Edition: Hamlyn
Review number: 134
The Mask of Treason is a competent thriller, very much in the mould of Mary Stewart. An innocent young woman gets caught up in terrible events - that is the essence of this plot as of many of Stewart's.
Fiona Grant is a costume designer, in the throes of her first major success, the costumes for an important and well-received production of Der Rosenkavalier. As this transfers from London to Edinburgh to form an important part of the International Festival, she takes advantage of the few days' rest while everything moves north to visit her parents on the West Coast of Scotland.
Asked by her rich uncle to bring his Mercedes north from Glasgow for him, it is during the car journey that her adventures begin, as she comes out of a fog bank and brakes just in time to avoid an accident with a stationary pair of cars, one containing a dead man.
As she travels on north with Wyndham, the naval commander who was in the other car, she becomes involved in a shadowy world of espionage centred around the navy research base on the island opposite the small town in which her father runs a boatyard.
Mask of Treason is an interesting, if gentle, thriller, which is another reason that it reminds the reader of Mary Stewart. If Stewart had continued to write in the same vein as Nine Coaches Waiting, Airs Above the Ground and Wildfire at Midnight instead of moving to a more mystical vein which produced the excellent Arthur novels and the more insipid romances she has written in the last few years, then Mask of Treason is the sort of novel she could easily have gone on to produce.
Monday, 12 October 1998
Friday, 9 October 1998
P.C. Doherty: Ghostly Murders (1997)
Edition: Headline, 1997Review number: 132
I rather like the idea behind this series of Doherty's, very different from the Hugh Corbett mysteries or the Brother Athelstan books he writes as Paul Harding. The characters are the pilgrims of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the idea is that in the evenings, resting from the day's journey, each pilgrim in turn told a murder story to match the tales told during the day and recorded by Chaucer. The stories so far (I believe this is the fourth) all have much the same format, third person narratives which turn out to be thinly disguised autobiographical accounts interspersed with comments from the other pilgrims. Each individual story is much longer than the ones in the Canterbury Tales, and they connect together several of the pilgrims (so that the final number of books in the series will be fewer than twenty-four, the number of Chaucer's tales).
Ghostly Murders is the tale of the poor priest, and it brings in the cook and the ploughman. It is extremely unusual among modern historical novels dealing with the Middle Ages in that it includes supernatural events which do not admit of rational explanation - visions of ghostly horsemen, physical attacks by spectres. Naturally, just about everyone in the fourteenth century would believe in such phenomena, but it is almost a convention of historical writing to allow a get-out for the modern sceptic.
The plot also involves a theme to which just about all writers of novels depicting the fourteenth century - and indeed many others - eventually turn: the downfall of the Templars in 1308. The overnight destruction of the richest and most powerful order of fighting monks (so rich and powerful as to amount to virtually a separate state within Europe) by Philip IV of France, and the acquiescence in its destruction by the Pope and other monarchs including Edward II of England is an irresistibly romantic mystery, with questions such as how justified were the accusations made against them? How complete was the destruction? Why did they just fold up and let it happen to the? (An interesting novel to read if you want to know more about the bizarre theories devised to answer these questions is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum; Lawrence Durrel's Avignon Quintet looks at the issue from a rather different angle.)
Clearly (and this is one of the few clear aspects of the event), the destruction of the Templars was less swift and less complete in England than in France. The premise of Doherty's novel is that a group of Templars were fleeing from their London headquarters with treasure, when they were lured into the Kentish marshes and killed from a distance with longbows. Over the next generation, the priests of the nearest village have a tendency to feel they are fighting the forces of evil, and to see spirits of both the knights and those who attacked them; then to become obsessed with the treasure and die raving. The novel deals with two men, brothers and priests, sent by the Bishop of Rochester to the village.
Ghostly Murders is an interesting ghost story, not particularly a mystery. Doherty manages his usual authentic feel, the characters not falling into anachronistic Freudian psychoanalysis as is only too common in this sort of novel. It is not written with the genius of Chaucer, so the various storytellers are rather similar to one another - strangely enough, their recitations fall into the same literary style - but it is entertaining.
