissa Evans

V For Victory
Lissa Evans
Doubleday, 27 August 2020
Available as: HB, 292pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy via Netgally
ISBN:9780857523617

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of V For Victory via Netgalley.

V For Victory sees Evans return to the characters she created and nurtured in Crooked Heart and Old Baggage. It's late 1944 and a bitterly cold winter. Vee and Noel are living in Mattie's old house in Hampstead, making ends meet by renting rooms to lodgers. Vee, you may recall, took the identity of Noel's frosty Aunt Margery at the end of Crooked Heart - so, especially in a wartime environment of regulations, identity checks and officialdom, she's never (at least in her own mind) more than heartbeat away from exposure and ruin (Vee looks, she muses, 'like the "before" illustration in an advertisement for nerve tonic')  even if she was acting with the best of intentions.

I just love Noel and Vee - precocious child-going-on-adult (Vee reflects that girls and 'grown women went out of their way to talk to him... maybe because... he actually listened to people; he wasn't just waiting to tip in his own comments...') and and hardened ne'er-do-well with a heart of gold, they may seem ill assorted but their relationship is wonderful. Not quite mother and son, not quite partners in crime, they understand one another, fill gaps in each other's life and support one another. Noel's not attending school (that didn't work out well last time) but he's tutored by the lodgers (so Vee's requirements when letting rooms are very specific) who make up a delightful, off little community in Mattie's sprawling old house: the doctor, the journalist, the BBC presenter. They have their foibles and baggage and their own knowledge and experience to bring to this wise and funny and at times desperately sad book.

Noel and Vee aren't the only familiar faces here. I won't tell you everyone who turns up - spoilers! - but we do meet Winnie again, from Old Baggage, one of Mattie's Amazons. She's now commander of an ARP post, a role that seemed to be reducing in importance with the end of the Blitz- until the V1 and V2 attacks began. This book is punctuated by the roar of the rockets, the shaking of windows and the aftermath of a square or terrace being demolished.

Evans pays tribute in one extended and frankly moving sequence to the men and women who deal with the destruction and injury, when Winnie coordinates all the branches of civil defence after one attack. It's a celebration of ordinary men and women, of their organisation and management by one woman using hard-won knowledge and skill. In keeping with Crooked Heart, this is a very bottom up view of people surviving and coping. It isn't sentimental and there is no Vera Lynn soundtrack. The difficulties of life - shortages, cold, boredom (Everyone was bored of everything, really; it had all been going on for far too long') - are made plain, as are the ways people fall short, from grabbing more than one's share of potatoes at the dinner table to desertion from one's post and even getting away with causing a death. You won't find any heroes, just ordinary people doing what they must and hoping it will all end soon.

And trying to take a little happiness while they can. A central strand of the book concerns Vee's dalliance with a jovial American serviceman, a presence who threatens to drive a wedge between Vee and Noel - troubling as their is the central relationship of the book and they still depend so much on each other. Evans treats this very well and sensitively, conveying - without actually telling us - how much Vee needs a little glamour in her life and how much Noel, however outwardly confident and knowledgeable he seems, is still desperately insecure and fearful that the little haven he and Vee have found will be destroyed, as his life with Mattie was.

Evans is such a sharp writer, content to show and then leave us a moment of silence to take in what she's showing, ready with well-observed details ('bringing a cylinder of cold air into the room with her') as well some gorgeous scenes ('the Vale of Health magnesium grey under a three-quarter moon' or the mumbling publisher whose speech at a party sounds like a sequence of throat-clearing) and moments that are just, well, true - as when one character remarks that the end of a war is something that you only see once in a lifetime and another character quietly points out that, no, for many present, that's not right.

