Anne McCaffrey: Black Horses for the King (1996)

Edition: Corgi, 1997
Review number: 198

Anne McCaffrey was never going to write an Arthurian story, because she felt put off by the Hollywood-style image she had of the legends, presumably that put about by films like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In this novel, written for the 'young adult' market, she has changed her mind. But she has not really written an Arthurian novel; the setting (other the fact that it is early medieval Britain, with the presence of a charismatic leader) is pretty irrelevant.

The idea behind the book is that the only thing that would produce a string of Saxon defeats like those attributed to Arthur would have been British use of heavy cavalry; and that would have meant large horses. In the sixth century, the average horse was the size of a small pony today, not enough to carry a large man and not a platform to take advantage of the major weapon made possible heavy cavalry - the charge. They would be fine for skirmishing from a distance with light bows (tactics used by Saracen light cavalry against Crusaders), but would not give an advantage in close combat.

So, at the beginning of his rule, Arthur (or rather, in this book, Artos) sets off to southern France where he will be able to buy a herd of Libyan horses, large and black. The book is told from the point of view of one of his companions, the boy Galwyn, who then becomes one of Artos' trusted grooms.

As a book aimed at teenagers, Black Horses for the King is well done; McCaffrey generally writes excellently for this age group. To someone with a bit more experience, it is perhaps rather predictable and certainly fits very snugly within the bounds of the standard plot type of a young boy growing up and discovering his destiny. It would be especially interesting to anyone who likes horses, though no specialist knowledge is needed to enjoy it.

Ngaio Marsh: Singing in the Shrouds (1958)

Edition: Fontana, 1967
Review number: 197

London is terrified by a serial killer, who strangles young women at ten day intervals, scattering them with flowers and singing over the bodies before disappearing into the night. Just before the cruise lines the SS Cape Farewell sails, he strikes again, at a girl bringing flowers to the ship as a farewell gift to one of the passengers. She is clutching the torn-off fragment of an embarkation notice, evidence to the police that the killer may be one of the passengers. So Alleyn, in charge of the investigation, is put on board the ship from Southampton, to travel incognito in an attempt to discover the killer.

Marsh uses some psychology to explain the trip, to try to make it more than a plot device to get a small number of people isolated together, the pre-requisite of the classic crime novel. Her idea is that the killer is a schizophrenic who has some dim recollection of his crimes in his normal moments, going on board ship to escape from the temptation posed by the anonymity of London. This does not solve his problem, for among the passengers are two eminently possible victims. I don't know how likely a piece of psychology this is, being in no way an expert in criminal psychiatry, but the case I do know a bit about, the "Yorkshire Ripper", was rather different: Peter Sutcliffe apparently had no knowledge in his normal life of the crimes he had committed; it was only when presented with incontrovertible evidence that the walls separating parts of his personality began to crumble; it wasn't even as though his most shameful nightmares turned out to be true.

What in fact rings most falsely in this book is the awful slang employed by the characters; did anyone ever refer to a man they fancied as a 'G.B.' (short for gorgeous brute)? After the war, Marsh seemed to be writing books more and more set in the past (though providing indicators, such as the awful TV show hosted by the character Aubrey Dale, that they were still intended to be contemporary), in the twenties and thirties. The backgrounds are no longer up to date - the villages of Off With His Head and Scales of Justice were surely rare even in the fifties; cruise ships (even ships intended to mainly carry cargo, as Cape Farewell is intended to be) must have already been losing out to commercial aviation. This old-fashioned atmosphere is compounded by the slang; if you want your dialogue not to seem hopelessly out of date in ten years' time, you should ignore the more outrageous slang around you.

Caroline Graham: Faithful Unto Death (1996)

Edition: Headline, 1997
Review number: 196

In her Cotswold-set mysteries, Caroline Graham has great fun parading casts of bizarre exaggerated eccentrics before the eyes of Chief Inspector Barnaby and Sergeant Troy (themselves stereotypical policemen) and her readers. Faithful Unto Death follows the formula pretty exactly, with a puzzle which is perhaps a little above the average level of difficulty.

When Alan Hutchinson's wife Simone goes missing, he at first does nothing about it, launching himself instead into a self-pitying sea of whisky. His neighbours eventually inform the police, but there is little they can do until Alan himself is found dead. Like almost all of Graham's stories, this one takes place in a tiny village entirely, it seems, populated by really strange people, and this includes the reclusive Hutchinsons.

Having seen the TV adaptation of this novel before reading it, I wasn't expecting it to be terribly good. The "cast of eccentrics" idea works rather better on the page than on the screen, where there is a danger that they merely seem rather exaggerated (though the TV listings magazine we get implies, in what is said about the adaptation of a different Graham novel, that the series is very popular in the US, and some viewers there think it reliably catalogues English village life; it is about as reliable as Buffy's portrayal of American high school life). The compression of the novel into a single two-hour programme meant that the plot was considerably simplified and the characters made rather more sketchy; attention was inevitably focused on the star part, Barnaby (who was also considerably softened to make him more attractive to viewers). The book is far better, though I did find myself occasionally wondering how much some of the characterisations are deliberate parody and how much poor writing.

