The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson

Uncharitably, one could call this a well-wrought snuff tale.

It is in fact many things. A look at the brutality and violence that fear, poverty and ignorance engender. A look at the lengths the helpless will go to to feel some sense of agency. An outline of the types of torture, disfigurement and punishment that were applied by so-called God-fearing men (and probably still are in some places). A fantasy about witches, but one that avoids the expected tropes. A look at male versus female ‘power’. A love story (or two). One could argue it may be too short to contain everything the author is trying to do. It certainly has no lack of descriptions (and inferences) of brutal behaviour, including sexual violence and incest.

It is (in brief) the story of the hunting down of witches and papists in Stuart England, and the punishments meted out to them. Its presentation of the brutality of the times  is unflinching. Often in a book the violence is cartoonish and you can disregard it. Here, it is the opposite. It is clumsy yet vicious, it is matter-of-fact yet beyond the pale, and you cannot even pretend it didn’t happen this way.

Note, if this were a movie, it would be R18+, and is certainly not suitable for kids or the squeamish, or people who are likely to be kept awake when their mind replays horrible visions from what they’ve read or seen.

The writing is on the whole very good. Not all the arresting images are brutal — some are admirable figures of speech, evocative conjurings, subtle delineations of character (after all, one can skilfully and subtly describe a crude, venal or ignorant character).

It is interesting to think how lowly regarded a book covering much the same territory but written in a pulpy, exploitative style would be.

It’s quite good, but that does not mean it’s for everyone.

Interstellar Empire by John Brunner

This is number 4 in the Venture SF series, and it’s not too bad. It’s 50s-style space opera by one of its top producers.

It contains 3 pieces; 2 short novels and a novella — The Altar on Asconel, The Man from the Big Dark (a novella at 40 pages) and The Wanton of Argus. The stories are set in a galactic empire centred on Argus. All are lean, straightforward adventure stories, with no pretences and a sensible economy of description.

Interesting also is the foreword, in which Brunner discusses the galactic history that might lead to the coexistence of swords and spaceships.

Wanton of Argus is replete with mysterious figures, beautiful women, swordsmen, robots in disguise, you name it, before it ends in a kind of confrontation between two mighty wills  — the kind of ending that renders much of what went before superfluous. A bit like a story in which much happens and then a comet wipes out the Earth anyway. Well, not quite as extreme as that, but that’s the somewhat unsatisfactory sense it gives. It is most interesting because it is a very early work — as a piece of fiction, it’s pretty clearly little more than grist for the publishing mill of the time. Brunner wrote it when he was 17, and sold it and got paid for it, although the buyer slapped the terrible title on it that is completely unreflective of the content.  It was republished as The Space-Time Juggler.

The other stories are better constructed, as you’d expect, especially Asconel, but nothing here is a major work, and there’s really no reason to read the book unless you’re interested in Brunner or a fan of SF from the 50s.

The omnibus is a good read if you like freewheeling, unselfconscious space opera in the 50s style. Very much not like Brunner’s major novels of the late sixties and early seventies. More like this one.

 

Space opera

The Week the Sea Blew Up by Gordon Ross

The title is not great. The story is so full of incident it becomes schematic, with little room for character. It ends abruptly. Usually, I like how these old books are around 120, 130 pages. Modern books are so bloated by comparison, loose and not edited hard enough. These are written to a fixed format. But in this case the author has crammed so much in the book is a little compromised.

Even so, many details ring true, and I confess I found it adequate entertainment. But the bar is pretty low — I am an easy mark for such stories. Where others watch police procedurals or murder mysteries, I read these old stories. Like a TV mystery, you know what’s going to happen in broad terms, but the details always differ. The detective will, in the end, solve the murder.

This  tells the story of  a British antisubmarine group — sloops and corvettes, led by a sole destroyer — hunting for a German submarine wolf pack. Intrigue about a Nazi ‘political’ on the crew of the lead sub upsets the apple cart, and other incidents occur, and then it all ends.