Thursday, 8 October 1998
Norman Lebrecht: When the Music Stops (1996)
Edition: Simon & Schuster, 1996Review number: 131
When the Music Stops is Norman Lebrecht's notorious attack on the classical music business and what he views as its virtually terminal decline. As music critic for the Daily Telegraph he is in a good position to know the current state of the industry, and he is not afraid to be critical or to name names. Condemned by many when it came out - particularly those with an interest in the kind of activities he criticises - When the Music Stops is vitriolic and extremely entertaining.
Lebrecht's thesis is basically twofold. The large agencies gained too great a share in the market for musicians, leading to corruption ("If you want such and such a star, the rest of your opera cast must also be my clients"), particularly as these agencies were also connected with broadcasting, recording and performance venues. The concurrent concentration on a few star names has led to overpriced big fee performers, and this means lower wages for other musicians and an inability on the part of venues and recordings to make a profit. Many artists and managers come in for criticism along the way, but Lebrecht seems to want to reserve his strongest criticism for Herbert von Karajan, with his dubious Nazi past and demand for ever greater control in his autocracies of the Salzburg festival and the Berlin Philharmonic.
There is certainly some truth in the generalities of what Lebrecht says; large fees do not guarantee a good performance. Not even perfection does that; Karajan turned in many soulless performances on record in which not a wrong note could be heard. (I don't really like Karajan's conducting myself either.) It is difficult for one outside the music profession to have a complete enough picture to be able to judge how one-sided Lebrecht's view of things actually is. As he himself points out, there are record labels doing good things and even making money - Lebrecht cites Nimbus and Hyperion among others.
No matter whether or not you agree with his argument, When the Music Stops is great fun to read, as it dissects the music business fearlessly, from the time of Mozart to the present.
Wednesday, 7 October 1998
Frank Herbert: The Dragon in the Sea (1956)
Edition: Penguin
Review number: 130
Frank Herbert's first science fiction novel, set in about 2020 and written in 1956, today reads more like a contemporary thriller than science fiction, even though it is set in a somewhat different world to the real one. It is set during a length, drawn out nuclear war (it was written at a time when comparatively little was known and much less public about the effects of a nuclear attack). The West is running short of oil but cannot easily obtain it while the East controls much of the world's oceans; this is a war in which air power is virtually non-existent because of the lack of fuel. The Western military have come up with a daring plan to obtain oil: sending nuclear powered submarines underwater all the way to Eastern oilfields on their continental shelf, towing oil tanks into the Arctic coastal waters and drilling there to remove cargoes of oil. Putting it baldly like this makes it easier to see the technical difficulties which are skated over - and skilfully hidden from the reader - in the longer explanations in the novel itself.
After some initial success, things have begun to go wrong, until there have been twenty missions in a row that have failed. This is partly because the Easterners have to some extent caught on to what is going on, and partly because of infiltration of submarine bases and crews by carefully hidden sleepers, not yet active spies and saboteurs.
The hitherto most successful crew has been in port for some time. In their last mission, they lost one of their four-man team, the electronics officer. Now they are to go to sea again, with a new electronics officer who is a trained psychologist from security. He is there to investigate what makes this crew successful and to ensure that none of the others are sleepers.
The tense atmosphere of the submarine, underwater and completely isolated because of the need to keep radio silence, is well-portrayed. The issue of the importance of religion to the men on the ship is handled with particular interest and sensitivity. The beginning and end of the book, which take place ashore, are rather less immediately convincing.
Review number: 130
Frank Herbert's first science fiction novel, set in about 2020 and written in 1956, today reads more like a contemporary thriller than science fiction, even though it is set in a somewhat different world to the real one. It is set during a length, drawn out nuclear war (it was written at a time when comparatively little was known and much less public about the effects of a nuclear attack). The West is running short of oil but cannot easily obtain it while the East controls much of the world's oceans; this is a war in which air power is virtually non-existent because of the lack of fuel. The Western military have come up with a daring plan to obtain oil: sending nuclear powered submarines underwater all the way to Eastern oilfields on their continental shelf, towing oil tanks into the Arctic coastal waters and drilling there to remove cargoes of oil. Putting it baldly like this makes it easier to see the technical difficulties which are skated over - and skilfully hidden from the reader - in the longer explanations in the novel itself.