As well as reminding us of the aftereffects of that earlier war (not least in the characters who still suffer trauma from it)  the book looks forward, both nationally ('There'll need to be a big shake-up when this is all over') and individually - by the end, we see the figures we've come to know well and, in some cases, even to love, facing up to change, to losing roles they've grown up into ('she herself... a woman in charge of men - would suddenly be in charge of nothing at all') or adopting new ones. With the end of the war, lovers, husbands, others who were thought lost, will turn up, relationships will have to be reworked and sometimes, started over again. It's an uncertain time. Our friends here may, as Churchill eventually said (there's a running joke about him still writing hs speech) be allowed a brief moment of rejoicing but it's an uncertain future. (I hope Lissa Evens might though return to document it - I have a picture in my head of Noel as a young man, just graduated perhaps, at the Festival of Britain...)

Best of all, perhaps, it the little impromptu memorial at the end to Mattie, who was the central character in Old Baggage but was lost to us early in Crooked Heart. Her grave is, we learn still kept fresh and I think something came into my eye as Noel and a friend remember and sing "March of the Women" together.

A wonderful book, which you just have to read.

Review - The Witch's Kind by Louisa Morgan

Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio

The Witch's Kind
Louise Morgan
Orbit, 21 March 2019
PB, 440pp

One of the lovely things about book blogging is being sent books out of the blue, like this, so different from what I might buy myself - but which are just so right for me. It gets me out of my ruts, and I'm so grateful to Nazia at Orbit for a free advance copy of The Witch's Kind.

Opening in June 1947, this is the story of Barrie-Anne Blythe, a young woman living in a remote coastal community in Oregon in the US North West. It's also about her Aunt Charlotte, and Barrie-Anne's adopted daughter, Emma. Barrie-Anne farms a few acres of land that belonged to her husband Will; Charlotte is an artist who makes her living illustrating medical texts but pours her heart into her abstract canvases. And there's Willow, the dog, who is devoted to Barrie-Ann and Emma.

The Witch's Kind moves backwards and forwards in time to tell us a little about Barrie-Ann's earlier life - both her parents died when she was young, and strange, solitary, Charlotte brought her up alone - about her marriage to dashing, unstable, unsafe Will and about the effect on them both of the War, when Will joins the Navy and is sent to the Pacific. But the book is foremost, I think, a study of women's lives, of the expectations projected onto them and of quiet, loving, determined resistance. The conversations between Barrie-Anne and Charlotte, what's said and not said, the gradual exploration of each others' lives and of their family history, are actually very moving as is the support Charlotte gives when mercurial Will bursts onto the scene.

Will is a study in himself, a version of toxic masculinity made more convincing by his being, at times, oh so amenable and charming. He isn't even a complete monster - what we learn about his background is actually deeply sad, but this only makes him even more chilling and creepy and Morgan conveys with almost surgical precisions the emotional effect of this on Barrie-Ann. That is hard to take at times, it is so well portrayed and the subtle demolition Will carries out to his wife's independence and sense of self so devastating that I think a content warning might be appropriate for any woman who has suffered such an experience in her own life.

There is a puzzle to Will and his comings and goings, only one of the wider mysteries in this book. There is the mystery of the Blythe women. There are rumours of strange sights in the sky and the sea. Roswell is being reported, and a couple of Men in Black even turn up. Underlying all is the dislocation of the War and uneasy attempts to reset things - all those men returning and wanting "their" jobs back - and a sense of policing women who may have got out of line, who are "different". Here Barrie-Anne, with her missing husband, and Charlotte, who never had one, may be at particular risk of standing out, even without their family "gift".

The book's title, referring to that, may seem like a rather obvious hint about what goes on here but while there is a strand of magic in the book - and it is important to the plot - I'm not sure about the word "witch". It seems a somewhat over definite term for the mysterious ability passed down among the Blythe women, as well as creating particular expectations for what you might find in the story. But there are no covens here, no wider organised society of women using magic and in fact I don't think the word "witch" occurs anywhere in the story. It's a much more subtle book than that, a book about love and abuse, about defending what is precious, the lengths one might go to to do that, and about male corruption and selfishness.

So there are also redeeming strands - the strong presence of Aunt Charlotte (Aunt Charlotte is really cool!), an act of charity and solidarity with Barrie-Anne's by her neighbours which lifts her at a particularly low point, the quiet affirmation of a country doctor who carries his own sorrow with him - and even the devotion of the dog, Willow. It's these quiet people (dogs are people, didn't you know?) and moments which weigh against the bluster, the whining, the bullying.