I cannot recommend it, really, unless you’re already a reader of such books; and in truth what are the odds you’d ever see a copy anyway?

Deep Escape by Alistair Mars

The cover of this book, and its title, would give you the idea that the whole book is about a lone man escaping from a damaged submarine at the limit of its depth range. A kind of Gravity underwater. This is only strengthened by the author’s bio, which refers to Mars as a wartime submarine ace; it sounds like he was a larger-than-life figure.

In truth, the escape occupies the first few pages — and it’s pretty good stuff. The rest of the book is subterfuge and intrigue on an Italian island, complete with a villa occupied by a beautiful woman, educated in the USA and ready to escape occupied Europe with our (Australian) hero who is a much-needed expert on radar.

Commando operations, a love story, a naval adventure, brave resistance fighters — it’s all here in 130 pulpy pages. It’s not going to win any prizes, but it’s quite a fun read. It’s just not what the cover would imply.

Sub.

The Third Reich in Power by Richard J Evans

The Third Reich in Power

Richard J Evans

This is the second of three volumes. The first chronicles the rise to power, the third the war; this is 1933 and the seizure of power through to the start of the war.

It is thorough and interesting. Possibly one if its most interesting aspects is the insight it gives into how the Nazis held onto power when they were so extreme and so bad for so many.

We look back and ask, “How could that happen?” Especially if you’ve grown up in a liberal democracy, the rise of the Nazis, the lack of meaningful opposition to them, the way the nation followed them into a war and all the way into complete destruction — it all seems strange. Yet who among us would be prepared to rise against our own government in armed opposition? Would we be sure that it was the right thing to do? Who is willing to march at the front of that demonstration and take the bullets so the others can be free? Some people, yes — but enough? Add to that the undoubted brutality of the brownshirts and the bogey men that the SS and Gestapo became (and the disappearances of people into the concentration camps). Add to that the jobs that rearmament created.  Yes, they were lousy jobs with long hours and low pay, but they were seen in contrast to the lack of any work during the Depression. Add to that the international successes that Hitler accrued — the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Memel — and the pride that he gave back to many Germans … and you see a situation in which by the time the case for meaningful opposition had become incontrovertible, nothing short of a full rebellion by the army could have stopped the coming catastrophe.

And the army … well … loyalty, confusion, greed, bribery, scandal, indecision … and Hitler had them in the palm of his hand.

It’s not a good thing if an army is too ready to throw out a legitimate (at first) government. But it is tempting to believe that one great German general in the right place at the right time could have stood up.

A very useful book if you want to understand a very important time and place.

 

History

 

Stand by to die by A V Sellwood

A short novelised true story about the river steamer Li Wo and its brave, futile battle against the invading Japanese in world war 2. It is perhaps enough to say that her skipper received a posthumous Victoria Cross.

The story focuses on Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Ronald Stanton RNR — in part at least because he was one of the few survivors.

This is told in a straightforward, commercial-fiction kind of way. Sellwood wrote a handful of popular histories of the war, and was of the same generation as the people he wrote about. The book has a very close focus on the sailors. I cannot find out, but it is quite possible, likely even, that Sellwood interviewed survivors, presumably Stanton at least, because he used this way of working on other books.  This closeness to the ordinary men of the crew results in a book that tries to speak in their words and express their thoughts and points of view. So we see unchallenged ‘colonial’ thinking and casual racism. We  don’t see large-scale strategy. We are down in the dirty work, and the book is the better for it. Should they fight? Should they purely aim to survive? What can they meaningfully do? What else is going on? They have to make the best of it. We see them use their tiny, slow little vessel to dodge bombs, fight enemy ships, and try to find a safe harbour — of which there is none. We’re down in the water with them, surrounded by wreckage, as the Japanese turn their machine guns on the injured sailors. The book does not dwell on the brutality –it is pretty matter-of-fact, yet still quite evocative.

This is a good solid read about a time that drove men to their limits. Recommended if you like novelisations of real naval action.

