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Farewell to the king

 

© Penguin Books

 

I’ve just finished Excalibur (1997), the third and final book in the Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell’s take on the King Arthur legend.  Reading it was a bittersweet experience.  On one hand, I was pleased it lived up to the high standards set by its predecessors in the trilogy, The Winter King (1995) and Enemy of God (1996).  On the other, I felt almost reluctant to read it because I’d come to know so well, even love, the characters from the earlier two books – and this being the King Arthur legend, I was aware things wouldn’t end happily for them.

 

Still, not wanting to read the final book in the trilogy because you don’t want bad things to happen to its characters – that must show how captivating Cornwell’s Warlord books are.  And besides, as they say, all good things come to an end.

 

Once again, the story is narrated by Derfel, an elderly, one-handed Christian monk. He’s writing down – with his remaining hand, obviously – the details of Arthur’s life as it unfolded in post-Roman, fifth-and-sixth-century Britain, a time when the island and its Briton inhabitants were besieged by invading, land-hungry Saxons.  Derfel knows these details because despite being Christian and monkish now, he was in his youth (and, in Excalibur, his middle age) a pagan and one of Arthur’s warlords.  He’s recording the story at the request of Queen Igraine, who’s too young to have known Arthur but is besotted with his legend.  Derfel unhappily suspects that, when he’s finished, the queen will change the unromantic bits of his saga to make it more legend-friendly.  “Tales of men fighting can get very boring after a while,” she scolds the old monk, “and a love story makes it all a lot more interesting.”

 

Excalibur joins the dots and tells us how Derfel went from being a powerful pagan warrior to being a humble Christian monk in a monastery run by the contemptible Bishop Sansum – a recurring character in the trilogy, who constantly schemed and shit-stirred against Arthur and, in his furtive, cowardly way, tried to engineer his downfall.  We also learn how Derfel lost his hand.  And, all credit to Cornwell’s ingenious storyline, he certainly doesn’t lose it in any way I’d expected.

 

And we find out the fates of the characters who were still standing at the end of the second book.  We learn what happened to the wily and enigmatic druid Merlin; to King Cuneglas of Powys whom, alone among Britain’s powerful kings, Arthur could depend upon as an ally; and to Derfel’s fellow warriors, such as the Christian Galahad, and the Numidian Sagramor, and the coarse but likable Culhwch.  Also, with an ache, Derfel recalls what became of his partner Ceinwyn.  In this final volume, she has to endure a lot.

 

Of course, we get the final chapters in the life of Arthur himself.  At one point, Derfel sums up the thanklessness of Arthur’s task: “If only Arthur had remained in power, men say, then the Saxons would still be paying us tribute and Britain would stretch from sea to sea, but when Britain did have Arthur it just grumbled about him.  When he gave folk what they wanted, they complained because it was not enough.  The Christians attacked him for favouring the pagans, the pagans attacked him for tolerating the Christians, and the Kings… were jealous of him…  Besides, Arthur did not let anyone down.  Britain let itself down.  Britain let the Saxons creep back, Britain squabbled among itself and then Britain whined that it was all Arthur’s fault.  Arthur, who had given them victory!”

 

From wikimedia.org

 

No wonder that in Excalibur, after Arthur manages to beat off the Saxons, he retires from his role as the Lord Protector of the kingdom of Dumnonia and becomes ‘a mere landowner living in the peaceful countryside with no worries other than the health of his livestock and the state of his crops…’  He also, amusingly, tries to learn how to be a blacksmith, but he’s not very good at it.  When Derfel sees him working on ‘a shapeless piece of iron that he claimed was a shoe-plate for one of his horses’, it’s clear the iron is a metaphor for his futile attempts to fashion a unified and harmonious Britain out of its quarrelling kingdoms.

 

At the same time, the book provides endings for the remaining villains of the trilogy.  These include Arthur’s treacherous wife Guinevere, who at the end of the Enemy of God had joined forces with the dastardly Lancelot – the young Queen Igraine was dismayed to learn from Derfel that Guinevere and Lancelot were definitely not the noble characters of legend.  There’s also Arthur’s cruel and potentially despotic nephew Mordred whom, despite everyone’s misgivings, Arthur feels honour-bound to give the throne of Dumnonia to when Mordred reaches manhood, thanks to an oath sworn to Mordred’s grandfather Uther Pendragon.  There are the Saxon kings Aelle and Cerdic, whose forces are rapidly encroaching on the Britons’ western strongholds.  And perhaps most fearsome of all, there’s the priestess Nimue, once a childhood friend of Derfel and a protegee of Merlin, who in Excalibur’s final pages has transformed into the leader of a fanatical pagan force that’s as much of a threat to the heroes as Mordred and the Saxons.

 

Like all good writers, though, Cornwell doesn’t paint his characters as being simply good or evil.  They’re often nuanced.  Indeed, in Excalibur, a few people we’d written off as bad guys – or bad girls – achieve some redemption for themselves.