After some initial success, things have begun to go wrong, until there have been twenty missions in a row that have failed. This is partly because the Easterners have to some extent caught on to what is going on, and partly because of infiltration of submarine bases and crews by carefully hidden sleepers, not yet active spies and saboteurs.
The hitherto most successful crew has been in port for some time. In their last mission, they lost one of their four-man team, the electronics officer. Now they are to go to sea again, with a new electronics officer who is a trained psychologist from security. He is there to investigate what makes this crew successful and to ensure that none of the others are sleepers.
The tense atmosphere of the submarine, underwater and completely isolated because of the need to keep radio silence, is well-portrayed. The issue of the importance of religion to the men on the ship is handled with particular interest and sensitivity. The beginning and end of the book, which take place ashore, are rather less immediately convincing.
Tuesday, 6 October 1998
Jean-Paul Sartre: Huis Clos (1944)
Translation: As In Camera, by Stuart Gilbert (1946)
Edition: Penguin , 1960
Review number: 128
Huis Clos is probably the best of Sartre's drama. Here he chooses a form in which his philosophical arguments fall more naturally than in the situations set up in his other plays, and this means that the philosophy is less nakedly apparent. By setting the play in a hell of his own creation, he can mould the setting to fit in with the main points he wishes to make, while in his other plays the setting is either naturalistic (as in Les Sequestres d'Altona and Morts sans Sepultures) or based on a well-known myth (as in Les Mouches).
There are three main characters in Huis Clos, each, recently deceased, shown in turn into the Second Empire drawing room in which they are destined to spend eternity together by the valet, the only employee of hell they will ever see. Garcin is a South American journalist who claims to have died a hero for standing up for the freedom of the press; Inez is a lesbian killed by her lover who committed suicide by gassing them both; and Estelle is a socialite who lives only for the company of men. Each of them slowly realises that they are there to torment each other, leading to Garcin's famous remark, "Hell is other people". They also come to know more about each other than they want to, as they are able to see what is happening on earth when someone is talking or thinking about them, and they narrate what is happening almost involuntarily.
What is revealed about the three of them is that their crimes are essentially existential in nature; and here Sartre very wisely chooses not to interrupt the flow of the play to explain or analyse them. Garcin is in fact a coward obsessed by bravery and honour, killed in an attempt to flee the country. Estelle revels in her power over some kind of men - not Garcin, who is too self-obsessed to be interested in women - and yet she killed her baby to be able to carry on her life in the style which she enjoyed. Inez killed her lover's husband in order to be with her.
The three are believable characters, and the more we know about them the more we see how they have been cleverly selected to torment one another for eternity.
The French title refers to the vacation period when the courts are closed; thus it means that there is no way for the characters in the play to change their fate: no appeal. The English title chosen for this translation is also a legal term, but with a somewhat different meaning. In a sense it is also appropriate to the play; the characters are on trial, but only the judge and jury (and indeed executioners) in the persons of the other characters are present.
Edition: Penguin , 1960
Review number: 128
Huis Clos is probably the best of Sartre's drama. Here he chooses a form in which his philosophical arguments fall more naturally than in the situations set up in his other plays, and this means that the philosophy is less nakedly apparent. By setting the play in a hell of his own creation, he can mould the setting to fit in with the main points he wishes to make, while in his other plays the setting is either naturalistic (as in Les Sequestres d'Altona and Morts sans Sepultures) or based on a well-known myth (as in Les Mouches).
There are three main characters in Huis Clos, each, recently deceased, shown in turn into the Second Empire drawing room in which they are destined to spend eternity together by the valet, the only employee of hell they will ever see. Garcin is a South American journalist who claims to have died a hero for standing up for the freedom of the press; Inez is a lesbian killed by her lover who committed suicide by gassing them both; and Estelle is a socialite who lives only for the company of men. Each of them slowly realises that they are there to torment each other, leading to Garcin's famous remark, "Hell is other people". They also come to know more about each other than they want to, as they are able to see what is happening on earth when someone is talking or thinking about them, and they narrate what is happening almost involuntarily.