I loved this book - it's one I had to read on and on at a gallop, unputdownable in that overused phrase - and I would recommend it highly.

(Also, that cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio is superb...)

#Blogtour review - The Courier by Kjell Ola Dahl

The Courier
Kjell Ola Dahl (trans Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 21 March 2019
PB, 314pp, e-book

This is my stop on the blogtour for Kjell Ola Dahl's new standalone thriller, The Courier. I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part and providing a free ARC of the book.

Set in three time periods - 1942, 1967 and 2015 - this is a complex novel, starting out as, ostensibly, a thrilling, if dark, war story but turning into something far darker and more interesting.

In 1942, in Oslo, occupied by the Nazis, Ester is doubly hunted: as a Jew, and as a courier for the Resistance. Barely escaping arrest, she flees to Sweden, continuing to work against the Occupation, and meeting the enigmatic, haunted Gerhard Falkum.

In 1967, a woman, Turid, who lost her mother in the war, is studying law. A man from the past, who died when she was still a child, turns up in Oslo, and events take a threatening turn for Ester.

In 2015, Turid discovers a brooch on sale which belonged to her mother. She sets out to retrieve it and to learn its story.

I enjoyed this book A LOT. It soon become clear that it was more than just a thriller. The sections in 1942 and 1967 (2015 is more of a coda, albeit crucial to understanding the book) are freighted with menace, with mysterious figures in dark, snowy streets, with the threat of arrest, betrayal and worse. The world of the Resistance is portrayed as small, claustrophobic, almost existing in synergy with the Norwegian police and Gestapo. (At one stage they're puzzling over the same murder). There are no descriptions of daring sabotage, it's office work, dull errands and freezing safe houses.

The story reminds us of what's easily forgotten - alongside war, political crime, and genocide, age old human entanglements, resentments and emotions continue, and it's these latter that seem to be the focus of the story and that raise it from being a matter of spying, propaganda and near misses to a tale of heart, blood, and revenge. The tense relationships between, for example, Ester and Gerhard in 1942, or her and Sverre in 1967, are strongly drawn and for me recalled some black and white movie where Burton and Taylor are about to begin screaming at each other (and then fall into each others' arms).

And yet... this book actually has layer upon layer. Deeper still, perhaps at the heart (or does it go further?) in this book is Ester's hatred of what's been done to her parents, to her people, to her. As though 1942 Oslo was a forge pressing out a new Ester, the woman we see in 1967 seems different, harder, marked by experience. We learn a little bit of what that experience was, of the things she's apparently done. It's enough to understand that for all this difference, the girl who got ready for a night out in 1942 Stockholm is linked to the woman of 1967 by at least thing - a desire for revenge.

All in all, this is a twisty little story where enemies are not always visible, conversations are marked by what is not said, and innocent childhood seems far, far away. One thing is clear - after 1942, nothing will be the same again for any of these characters.

I said above that I enjoyed reading this book, I should add to that that I'm not sure "enjoyed" is the right word for a rather dark story. It seems almost wrong to "enjoy" some of what goes on here. But it is a fine work. The characters are strongly drawn and everybody is sympathetic - to a point. At times, events are clouded by mystery, an effect enhanced by the different timelines although Kjell Ola Dahl keeps things on the right side of the line between "puzzling" and "baffling", and the relentless drive of the narrative - it is truly nailbiting at times, always thrilling - means the jumps are pretty easy to read through. The pacing is superb, building up to simultaneous climaxes in different periods which have a real sense of jeopardy (even though the structure means we know - or can guess - how things turned out).

As ever, Don Bartlett's translation gives us excellent, lucid English with just a hint of foreignness to remind the reader that this story does come from somewhere else, as it were, something I always think adds a little tingle.

I'd recommend The Courier to fans of spot fiction, historical or crime, and especially to those who like a mashup of all three.

You can buy The Courier from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Waterstones, Blackwell's, or Amazon.

