Leslie Charteris: The Saint Goes West (1942)

Edition: Hodder Paperbacks, 1964 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 779

Two of the three stories in this wartime Saint book have nothing to do with the war, and even in the other, the first, it is not essential to the plot. The stories follow on from The Saint in Miami, and are the adventures encountered by Simon Templar as he travels west through Arizona and California, with the titles given by the locations: Arizona, Palm Springs and Hollywood.

Each story is enjoyable, without being among Charteris' best. Palm Springs and Hollywood are both detective stories. The first has a millionaire hiring the Saint as a bodyguard after receiving death threats, and the second has a film producer killed after offering the Saint the starring role in his next film. The investigative technique used in this story leaves a lot to be desired (it is partly a satire of this kind of mystery story); Simon accuses each person in turn of being the murderer - all quite plausibly - until he finds the right one.

Saki: Reginald in Russia (1910)

Edition: Penguin, 1982
Review number: 776

Saki's second collection of short stories did not appear until six years after the first, and there are significant changes. Reginald was a monothematic collection of extremely short commentaries on the British upper class social scene centred around the ascerbic, effete young man Reginald. Here, he features in only one story, providing the title for the collection, and it is half hearted in comparison with the earlier Reginald stories.

One of the strands in Saki's story telling is to write about something unpleasant behind a facade of apparently normal British life, usually something on the very of the supernatural; Sredni Vashtar in Beasts and Superbeasts is the most famous example. They are from a genre which today includes writers such as Robert Holdstock, and many of them are quite disturbing to read. The earliest of them, Gabriel-Ernest appears in this collection, incongrous alongside the society satire.

Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend (1865)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 777

Dickens' late novel is one of my favourites. It is a satire on hypocrisy and the British class system. John Harmon has made a fortune from the rubbish of others, collecting great mounds of dust which tower over London. On his death, his wealth is to pass to his son, also named John, who is murdered on his return to England. The money then passes to Harmon's foreman, Mr Boffin, who begins to take a new place in society and becomes known as "The Golden Dustman".

The melodramatic plot is more unified than most of Dickens', though it does have some holes. Coincidence plays a large part, with characters from unrelated strands meeting by accident. Occasionally, motivation is not quite clear, particularly for John Harmon's pretense that he has been murdered, and indeed for his changing clothes with the victim in the first place. (The motive might seem to be to test his bride to be, but he as yet knows very little about her.)

There is quite a wide variety of characters, both male and female, which are perhaps created less for grotesque effect than is usual in Dickens. Moreover, all the main characters present a different viewpoint on the subject of class, whether they are in their "rightful place" (as, say, the Podsnaps and Rogue Riderhood are) or out of it (like Headstone, educated out of his background or Lizzie Hexam whose birth is far inferior to her nobility of character). The novel does not posess the same immediate charm of some of Dickens' earlier writing, which may explain why many readers feel that it is well done without loving it, but to me it is right at the peak of his work.

Richard J. Evans: In Defence of History (1997)

Edition: Granta, 1997
Review number: 774

It may seem that investigation into the past ought to be a straightforward business, but history has been subject to a crisis of self-definition over a considerable period of time. Indeed, this has been part of the discipline from its very start, at least to some extent, as the notion of historian as interpreter rather than chronicler was defined by Herodotus and Thucydides, who differed quite considerably as to method. (Thucydides famously restricted himself to matters within living memory, but he still differed from modern practice by ascribing imaginary speeches to the people he considered to be important, something which is characteristic of ancient and medieval historians.)

Evans does not range back as far as the Greeks in his discussion of issues in history to day; the question of how a historian should separate truth from fiction and how much interpretation is legitimate may go back that far, but many other issues go back to nineteenth century Germany, when the work of Ranke brought into being criteria which have effectively formed the yardsticks of modern historical study. These caused new issues, such as the legitimacy or otherwise of secondary sources, or whether or not history is a science - the German term applied to the subject has a wider meaning than its usual English translation. During the early part of the twentieth century, developments such as the application of Marxist principles to history and rising interest in social and economic history added new divisions between conservative and radical, and these led to the two classic works in English on the study of history, E.H. Carr's What is History? (radical) and G.R. Elton's The Practice of History (conservative).

These books appeared in the early sixties, and have remained the principal university texts on the subject ever since, despite continuing changes in the academic discipline of history, with feminist history, black history and gay history becoming seriously considered as ways to look at the past. The most serious new movement in these four decades is the advent of post-modernism, which has gone so far as to deny the possibility of writing history at all (on the grounds that the past is a construct of the present).

Evans' aim is to write a new account of the study of history, from (as the title indicates) a fairly conservative position, which looks at the various issues and controversies. He tries to be fair, but cannot help but be critical of much postmodernist history; this is quite easy, as many statements by its advocates verge on the ludicrous. He does see good things in it, including an interest in the biographies of completely obscure individuals to illuminate a period of history (as in Simon Schama's book on the French Revolution, Citizens), and a renewed emphasis on good writing as a virtue.