What is revealed about the three of them is that their crimes are essentially existential in nature; and here Sartre very wisely chooses not to interrupt the flow of the play to explain or analyse them. Garcin is in fact a coward obsessed by bravery and honour, killed in an attempt to flee the country. Estelle revels in her power over some kind of men - not Garcin, who is too self-obsessed to be interested in women - and yet she killed her baby to be able to carry on her life in the style which she enjoyed. Inez killed her lover's husband in order to be with her.
The three are believable characters, and the more we know about them the more we see how they have been cleverly selected to torment one another for eternity.
The French title refers to the vacation period when the courts are closed; thus it means that there is no way for the characters in the play to change their fate: no appeal. The English title chosen for this translation is also a legal term, but with a somewhat different meaning. In a sense it is also appropriate to the play; the characters are on trial, but only the judge and jury (and indeed executioners) in the persons of the other characters are present.
George MacDonald: Phantastes (1853)
Edition: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Today MacDonald is perhaps best known for his childrens books, particularly The Princess and the Goblin, but (like Hans Christian Andersen) he also wrote for adults. He was one of the nineteenth century precursors of the modern fantasy genre, along with William Morris (whose work Phantastes closely resembles) and collectors and writers of fairy stories such as Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and the Celtic revivalists. Through his influence on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, MacDonald has come to have an effect on twentieth century literature rather greater than his innate literary merit deserves.
Part of what doesn't quite come off about Phantastes is that it is almost completely devoid of plot. The narrator stumbles into Fairy Land, where, after several adventures in a wood he gains a shadow (beyond his natural one); the remainder of the book is spent in an attempt to perform good and valiant deeds to remove it. It is akin to the individual quest which is part and parcel of the fantasy genre (deriving from medieval epics detailing the adventures of knights), mainly because Tolkien used it in The Lord of the Rings. But the journey is not really sufficiently purposeful here to be called a quest; the reader gets the distinct impression that the narrator is wandering aimlessly from one adventure to another.
The positive side to this lack of plot is that it gives Phantastes a dreamlike, poetic quality (though the actual poetry that appears in the book is best skipped, as in so many later fantasy novels). This is particularly true of the best episode in the novel, the time spent by the narrator in the castle of the Fairy Queen, trying to catch a glimpse of the courtiers invisible to normal human eyes.
A major aspect of Phantastes, and one strong influence on Tolkien and particularly Lewis, is the allegory. Many of the episodes have an allusive, symbolic quality, typical of medieval allegories such as Piers Plowman, though the symbols used by MacDonald here are sufficiently personal to make interpretation difficult if not impossible. From clues in the text, and given that MacDonald was an ordained (if somewhat eccentric) clergyman, it is reasonable to guess that part of the thems of the novel is to allegorise the Christian life. Fairy Land represents the spiritual world in which the Bible insists a Christian lives, with both good and evil spirits; the shadow is the soul's load of sin (as in The Pilgrim's Progress). Beyond this it is difficult to go, though there is an extremely clear picture of death and the resurrection towards the end of the book.
Today MacDonald is perhaps best known for his childrens books, particularly The Princess and the Goblin, but (like Hans Christian Andersen) he also wrote for adults. He was one of the nineteenth century precursors of the modern fantasy genre, along with William Morris (whose work Phantastes closely resembles) and collectors and writers of fairy stories such as Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and the Celtic revivalists. Through his influence on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, MacDonald has come to have an effect on twentieth century literature rather greater than his innate literary merit deserves.
Part of what doesn't quite come off about Phantastes is that it is almost completely devoid of plot. The narrator stumbles into Fairy Land, where, after several adventures in a wood he gains a shadow (beyond his natural one); the remainder of the book is spent in an attempt to perform good and valiant deeds to remove it. It is akin to the individual quest which is part and parcel of the fantasy genre (deriving from medieval epics detailing the adventures of knights), mainly because Tolkien used it in The Lord of the Rings. But the journey is not really sufficiently purposeful here to be called a quest; the reader gets the distinct impression that the narrator is wandering aimlessly from one adventure to another.