The blogtour continues - see the poster below for forthcoming posts and for any past ones you might have missed.

Review - Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Design by Richard Ogle

Transcription
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 6 September 2018
HB, 337pp

I bought my copy of this book.

I should have read Transcription when it came out in September but with a lot of distractions, it slipped and I picked it up to read over Christmas. Once I did, I couldn't put it down.

Atkinson's latest is, simply, masterly. It's an immersive, compelling account of one woman's war (a phrase borrowed from the title of one of her source books, sorry) and of the price she pays for it later.

Following the death of her seamstress mother, Juliet Armstrong - a bright, scholarship girl with Oxbridge ambitions - attends secretarial college instead, then joins MI5 as a typist at the beginning of the Second World War. She assigned to monitor Nazi sympathisers in 'Operation Godfrey'. This basically means transcribing covertly recorded conversations between an MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby, and the sympathisers ('the neighbours'). They think he's a German agent, allowing him to prevent them passing on useful information to anyone who might make use of it.

The story moves backwards and forwards between 1940 - those fatal weeks around the fall of France - and 1950, by which time Juliet is ensconced at the BBC as a producer of schools programmes. Atkinson plays a long game here, gradually introducing elements looking back and hinting at how the events of 1940 played out, and how they may still haunt Juliet. More is implied than said, but it soon becomes clear that she wasn't just transcribing but at one stage actively infiltrating the 'Right Club'. (This contains just the kind of ghastly people you'd expect - traitors and cryptofascists happy to  collaborate with tyranny just to protect their privileged position in the world. Mostly, rather stupid people, of a type that, unfortunately, doesn't die out). That leads her into danger, at first of a rather 'Girls' own' type but soon becoming more serious - Atkinson drops more hints, about deaths, even as Juliet's role in 1950 becomes more complex too.

At the heart of the book are two mysteries. What really is going on at the BBC? With old MI5 contacts apparently popping up and threatening messages being sent, the past seems to be reaching out for Juliet, the corridors of Broadcasting House no longer safe, a series of mistakes threatening her position at the BBC. And what really was going on in Dolphin Square in 1940? Who, exactly, was on what side? Might a network of collaborators have been a useful asset for an MI5 agent wanting to hedge their bets?

As the story becomes more complicated, truth being reflected around that labyrinth of mirrors to which spy fiction is prone, Atkinson keeps the reader focussed less on the 'what' than on the 'why' and on the consequences. There are consequences; one character spells this out explicitly towards the end, but really, we've been aware of that all along. Just look at Juliet. She is a composed, resourceful and self-aware young woman - whether in 1940 or 1950 - yet continually speculates on the future, the past, her place in MI5 or the BBC, on the effect of what she did on others (especially this). Juliet is, really, our window into some very strange worlds at a time when so much hung in the balance. The story has often been told about how in May 1940, the UK wavered on the brink of capitulation, with an influential factor in favour of peace. This is not that story - the story of Cabinet debates and Parliamentary oratory - but it also is that story - the story of what ordinary (and extraordinary) people were doing and saying that lets us imagine how they might have responded had things been different.

Readers of Atkinson's last two books, Life After Life and A God in Ruins will be familiar with some of these themes (responsibility; consequences; the price that might be paid) which she also examined there, through the lens of a kind of of multiple worlds universe and she - teasingly - alludes to this I think. In the opening scenes, set in 1981, a Royal Wedding is coming, reminding me of the framing of A God in Ruins, and there's a certain amount of overlap too in the 1940s setting and in what we might imagine Juliet's later life to have been like. But this isn't a book in that world. The alternate paths taken here are choices made and fixed and then reflected on, not points that might yet go a different way in another life. That makes the stakes, I suppose, higher, and the things Juliet has done graver.