 

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher; is it what you expect?

I got this book for 50c at a library that was selling off old books. I enjoyed Wishful drinking well enough. Though Fisher’s self-deprecating shtick would I suspect have become annoying had that book been much longer, the combination of verbal wit, jokes and frankness, and a willingness to own her mistakes and weaknesses — and also own the growth they had induced — was on the whole quite entertaining and at times insightful.

I cannot say this book is as good. It is funny in places. It is in fact very odd and left me feeling somewhat icky, as if I had done something a little sordid just by reading it.

This review is largely about what the book is and is not; not necessarily whether it is good or bad, but whether it is what a reader might expect it to be, which they may find useful if thinking about reading it.

First, a warning. Yes, it contains diary entries from while Carrie Fisher was working on Star wars. But, and it is a big but, none of them actually tell you anything much about the movie, its history, creation and so on. What they are is the self-analysis, self-flagellating, self-critiquing of a Carrie Fisher who was trying to work out what she wants, and why she (feels like she) loves Harrison Ford when he was not actually enjoyable to be with and never going to stay with her.

Fisher is 19, 20 years old. Ford is 35 and looking for some physical pleasure while away from wife and kids filming. The book rather suggests that he initially misreads Fisher’s worldliness, assumes she is able to have some fun and let it go at that, then later realises that she’s not that experienced, and is rather hooked on him, which troubles him but he allows it to go on. She cannot help falling in love in the intense and sometimes hopeless way that we do when it’s the first or second time, and berates herself over her lack of wisdom but does not/cannot walk away.

In other words, we’re looking at a young person’s deeply personal diary, that they are writing as a coping mechanism at a confusing and intense period in their life.

Even though that very person decided to publish these words, even though they bracket them in words they wrote at the age of 60, when they could be expected to know their own mind, it still, to me, feels invasive reading this stuff.

I mean, it has an honesty that you rarely encounter, in an oversharing kind of way. Can anything be more cringeworthy than teenage diaries? Would you want your teenage thoughts, poems, crushes and insecurities printed and distributed? Carrie Fisher did, it would seem. That could be seen as brave. And if you are a male novelist who wants to write a young articulate female character, it might be useful research. But by reading it I kind of feel complicit in some kind of bad decision. Like I let my friend drive drunk.

The material in the book before the diaries kick in starts off a lot like Wishful drinking; anecdotes, context from the times, that sort of thing — quite entertaining. Then Ford starts to dominate the narrative, and it veers off into self-analysis, and then the diary entries come in, and then we get a grab bag of stuff about times since, including a long discussion of signing photographs for money.

The central scene, in a way, is shortly before the diary entries start. They are having a party, and Fisher, seemingly the only young woman on the scene, is first pressured into getting drunk, then almost carried off for possibly illegal purposes by large male members of the film crew, then ‘saved’ by Ford who then snogs her in the taxi, which leads to their first night together.

It is a long way from insights into how a beloved movie got made.

So it is a slightly odd grab bag with an awkward kernel that might not be what you expect based on the cover blurb.

Hammer’s Slammers — good at what it is

After the interesting We all died at Breakaway Station and the quite dreadful Come, hunt an Earthman, volume 3 of the Venture SF series is Hammer’s Slammers by David Drake. It is actually a collection of linked short stories, despite Venture’s blurb bravely proclaiming ‘no short stories, no fantasy, no boredom’. It is a solid example of military SF, with a well-balanced mix of human story, weapon pornography and military tactics that will keep its core constituency happy — as it must have, because many more ‘Slammers’ books followed, and in fact this was very much the launching pad of Drake’s very successful career.

The book shows the waste and the casual and collateral destruction of lives that fighting causes. It shows the loyalty and toughness of fighting men and women, and in doing so obliquely advertises the military life as one of a kind of virtue. For the better, it avoids the higher-level, dehumanised oversight level of story and instead puts the reader in tanks (‘blowers’ — massive, hovering, nuclear-powered monsters) and in commandeered dwellings, waiting for said tanks to pass by.

