Books read Q3 2019

Vets Might Fly

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.