C.S. Forester: Hornblower in the West Indies (1958)

Edition: Pan, 1966
Review number: 173

Hornblower in the West Indies consists of five episodes from towards the end of his career, when he was an admiral and during a four-year term as Commander-in-Chief in the West Indies. Other than this background, and the fact that they are arranged chronologically, the stories are virtually independent; each one could certainly be perfectly comprehensible if read on its own. In these stories, Hornblower deals with an attempt to rescue Napoleon from St Helena (they take place around 1820), captures pirates, gets involved in Simon Bolivar's rebellion in South America that led to the independence of the Spanish colonies there, is kidnapped and survives a hurricane.

Hornblower's personal heroism is still there; much of the plot of these stories is set up to justify him being in situations where such an important and senior officer could display this characteristic. The short format (each section amounts to about fifty pages, so they are longish short stories) makes Forester skate over many of the strengths of earlier Hornblower stories and his characterisation of the character almost perfunctorily - the eccentricities which made him both human and more acceptable to modern tastes (such as his opposition to hanging and flogging, his famous daily baths and his tone deafness) are really only there as gestures. It is the earlier novels, dealing with his time as a captain, which are the strengths of the Hornblower series.

Peter Tremayne: The Subtle Serpent (1996)

Edition: Headline, 1996
Review number: 174

By the fourth of Tremayne's Sister Fidelma novels, she is well-established in the affections of fans. Having a female detective in a medieval crime novel is rather unusual, given the general attitude to women in the period. Fidelma is hardly a normal woman, being a king's sister, a nun, and a highly trained advocate in the Irish courts. Although Tremayne continually emphasises the humanity of traditional Irish law - particularly as a contrast to its rival Roman church law - I find it a little unconvincing. I don't know much about sixth century Irish life (and the blurb does say that Tremayne is an expert), but no matter how humane the legal code was, I suspect it was considerably less so in practice. The whole setting appears to be considerably idealised, though as I know much more about Ireland after the Viking raids which are supposed to have severely damaged the country's economy according to some sources, it may well have been a much richer place than the squalid barbarianism reported from later on in the Middle Ages.

The recurring characters are well-drawn and charming, the puzzles are actually quite difficult, and they are written in a pleasant prose style.

In this particular novel, Sister Fidelma is summoned to investigate the discovery of the headless, naked body of an unknown woman, found in the well of an abbey with a cross tied to one hand and a pagan curse to the other. All is not well in the abbey; its imperious abbess, Draigen, has a great hatred of her brother Adnár, who is the local secular authority. He and his spiritual adviser, Febal, in turn make accusations about her. When Fidelma discovers that Febal was once Draigen's husband - the story is set before the Irish chuch really accepted the supremacy of Rome, and before even the Roman Catholic church ordered its priests and nuns to be celibate - she realises that there is a long history of problems at the abbey. With the death of a second victim, the abbey's librarian Síomha, and the near lynching of a disabled nun as a witch believed to have caused the deaths by magic, Fidelma realises that this is a mystery which must be solved quickly.

Graham Greene: The Comedians (1966)

Edition: Bodley Head, 1966
Review number: 172

The Comedians is about three men, Smith, Jones and Brown, a shifty sounding set of names, as the narrator remarks. They meet on a ship bound for Papa Doc's Haiti, each travelling there for a very different reason. Brown, the main character and narrator, owns a hotel there which he has been trying to sell in the US because it has become a liability rather than an asset through the vagaries of the Duvalier regime; Smith and his wife are evangelists of vegetarianism, rich Americans who have a vision of a vegetarian centre in the Caribbean, possibly in Haiti; Jones is someone with a somewhat murky past, about whom the captain of the Medea has received warning telegrams.

Through their time in Haiti, each is shown to be, to some extent, playing a part and putting on a show. (This is the reason for the novel's title.)

The background of third world sleaze and corruption is something that Greene was a master at; imitators include Len Deighton (MAMista) and John le Carré (The Tailor of Panama), both of whom are perhaps rather heavy-handed by comparison. (A nineties thriller is perhaps expected to be more violent and sordid, which would also explain this difference.)

Jill Paton Walsh: A Piece of Justice (1995)

Edition: Coronet, 1995
Review number: 171


A Piece of Justice is the second of Walsh's detective novels to feature Imogen Quy, nurse at St Agatha's, a fictional Cambridge college. As you would expect from a Booker shortlisted author, it is well written, though it doesn't have a particularly difficult puzzle.
Imogen has taken a lodger, a postgraduate student named Fran writing a thesis on the nature of biography. To be able to live while working on this, she asks her supervisor if he has any suggestions of paid work she can do. He offers her the chance to ghost a biography he has been asked to write, of a prominent St Agatha's mathematician, Gideon Summerfield, about to (posthumously) receive the Waymark Prize, the (fictional) mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

When Fran receives the papers which have been amassed about this man, she and Imogen discover something rather odd. In the rather dull chronology of his life, there is a month which cannot be accounted for. Not only this, but there have been three previous biographers who have begun to work on the project, all of whom have disappeared when they tried to investigate the missing month.