In recent years, controversy in history has not just been about methodology; there have been several scandals. Evans discusses the cases of David Abraham and Paul de Man at relevant places in his narrative, but gives more space to the most serious, that of holocaust denial. He has little patience with those who seek to defend deniers (on grounds of free speech, mainly), maintaining that to be a historian worthy of being taken seriously, it is necessary to respect the truth. This is also what he feels is the major problem with the relativistic approach underlying post-modernist theory; Evans believes that interpretations may be challenged but not the events of the past themselves.

In Defence of History is a balanced account from a conservative perspective; Evans rejects extreme viewpoints but is happy to praise positive aspects of the various approaches to the study of the past. The use of archaeology, and the relation of archaeology to the written record are issues which are strangely unmentioned, and an account of this and controversies specific to prehistory would have been valuable. They would not, however, fit in any obvious way with the neatly categorised (and well written) argument presented in the book, so that it is easy to see why they are left out.

Katharine Kerr & Kate Daniel: Polar City Nightmare (2000)

Edition: Gollancz, 2000
Review number: 773

Unlike Palace, Katharine Kerr's previous collaboration, Polar City Nightmare follows on from her earlier solo novel Polar City Blues. Instead of an entirely new scenario, the background and characters are already in existence. This made it harder to believe the claim at the begging (also made in Palace) that this is an "old-fashioned collaboration" in which both partners play a major part, as opposed to the well known author merely lending her name and a little guidance for a novel based on a well known one of her own, as seems to be increasingly common in the genre.

Polar City Nightmare is in fact a direct sequel to Polar City Blues. The Republic of which the planet Hagar is a part continues its precarious existence as a small state between two enormous superpowers. Once again, a problem arises with one of their embassies, this time when a junior attaché and an irreplaceable cultural relic go missing. Once more Bobbie Lacey reluctantly assists the police investigation with her psychic partner Jack Mulligan. In this novel the stakes are higher; the other major difference is that baseball plays a much larger part.

By being such a novel, Polar City Nightmare reads as though Kerr were sole author, though it does lack something of the spark of its predecessor. That may be due to the part played by the sport, which limits the novel's appeal to one who is not American and is not particularly a lover of any kind of sport. Polar City Nightmare is diminished a little by this, but it remains well written, exciting, and an interesting portrayal of the future.

One interesting point, shared with the earlier novel, is made by Kerr in her introductory note. As she says, in most fiction - and, really, in most Western fiction - it is the intention of the author that, unless explicitly stated, the race of a character should be assumed to be white. Here, the opposite holds, and race relationships are generally a mirror image of late twentieth century America - whites in crime ridden ghettos, black and Hispanic people in most positions of power. That this assumption is made by readers (and that it is expected by authors) is a sad reflection on our culture, and is probably a consequence of an unequal distribution of education and prosperity - more white people have jobs which leave time and energy to read novels. It is effectively the same point made in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and it is a pity that it can still be made. (I suspect that a lack of black TV and film stars of both sexes also contributes to the way that characters in novels are imagined.) I should note that the background to Ursula le Guin's earlier Earthsea novels makes the same assumptions about race as Kerr does here.

Ruth Rendell: An Unkindness of Ravens (1985)

Edition: Arrow, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 772

When a neighbour's husband goes missing, Rendell's detective Wexford is reluctant to investigate. But what seems initially likely to be a case of a man going off with another woman turns out to be more complex, as he is revealed to have been a bigamist and as it becomes clear that no member of either family actually liked him very much.

As a murder mystery, An Unkindness of Ravens is neither particularly memorable nor difficult to solve (though it relies on something which is likely to be very obscure in a few years). As a novel, however, it is principal notable for its distinctly unfavourable portrayal of militant feminism. While Rendell herself was reasonably liberal, she was anti-extremist, and there are several of her novels with similar portrayals of, say, New Age travellers and the like. The issues of feminism pervade the whole novel: the most interesting character is the wife of Wexford's sidekick Mike Burden, who is pregnant and is shocked to find that, despite her belief that women are equal to men, she's really unhappy when an amniocentesis declares the unborn child to be a girl rather than a boy. The conflict between her conscious beliefs and something deeply felt - presumably conditioned by her cultural background - could be made more of, but that would overbalance what is meant to be a murder mystery and Rendell wisely leaves it alone, even at the cost of making the character less believable.

Catherine Fox: Angels and Men (1995)

Edition: Penguin, 1997
Review number: 771

The name Mara, given by Fox to the heroine and narrator of her début novel, means bitterness; it is the name taken by Naomi in the Biblical story of Ruth, when the death of her husband left her effectively a beggar in a foreign land. As such it is a strange name to choose for a child, especially when one of the parents is in the clergy. It is, however, appropriate for the character at the particular time in her life dealt with in Angels and Men.

Mara is a student in a theological college of a northern university, not named but presumably Durham from the descriptions. She has a turbulent background, having rejected the mild Anglicanism of her father for an extreme charismatic cult, and then, rejecting them in turn, cut off from her beloved twin sister Hester who chose to remain with them. The novel basically follows Mara through the college year, as she makes friends despite a desire to keep to herself, which earns her the nickname Princess.

The novel is simply but effectively structured, with each chapter bringing in a new revelation about Mara's background and character. (This means that by the end we have a very well drawn study of a particular person indeed.) The intensity of her recent experiences - she has effectively come out of a mind controlling cult - makes Angels and Men an exciting if uncomfortable read.