The positive side to this lack of plot is that it gives Phantastes a dreamlike, poetic quality (though the actual poetry that appears in the book is best skipped, as in so many later fantasy novels). This is particularly true of the best episode in the novel, the time spent by the narrator in the castle of the Fairy Queen, trying to catch a glimpse of the courtiers invisible to normal human eyes.
A major aspect of Phantastes, and one strong influence on Tolkien and particularly Lewis, is the allegory. Many of the episodes have an allusive, symbolic quality, typical of medieval allegories such as Piers Plowman, though the symbols used by MacDonald here are sufficiently personal to make interpretation difficult if not impossible. From clues in the text, and given that MacDonald was an ordained (if somewhat eccentric) clergyman, it is reasonable to guess that part of the thems of the novel is to allegorise the Christian life. Fairy Land represents the spiritual world in which the Bible insists a Christian lives, with both good and evil spirits; the shadow is the soul's load of sin (as in The Pilgrim's Progress). Beyond this it is difficult to go, though there is an extremely clear picture of death and the resurrection towards the end of the book.
Monday, 5 October 1998
Ugo Betti: The Queen and the Rebels (1949)
Translation: Henry Reed, 1960
Edition: Penguin, 1960
Review number: 127
The Queen and the Rebels is a play which reminded me of Shaw, particularly of Arms and the Man. That may be partly to do with the setting, a middle European war, or may be to do with the translation; it is always difficult to know anything about the tone of a play when it is translated from a language which one does not speak. In this case, I suspect that Henry Reed has chosen to write in a Shavian style, for, other than superficialities of setting, The Queen and the Rebels is not a comedy nor does it have a strong didactic purpose.
The play itself concerns a group of travellers stranded by the war and suspected by the side controlling the village where their train has been stopped of being spies. One of the leaders of the other side was a woman of noble extraction known to both her followers and her enemies as "The Queen". She is believed to have escaped the destruction of her headquarters and to be attempting to flee the country, in disguise.
Once this is established, the theme of the play begins to become clear: it is to do with identity. There are two women in the party of travellers, a peasant woman and a girl who is apparently a wealthy call-girl named Argia. The latter is suspected of being the queen, but she herself treats the peasant woman as though she is the queen. Relying on the villagers' interpreter, Raim, who knew her before the war, to establish her identity, she has the ground pulled out from under her when he refuses to do so for fear of the authorities (who might then decide he is an accomplice).
All the questions which arise are about real identity. Which of the two women is the queen, if either of them are? (If Argia is the queen, what she says to the peasant woman could be just in case she's overheard, and Raim could indeed by a former accomplice.) The other question of identity left unanswered is which side is formed by the rebels of the title?
Edition: Penguin, 1960
Review number: 127
The Queen and the Rebels is a play which reminded me of Shaw, particularly of Arms and the Man. That may be partly to do with the setting, a middle European war, or may be to do with the translation; it is always difficult to know anything about the tone of a play when it is translated from a language which one does not speak. In this case, I suspect that Henry Reed has chosen to write in a Shavian style, for, other than superficialities of setting, The Queen and the Rebels is not a comedy nor does it have a strong didactic purpose.
The play itself concerns a group of travellers stranded by the war and suspected by the side controlling the village where their train has been stopped of being spies. One of the leaders of the other side was a woman of noble extraction known to both her followers and her enemies as "The Queen". She is believed to have escaped the destruction of her headquarters and to be attempting to flee the country, in disguise.
Once this is established, the theme of the play begins to become clear: it is to do with identity. There are two women in the party of travellers, a peasant woman and a girl who is apparently a wealthy call-girl named Argia. The latter is suspected of being the queen, but she herself treats the peasant woman as though she is the queen. Relying on the villagers' interpreter, Raim, who knew her before the war, to establish her identity, she has the ground pulled out from under her when he refuses to do so for fear of the authorities (who might then decide he is an accomplice).
All the questions which arise are about real identity. Which of the two women is the queen, if either of them are? (If Argia is the queen, what she says to the peasant woman could be just in case she's overheard, and Raim could indeed by a former accomplice.) The other question of identity left unanswered is which side is formed by the rebels of the title?
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