The book is tremendous fun, shrewdly observed (a great deal of this revolving around the internal politics of a bureaucracy such as the BBC or MI5 - Juliet wonders if these two are not really fundamentally the same organisation - but also taking in things such as class and the state of British food in the 1950s) and very human in the way it deals not only the murky shenanigans of espionage but with the frail people caught up in it. Monstrous as they are, there is still some sympathy for Mrs Scaife and her entourage of would-be collaborators and Quislings. While some readers may think they never really got what was coming too them, I'm not sure; they see their hopes and plans dashed and many suffer personal loss - and as we seen, the forces of the State pretty much play fast and loose with law and decency to achieve their ends.

Best of all though, this is a thunderingly good story, the kind of thing you won't want to be parted from till it's finished.

Those are the very best books, and this is among the best of them.

Review - Victory Disc by Andrew Cartmel

Cover design by Martin Stiff

Victory Disc (Vinyl Detective, 3)
Andrew Cartmel
Titan Books, 8 May 2018
PB, 432pp

I'm grateful to Titan for an advance copy of this book.

This is the 3rd in the series featuring the (unnamed) Vinyl Detective, his girlfriend Nevada, annoying best friend Tinkler, getaway driver Clean Head and, of course, cats Turk and Fanny. The setup is well established - the Vinyl Collector hunts down old records, and his commissions typically involve him in a historical mystery, which has enough echoes in the present to threaten considerable danger.

Victory Disc is no exception, but takes the gang out of their comfort zone (if being threatened, drugged, burgled or kidnapped can be so described) as the hunt is for even older and rarer records than before - specifically for wartime recordings of the RAF's Flare Path Orchestra, a band of serving airmen purportedly set up to compete with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The Flare Path Orchestra wasn't, of course, real, the Miller band (of course) was. Yet Cartmel has an amazing knack for describing  (totally fictitious) music so convincingly that you're almost there, listening to it. Very evocative, as is the name Flare Path Orchestra itself which made me think of Terrance Rattigan's play Flare Path, also set against the background of bomber crews in the Second World War.

Of course there's a mystery to be unravelled here, the murder of a young woman, Gillian Gadon, during the war, for which a young RAF officer was hanged. (I strongly approved of the fact that in this story Nevada insists on using Gadon's name, making her more than simply an object of male violence). This backstory intertwines with a commission, in the present, by the wealthy Miss Honeyland, to hunt down any serviving records by the Orchestra whose leader was her father, "Lucky" Lucian Honeyland. (One slight gripe: Honeyland's is described as "Colonel" - not an RAF rank, I think). That sets The Vinyl Detective (or the Shellac Shamus, as Nevada describes him now that he's delving into the age of 78s) tracking down surviving members of the band, widening his knowledge of the wartime bombing campaign (at the heart of the book there is, among other things, a compassionate argument about the cruelty of that campaign and its effect both on German cities and on the aircrew themselves).

This is Cartmel at his best, sending the team off on a series of rackety day trips to obscure corners of Kent, portraying the foibles and varied lives of the surviving band/ squadron members while throwing in an eclectic gallery of record eccentric collectors, menacing thugs, murder historians and, inevitably, more cats (poor Abner...) It all moves pretty briskly and - another thing I like in these books - the crew behave intelligently, understanding (from previous adventures) that there may be danger out there. Not that this makes the book staid or boring - it has a pretty scary climax and the revelations that follow complete a satisfying story, bringing the crimes of the past right into the present and showing how evil persists. Indeed there is something of a sense of urgency to the story and a demand to question appearances and remain vigilant. Another strong theme is erasure, particularly of artists (that's a vein consistently explored in all these books).

In all this was an exciting and atmospheric mystery and a good addition to the Vinyl Detective's casebook. I note that a further instalment, Flip Back, is due in 2019 and I wish the anonymous record-finder and his partner plenty of good, fresh coffee and decent food in their next outing.

Final note: while Cartmel avoids using the Collector's name - how long can he keep that up? - he does use pronouns, so I'm not just falling into a lazy assumption that the character is male!

For more about the book see the publisher's website here.