Hammer’s mercenaries take the money, do the job, and go, leaving destruction and death behind them. They try to make no judgement on whether they are on the ‘right’ side of the conflict, though sometimes they find themselves asking too many questions. They are on the side that pays them. Thus, we have a sort of foregrounded decency (individual grunts doing the best they can in tough spots, too busy staying alive to worry about rights and wrongs — though some of them do — kind of thing), against a background of venality. In desperate situations people can be brave, tough, brutal, resourceful and so on, yes; but often those situations need not exist. Often, the mercenaries are pure parasites — taking the money from a government funded by the taxes paid by the struggling workers, destroying livelihoods in the fighting, and then leaving.

Yet the machinery of war is shiny and brilliant and sleek and seductive.

Anyway, I feel like I am thinking about it too much. It’s a military SF adventure. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll like the book.

 

Come, Hunt and Earthman, an awful novel indeed

In the 1970s English publisher Robert Hale put out a series of smallish-format hard cover SF novels aimed at libraries. They were not all bad — World of Shadows by Australia’s Lee Harding certainly aimed to be something interesting — but they were not typically good. I believe they may have  been constrained to all be the same 192 page length, for example, to keep costs down.

Philip High had been publishing novels and short fiction for 20 years when he wrote  small cluster of books for Hale. This is one of them. When Venture SF started up in the 80s, their mission was to put out SF adventure stories, and they were to be novels and to have not been published in the UK in paperback before. Hence, the series consists of old UK hardback titles that never made it into paperback (like this one), US fiction had not yet had a UK paperback edition, and a few omnibuses, in which they could combine things that had been out in paperback, on the grounds that the omnibus was new. By volume 3 they had already published a collection of stories, albeit as a kind of fixup. The best of them are good examples of the kind — early works by Roger MacBride Allen, for example. The worst of them … are not good. But, then, they can’t all be gems.

This book begins with a premise that could have been well-suited to a successful action-adventure story in a Deathworld kind of way — a jaded, decadent galactic empire has discovered Earth and set it aside as a game hunting reserve (Predator, anyone?). Hence the title. One could imagine it being one of those 1950s-type US stories in which humans turn out to be superior to the aliens because we can whistle, or something. In such a story, the alien overlords get more than they expected when they tangle with us ingenious Earthfolk, and we end up running their empire.

There’s a bit of that here, but the superscience silliness and unlikeliness of almost all the action, the complete lack of characterisation and humour and the stiffness of much of the dialogue combine to make the story quite a slog after the somewhat intriguing set-up is complete. The further you get into the story, the worse it gets. The last few pages went by slowly, even though the book is only 170 pages long.

I think there is a kind of attempt at the sort of story in which the scope keeps widening. You think it’s about Earth — no, it’s about a local confederation of worlds. No, it’s about the whole galaxy … no! It’s about the whole universe … no! … and so on.

High clearly had plenty of ideas. The book amply demonstrates that ideas are one thing, an interesting narrative peopled with interesting people quite another.

Also, and not the author’s fault, the book is woefully badly produced. Quite a lot of explicative paragraphs end with closing quote marks, as if the typesetter got to the end and thought it was dialogue (perhaps they had tried to avoid actually reading the text). I noticed ‘in’ instead of ‘it’ (or the converse) now and again, and a few other things.

The Venture SF series begins rather promisingly with We All Died at Breakaway Station, and the next book is the competent military space adventure of Hammer’s Slammers, but if the series editors wanted punters to ‘start collecting them now’ as the little blurb inside the front cover suggests, they ought to have placed this story a little later in the series.

Maybe Philip High was a mate of theirs.

 

High

Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

A good story, first and foremost. It is built around the idea that there are pockets of ancient woods, and that this is where ‘myth imagos’ — mythagos — can be found, creatures of the mythical past or subconscious, perhaps creations of the collective imaginations of cultures, going back thousands of years.