The major characters are well-drawn, and (unusually for genre fiction) even the minor ones are individualised. Only the standard crime novel problem of unbelievable coincidence mars the plot in places.

Thomas Browne: Religio Medici (1643)

Edition: Renascence Editions, 1998
Review number: 170

Ever since reading Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night for the first time, and seeing how much pleasure the metaphysical poets and Thomas Browne gave her (through the enjoyment she assigned to her characters), I have wanted to read these works for myself. This year I have finally got round to doing so, and was not disappointed. They provide much the same kind of pleasure, in the images used and the linguistic invention in which the writers take such joy. This is perhaps to be expected in poetry, but much less so in prose (even seventeenth century prose), particularly when the subject under discussion is philosophy and theology.

There are many parallels with Gide's Fruits of the Earth, which I read only a short time before Religio Medici: both are written mainly in prose, a prose which reads like poetry; both have similar subject matter; both were written by comparatively young men. Browne's work is, naturally (given its date) more orthodox and (given Browne's nationality) more Protestant in outlook. However, Browne was not completely orthodox; he thought for himself and was not afraid to come to different conclusions from mainstream seventeenth century Anglican theology. (He is much more tolerant of Catholicism and other religions, for example.)

The joys of Religio Medici are in its beautiful language and Browne's humanity, his understanding and his insight. It is not surprising that it was loved by Lord Peter, and by many others.

Robin Hobb: Royal Assassin (1996)

Edition: Voyager, 1996

Review number: 169  

Royal Assassin is the second of Hobb's Farseer trilogy, and it is a novel which very definitely points the way to part three. At its beginning, the situation is difficult for the Six Duchies and for Fitz, the illegitimate royal prince who is the hero of the series. The kingdom is being invaded by the Outislanders, who turn many of its subjects into the Forged (virtually mindless beings who live only to satisfy their desires, whatever the cost to any others). The crown prince Verity, recently married, is forced to neglect his new queen to try and save his kingdom; the king, Shrewd, is incapacitated by a terminal illness. Verity also has to defend himself against the machinations of his half-brother, Regal, who wants power but lacks the morality and indeed the intelligence to use it for the good of the kingdom. It is through working against his plotting that Fitz has already fallen victim to a poison Regal administered, one which if it does not kill can ruin its victim's health for life. In addition, he willingly gave up much of his strength telepathically, to help Verity stave off a mental attact from a Skillmaster loyal to Regal rather than the kingdom. (Magic in this series is basically divided into two branches, the Skill, which is telepathic contact between humans, and the Wit, a bond between man and animal considered unnatural.)

This is the situation at the beginning of Royal Assassin, and the book consists of Hobb thinking up ways in which it can get worse (with considerable inventiveness). A desire for a happy ending - which is a major reason why people read genre fiction, where they are almost guaranteed - impels the reader to move on to part three. (I suspect that in this case the desire may be disappointed.) Basically, Royal Assassin is well written and involving, but distinctly depressing.

Simon Frith: Performing Rites: On The Value of Popular Music (1996)

Edition: Oxford University Press, 1996
Review number: 167

Performing Rites is an academic analysis of the meaning and role of music from the standpoint of a cultural studies expert who has also been a well-known rock-music critic (he was the chairman of the judges for the Mercury Music prize for some years, for example). Though ostensibly about popular music, much of what Frith has to say is based on classical musicology (for the obvious reason that there is far more material available in this field).

As a cultural theorist, Frith is fascinated by non-musical aspects of popular music culture - performance conventions, the role of intermediaries from producers to record shops, and so on. That he manages to pull such disparate material as that which covers these areas together with that of musicology is something in a triumph in itself.

Considering his background, Frith's eventual conclusion is not a huge surprise: popular music, like other aspects of popular culture, is important to people because it confers identity, membership in a particular community. This may seem a little strange if it is a new idea, but you will probably find (as I did) that thinking back on when you first started liking particular kinds of popular music will confirm it to at least some extent. Certainly, to be a fan of top forty bands when I was at school would not have been a good way to become popular.

The idea is really that if we regard different genres of popular music as equal in merit, musicality and power - and comparing the things people write about them, this seems almost inevitable to Frith - the major difference between reggae, heavy metal and disco (for example) is in the community of the genre's fans. Frith identifies companionship in such a community - conversations and arguments about the merits of different artists in a pub, fanzines, ideas of authenticity (the subject of arguments even in such artificial genres as eurodisco), and so on - as one of the main pleasures of popular culture. In a sense, this reverses an idea of C.S. Lewis (in The Four Loves), that the particular pleasure of friendship is in shared interests. To Lewis, the interests bring the friendship; to Frith, the desire for friendship determines the interests.

The book is thought provoking throughout; worth reading for anyone interested in popular music culture who feels they can keep up with the dense academic style.