The Constant Soldier

The Constant Soldier

Image from www.panmacmillan.com

William Ryan

Mantle, 25 August 2016

HB, 368pp

Source: I'm grateful for an advance copy of this book to review 

It is early 1944. A soldier rides away from battle  through a fairytale landscape of glittering ice, snow-boughed trees and frozen rivers. he is injured and will have to spend many weeks and months recuperating before being discharged home, used, broken and racked with guilt. But the war hasn't finished with him, and even on that journey back from the Front, he passes another train - 'a long line of snow-roofed cattle trucks'. There are no windows, only high, barred slits. 'From some of them - not all - thin, blood streaked hands ingnored the wire to reach out, as if looking for something their owners couldn't see.'

In 1944, on the Eastern front, the Third Reich is entering its final days, reaping the fruits of murder. Brand is coming home to face his past, make what peace he can with it and try to save something. meantime, Polya is also coming, part of the all conquering Red Army, driving her T-34 tank on the long road to Berlin.

In an afterword, Ryan explains how this story was inspired by a real place - an SS rest hut in German-occupied Poland, where murderers and torturers came to forget their work and relax. The book includes two photographs from an album kept by one of the officers looking after the hut during those last days: incongruous pictures of Christmas trees and hunting parties. This contrast between everyday life - if one can use the term - and apocalyptic events taking place over the hills, where the Russians approach, or down the road in the camp, where human beings are butchered, underlies the story, beginning as a mere convenience for the hut's orderlies and guests - the ignoring of inconvenient and evil truths - and growing into a grand collective delusion as the enemy approach and the end comes near - but none dare admit it.

That battle rages in all the characters (except Polya, perhaps) - Brandt, who was forced into the army to escape 'political trouble' and bears a double guilt, for what he did then and for the fact that his lover fell into the hands of the Gestapo due to him; for Neumann, in charge of the hut, who has been excused 'active involvement' in the camp after a trauma which literally haunts him; Jager, the hardened Waffen SS man who has no hope left and sees through everything. Only, perhaps, the more stupid remain comfortable. 

I was in two minds about this pervasive guilt and sense of mis-ease. At one level, it might be reassuring to think that many Germans - and those who joined in the terrible crimes of the Second World War - knew, at some level, that what was happening was utterly wrong. I want to believe in their humanity, that they would be troubled by what was happening, what they were complicit in. That seems like a sign of hope, a small flower in a bleak desert. But no - I think what the book demonstrates is the terrible power of events, of going along with things. Those mental reservations, that unease, doesn't save a single wretch from death. Still less the realisation that it's all going up in flames and time to turn to turn coat and denounce what's been going on. (A couple of soldiers discuss the inevitable future war between the West and Russia and how they will be needed in it).

In this moral cesspit, Brandt, tainted and loathing himself, tries to rescue those he can. His determination to atone plunges us into an action-filled and morally ambiguous story, one that powers along like those Russian tanks sweeping westwards. Against the huge forces in motion it seems as though nothing he does can have any significance, yet he, and some of the others, do what they can. There is the woman he lost all those years ago and her fellow prisoners. There are the boys and old men of the village, press-ganged into Hitler's last ditch Dad's Army, the Volkssturm. There's his sister and the rest of his family. (The village will not be safe when the Russians come: but even before that, it's not safe - partisans prowl the woods and fanatical Nazis like the Mayor prowl the streets. And it hasn't been safe for many for years: "The Glintzmanns have moved away"). The political prisoner, Agneta, knows that the body of her Jewish friend Lena should be washed but only has tears to do it with. The two women who are 'Bible students' refuse to condone the killing even when a single word would free them at any time.  does what he can. 

One can't escape guilt - even Polya suffers guilt as her tank crushes a refugee wagon and kills a mother and her children - and there is no redemption or absolution here but one can try to save something from the wreckage, perhaps, make things a bit less bad. But it's deeds that count not inner guilt, unspoken repugnance nor even - as with a couple of characters - self-destruction (either by suicide or throwing oneself at the approaching Russians). 

It's a sobering and at times desperately sad book, a story of love, loss, revenge, guilt and endurance - perhaps above all, of endurance. A magnificent read and a real reminder of the times Europe and its people have been through and the need to be on our guard against their repetition.