C.S. Forester: Lord Hornblower (1946)

Edition: Michael Joseph, 1951
Review number: 195

As in the earlier climax of the Hornblower series, Ship of the Line, Lord Hornblower takes Forester's hero back to the French countryside. He is initially dispatched to deal with some mutineers from the British navy who have taken refuge under the protection of the French batteries guarding the mouth of the Seine. In taking possession of the mutineers' ship, Hornblower also manages to be the man who establishes the first bridgehead on the northern French coast, by capturing Le Havre. This is in the twilight of Napoleon's power, as Wellington invades the south of France, and Russian troops menace the Rhine. Hornblower has to reluctantly become the host for the Duc d'Angoulême, one of the uninspiring Bourbons who wish to return to France and power as Napoleon is defeated and exiled to Elba. But when Napoleon escapes, Hornblower once again becomes a fugitive in a hostile France.

This late Hornblower novel has a distinct air of being an anticlimax. I don't know whether Forester was as tired of his most famous hero as Doyle became of Sherlock Holmes, but he was certainly not as able to come up with good ideas as the series of books extended. This is partly because he had to fit Hornblower into a historical context, and partly because he clearly didn't have a plan of Hornblower's whole career mapped out in advance; doing so would have made it possible to spread out the excitement more evenly.

That boredom was involved seems to be indicated, though, by the sketchy attention paid to character development in some of the later books. Hornblower has been established early on in the series, and he does not really change or develop, reaching the point where he is almost a caricature of his earlier self. Forester also repeats incidents, and in Lord Hornblower actually draws attention to it (Hornblower has the men caper at their guns at one point to stop them freezing, and he actually thinks how this will cause a new Hornblower legend to grow up, to set alongside stories of the jig danced on the Lydia during the chase of the Natividad.)

Jacques le Goff: Medieval Civilisation (1972)

Translation: Julia Barrow, 1988
Edition: Blackwell, 1988
Review number: 194

Medieval Civilization is an examination of the Middle Ages as a culture, an attempt to get into the minds of men and women quite alien to modern thought patters yet from whom modern culture derives.

Available for many years in France before being translated into English (at which point some revision was made), le Goff's work fits very much into the style of French historical writing whose best known exponent was Fernand Braudel. The earlier period of le Goff's interest has a much narrower range of available material, though the nine hundred years he covers is more stable than the rapid changes of early modern Europe which interested Braudel.

I found le Goff easier to take in than Braudel, who has a rather more dense style (at least, this is the case for their English translations). The differences between their chosen fields may have something to do with it; Braudel is more easily able to carry out closely argued analysis (since he has something to analyse), while le Goff has to use a broader brush. It works well, both in the short summary of the political history of Europe from the decline of the Roman Empire to the fifteenth century, and in the longer discussion of the culture that follows.

It is a most interesting book on the medieval period, one which I found particularly valuable to read because of its concentration on France rather than England (as you so often get in histories of Europe written in English); France was, after all, in the centre of medieval culture while England was on the periphery.

Helen MacInnes: The Double Image (1965)

Edition: Collins, 1965
Review number: 193

The Double Image is a competent spy thriller, not the chauvinist action of Ian Fleming nor the convoluted plotting of John le Carré but more straightforward and down-to-earth than either.

John Carey, an economist, in Paris while travelling to Greece to research the history of trade routes, meets his old teacher Professor Sussman by chance. Sussman has just returned from Frankfurt where he has been testifying at the trial of some former guards from Auschwitz. Their leader, Heinrich Berg, who grew up with Sussman, is believed to be dead - and yet Sussman has just seen him here in Paris. This would have seemed to Carey to be hallucinations brought on by the trauma of testifying, were it not for the fact that Sussman is murdered in his hotel room that same night.

Carey is now drawn into a world of seedy espionage; Berg is now posing as the Russian Insarov - with the explicit implication that the Communist states of Eastern Europe were harbouring many former Nazis. The climax of the book occurs on the Greek island of Mykonos, where just about everyone involved turns up, to take part in or to attempt to foil a plot by Insarov/Berg (the double image of the title) to kidnap a Western electronics expert from an American base in Smyrna.

The Double Image never really rises far above the commonplace, black and white world of the minor thriller; the author it reminded me of most strongly was Alastair Maclean. Accepting without question the commonplaces of the Cold War - East is worse than West, less moral, more unscrupulous - MacInnes never questions what is going on.

Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon: Don't Mr Disraeli (1940)

Edition: Hogarth, 1987
Review number: 192

This book is extremely like No Bed for Bacon, which was in fact written following the success of Don't Mr Disraeli. Indeed, the two have been printed in a single volume, under the title A Mutual Pair. The major difference is of course, that one is set in the Victorian age, the other in the Elizabethan.

Despite its greater success at the time, I think that Don't Mr Disraeli is less well-done than No Bed for Bacon. It has aged rather less well. This is because Don't Mr Disraeli, published almost sixty years ago, was written only forty years after the end of the period in which it was set, so that many of its readers would have been alive at the time; none of No Bed for Bacon's readers could possibly remember the sixteenth century. Compared to the average person living in 1940, our knowledge of the Victorian period will be much more sketchy, while our knowledge of the Elizabethan period will be reasonably similar. This means that references in Don't Mr Disraeli are more likely to be missed by or incomprehensible to modern readers (or, at least, take enough time to work out that the joke is spoiled), while those in No Bed for Bacon are more immediately funny.

Such plot as there is in Don't Mr Disraeli is a melodramatic version of the Romeo and Juliet theme, with the addition of a stage villain, all twirling moustachios. But the main point of the book is the series of silly anecdotes scattered through it, with no reference to their chronological order or connection to the main story (so, for example, scenes of the widowed queen precede others of her coronation). Disraeli keeps on making - or nearly making - errors, and is constantly corrected with the words of the novel's title. Just about everyone associated with Victorian England appears somewhere in the book, along with others who barely fit in (the Marx brothers, for example).