James Herriot
There is a particularly wonderful Granville Bennett story in this one,
where they fail to go out for an Indian meal and Jim ends up getting absolutely
steaming in Bennett’s home pub.
The Lord God Made Them All
James Herriot
This is the seventh in the series and perhaps a little of the sparkle
of the earlier books has gone – there is only minimal Tristan here, and no
Granville Bennett, and even Siegfried is mostly out of sight – but it's still very entertaining. The long sea
voyage to Klaipeda in Lithuania (East Prussian Memel as was), escorting a cargo
of Romney Marsh sheep, and the more risky flight to Istanbul with a planeload
of cattle, add an international flavour. One wonders if those parts are based
on real events. As with many of Herriot’s tales, one has a sense of an incident
that is grounded in reality and in his experience with real people, but which
has been embellished and embroidered.
Sir John Magill’s Last Journey
Freeman Wills Crofts
Crofts’ style was plodding and laborious. But this is actually one of
his better books, I think. A pleasingly convoluted plot focused on the
disappearance of an Ulster industrialist on what was then the lonely coast on
the north side of Belfast Lough. Our hero Inspector French hurries back and
forth between London, Belfast, Cumberland and Stranraer in his quest to solve
the crime, which he eventually manages in his usual painstaking fashion.
The decent clueing and lovely settings add to the enjoyment, and there
is plenty of long-distance train travel (indeed French goes between London and
Belfast via the night train and the Stranraer ferry several times – I dread to
think what his expenses for this case looked like). It’s curious to see a piece
of fiction set in a pre-Troubles NI, and written by an Ulsterman, which faintly
alludes to the underlying political instability of the Six Counties without
that being its main concern.
In This House Of Brede
Rumer Godden
One of the finest novels I’ve read for a while, a wise and humane book
following a decade and a half in the life of a fictional Benedictine monastery
in Sussex. The main character is Philippa Talbot, a senior civil servant who
gives up her prestigious career and London life to become an enclosed sister.
As well as seeing her story – which unfolds gradually over the course of the
novel, including the revelation of a horrendous tragedy in her past – we are
introduced to many of the other nuns. A few of them become important
characters, and we learn something of their trials and joys and triumphs and
faults. But we see a little of most of the sisters, and Godden succeeds
beautifully in portraying the subtleties of monastic life; the joys, the
dilemmas, the sacrifices, the hardships and delights, the rhythms of the
liturgy, the failures of charity and the restoring power of grace. There are
lots of loose ends, but thematically this feels appropriately. We are, after
all, simply dipping into one part of a very ancient and ongoing adventure in
faith. It contains many great insights; one of my favourites is “What price
ecstasy when you can have love?”
Sloop Of War
Alexander Kent
The Bolitho series are a superior set of wooden walls yarns, probably
a more complete achievement from the literary perspective than Ramage, and on a
par with Hornblower (although I haven’t picked up a Hornblower in years). While
there is nothing particularly brilliant in this early entry – we are in the
American Revolutionary War – it’s engrossing and well-told. I’m afraid that all
these kind of books now suffer by comparison with the Aubrey-Maturin saga.
Murder In The Museum
John Rowland
Not good. A bright and promising set-up – doddery old don drops dead
in the British Museum reading room – is wasted on a poorly told and
melodramatic mess of a plot. The central woman character is hopelessly written,
and the writing in general is flat and clichéd. Curiously, the blurb on the
back cover is mistaken about how the events of the story unfold. Rowland also
wrote Calamity In Kent, a real
stinker, and like this a BLCC reissue. Edwards, in the introduction, writes in
his usual diplomatic way that Rowland did not have grand literary ambitions and
employed a breezy thriller style. Quite so.
Tragedy At Law
Cyril Hare
This was recommended in Martin Edwards’ History Of Classic Crime In 100 Books, and unlike some of the works
mentioned in that volume I think this absolutely deserves its place. It’s not a
conventional detective mystery – with a sharply satiric tone about the
now-vanished world of provincial Courts of Assize, and their attendant flummery
and pageantry, it bears more than a little resemblance to a comedy of manners.
It is, however, gripping, a genuine and well-tooled detective story with a
clever plot and proper clues and a cast of vivid, believable characters. The
final twist reminded me slightly of Sayers’ Unnatural Death, involving as it
does a somewhat obscure point of law.
A Month In The Country
JL Carr
Wonderful novella about Tom Birkin, a traumatised veteran of the First
World War who is employed to uncover a medieval wall painting in a small
Yorkshire church. Not a great deal happens – he makes friends with another war
veteran who has been tasked with locating the grave of a medieval knight buried
outside the churchyard; he becomes a temporary part of a local Methodist
family; he falls in love with the vicar’s wife. But that is, perhaps, rather
the point. The point of the book, it seems to me, is that the ordinary stuff of
life – the everyday joys, as found in friendship or hospitality or beauty – really matters, and can offer healing and restoration and hope,
despite its transience. The book ends
without any great satisfying resolution, except insofar as Birkin seems to have
rediscovered some measure of happiness in life, despite his having no clear
plans for the future and his marriage still being in trouble. Maybe it would be
better to say that he has rediscovered the possibility of happiness.
It’s a truly humane book, presenting its characters without judgment.
The Judas Window
John Dickson Carr
Carr’s locked-room puzzles are endlessly ingenious. I don’t claim any
special expertise but it’s hard to dispute his status as the master of the
locked-room problem, and this one is no different. That said, I find there's
not always a lot more to them outside the resolution of the mechanics of the
death, in terms of character and plot. Although there is a lot to enjoy here –
there are puzzles within puzzles and the reveals are always fun – I can’t see
myself revisiting it now that I know what happens. Maybe I’m wrong.
Murder By Matchlight
ECR Lorac
I’ve enjoyed the other Lorac books I’ve read; she knew how to craft a
good story, even if she wasn’t quite in the Christie-Sayers league. But this felt
a bit below par. There are some very good ideas here. We have a murder in the
blackout, a neatly faked alibi, an entertaining houseful of artistic suspects,
and a story that takes as its basis the chaos and disruption of wartime London.
All that said, the good parts feel swamped by some uninspired and clichéd writing,
and some loose plotting. The murder method is rather dicey – it could have
failed and left the killer open to discovery quite easily. With the best will
in the world, Lorac’s Inspector Macdonald is not very remarkable and our main
point-of-view character is a rather forgettable “Whoops! Cripes! What larks,
with you Scotland Yard chappies!” type. I
was also annoyed by the fact that the novel appeared to be set in 1945 but
still featured large-scale bombing raids on London.
The Strange Death Of Europe:
Immigration, Identity, Islam
Douglas Murray
This is fundamentally a rather depressing read, because Murray is right
about the failure of Europe – or Western Europe at least. His case is simple,
and to my mind irrefutable, even if we might quibble with details of the
argument: the mass migration into Western Europe that has occurred since the
Second World War has already changed, and will continue to change, the
continent beyond all recognition, and the crisis of civilizational confidence
experienced by Europeans in the last century means that they are unable to
confront this problem honestly or to discuss it openly. In particular, he
argues persuasively, the increasing presence of Islam in Europe has the
potential to radically undermine our way of life and the institutions and
values that we have developed over many years. As a gay atheist and prominent
critic of Islam, Murray reasonably feels a close personal interest in that
religion’s rise to become the most widely-practised religion in what was once
Christendom.
Much of the book focuses on the 2015 refugee crisis, and the European
reactions thereto. Murray sees the German capitulation, the great temporary opening
of the borders, as highly symbolic of Europe’s exhaustion, anomie and moral
posturing; a hugely significant event in itself, for its irreversible and huge
effects on the future of Germany, but also part of a trend going back decades.
What is interesting about Murray is that he clearly – clearly – not a racial
bigot. He has visited refugee camps in Lampedusa and the Aegean. He writes
movingly about his encounters with the people in such places, but he does not
let his human sympathies overwhelm his critical faculties. He notes, for
example, the preponderance of young men among those entering Europe, not only
in 2015 but before and since, which raises an obvious question about future population
balance (Murray does not particularly pursue this line of thought).
It’s hard to see how anyone could dispute his argument that the
nations of Western Europe are becoming not places for Europeans, but for
everyone. The idea of the nation is under implicit and explicit assault by
European elites.
Murray does not really have any confidence that we can find answers to
the problems he identifies – which one can hardly expect, since it is a civilisational
crisis on a vast scale. He offers some policy proposals for limiting and
controlling immigration, better integration of existing immigrants, and
reasserting the political and cultural values of the West. On the whole,
however, the book is a lament; a sort of obituary for Western Europe (some
countries in the East – e.g. Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary – have shown more
willingness to assert their national interest and that of their peoples). He dwells
at some length on the philosophical and historical explanations for European
self-doubt and loss of confidence: the erosion of Christianity, the calamity of
the Great War, the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War and the
Holocaust. He ponders, sadly, whether perhaps the cynics and the deconstructionists
are right; maybe European civilisation is exhausted and deserves to perish.
One tension in the book is that Murray is not a Christian believer,
and yet leans heavily on the Christian cultural and artistic and moral inheritance
as a possible source of renewal for Western Europe. He explicitly calls on
atheists and Christians to declare a truce in their own struggles in order to
save Europe. But I’m not sure how realistic this is. Murray’s atheism is of the
old type – regretful, humble, questioning, and appreciative of the Christian
patrimony. But most atheism in Europe in 2019 is not of that kind. It is hard
and fanatical and dismissive, and self-righteous, preoccupied with repudiation.
Murray is rallying an army – culturally aware and conservative atheists – that I’m
not sure really exists. I doubt too that the
It would be very interesting to read a reply to this book by a critic
who took it seriously and genuinely sought to refute rather than denounce
Murray. But I have never seen such a reply even attempted, and that is significant in itself.
The Man In The Queue
Josephine Tey
Quite a decent whodunit, written with Tey’s usual grace and style and occasional
edge of melancholy. A man waiting in line for a musical is stabbed and proves
hard to identify until Grant chases up the leads. The central mystery is not
played entirely fair – the solution comes, well, not out of nowhere exactly,
but certainly from a pretty minor plot thread. Nevertheless, the pleasure in
Tey’s books comes from elsewhere: the pacing, the characters, the atmosphere.
As in The Singing Sands, Grant finds
himself in the wilds of Scotland on the trail of a killer, and this is perhaps
the strongest section of the book.
Are You An Illusion?
Mary Midgley
Enjoyable and compelling defence of the existence of the real self,
and of free will, against the heavy-handed materialism and scientism that
constitutes so much of the modern consensus. Midgley’s argument is hard to
summarise, and hard to understand in places for non-philosophers, but she does
not defend mind-body dualism in the old understanding. Rather, she stakes out the
position that a purely materialist understanding of the brain has no way to
account for human experience, for what it is actually like to exist as an
individual. She defends different kinds of knowing and understanding the world –
art, music, imagination and so on. A book to return to, I think, to mull over
and absorb its wisdom. It might be interesting to read an expanded version of
the arguments.
Problem At Pollensa Bay
Agatha Christie
Nothing remarkable here. A late and rather scrappy short story collection - not all crime; it includes a couple of those melodramatic tales that Christie sometimes turned out. One of the Poirot short stories is decent, but a weak assortment overall.
No comments:
Post a Comment