 

While the cast of Excalibur is mostly familiar from the previous two books, we get a couple of new characters too.  We’re introduced to the mystical bard Taliesin, who is something of a surrogate figure for Merlin – Merlin is absent from much of the book and it’s only near the end that we discover the tragic reason why.  Taliesin professes to be merely an observer, someone who records and later tells the stories that happen to other people.  At one point he informs Derfel, “It does not matter to me, Lord, whether you live or die for I am the singer and you are my song…”  Yet he becomes proactive and saves the day on one important occasion.  A less welcome surrogate is Argante, a young pagan princess Arthur marries as a replacement for the disgraced Guinevere.  He has no interest in her but feels, lamely, that ‘a man should be married’.  Arthur’s lack of enthusiasm is soon reciprocated by the ambitious but bitter Argante, and she throws her lot in with Mordred.

 

Cornwell also drops Sir Gawain into the mix, as he did with Tristan and Isolde in Enemy of God, though Gawain’s appearance is even briefer than theirs was and it ends no more happily.  Here, poor Gawain certainly doesn’t get to meet a Green Knight and go off on a quest of his own.

 

From wikipedia.org / oldbookart.com

 

The plot of Enemy of God hinged around three events and, similarly, that of Excalibur can be divided into three main episodes.  Firstly, Merlin and Nimue attempt to summon back the old pagan gods and restore Britain to its former greatness.  This involves using the 13 ‘Treasures of Britain’ that they spent the previous two books retrieving – the Treasures include Arthur’s sword Excalibur – in an elaborate ceremony.  It also involves setting the summit of a hill called Mai Dun spectacularly on fire at Samain, the pagan predecessor to Halloween.  Secondly, the Britons engage in a long, desperate struggle against Aelle and Cerdic, whose allied forces have launched an assault on Dumnonia.  And lastly, there’s the final reckoning with the armies of Mordred and Nimue.  Mordred is intent on killing Arthur and his young son Gwydre, who has a claim on Dumnonia’s throne.  Nimue is intent on reclaiming Excalibur as a Treasure of Britain and making another attempt to bring back the ancient gods.

 

Enemy of God painted Christianity in a negative light – it concluded with a bloody revolt against Arthur by the Christians of Dumnonia, which Lancelot had fomented.  But in Excalibur the pagans come off badly too.  The ceremony that Merlin conducts on Mai Dun to summon the gods reveals a dark and hitherto-unseen side to his nature.  And by the book’s end, Nimue, who early in the trilogy had been portrayed as a heroine and even as a possible love-interest for Derfel, has degenerated into a crazed and bloodthirsty monster.

 

Regarding the magical powers that Merlin, Nimue, the other druids and the Saxons’ wizards claim to have, Cornwell continues the policy he established in the first two books – he keeps it ambiguous.  The people of the time certainly believe in it.  Magic is as much a part of life for them as warfare, court intrigue and the weather.  Modern-day readers are allowed to read between the lines and interpret some of that magic as fakery – its practitioners have no qualms about resorting to crafty conjuring tricks.  The rest of it can be attributed to coincidence.  However, in Excalibur, you’re forced to explain a lot of allegedly magic-inspired happenings – dream-prophecies, curses, enchantments – as coincidences.  You begin to wonder if, in the world Cornwell has created here, there might be substance in what Merlin and Nimue claim they can do.

 

Elsewhere, Cornwell’s description of fifth-and-sixth-century fighting is as gripping as ever.  It’s maybe even more gripping than in Excalibur’s two predecessors.  The central episode, wherein we get a Saxon invasion, a desperate flight and then a siege, and finally the Battle of Mynydd Baddon and its aftermath, lasts a good 140 pages and is enthralling from start to finish.  The climactic Battle of Camlann is on a much smaller scale but, because you know it’s Arthur’s last stand, it feels no less intense.

 

And despite the sadness that increasingly permeates the book, things are still leavened by humour.  Merlin, as ever, gets the wittiest lines.  Early on, he says about Arthur: “…he is a halfwit.  Think about it!  Lancelot alive, Mordred alive, Cerdic alive and Guinevere alive!  If a soul wants to live forever in this world it seems like a very good idea to become an enemy of Arthur.”

 

So, that’s Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy over for me.  At least I can console myself with the thought that there’s plenty of books by him I’ve still to read: two dozen Sharpe novels (1981-2025); the Grail Quest quartet (2000-2012), which sounds Arthurian but actually takes place during the Hundred Years’ War; 13 instalments of the Saxon Stories (2004-2020), set in ninth-and-tenth-century England; and four instalments of the Starbuck series (1993-96), set during the American Civil War.  Yes, there’s enough Cornwell goodness out there to keep me reading for a long time to come.

 

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell

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Ian Jenkins 1941-2025

 

From facebook.com / Peebles Beltane Festival

 

At the end of last month I received some sad news.  Ian Jenkins, a teacher, a politician and a well-kent face in the Scottish town of Peebles, where I spent some of my formative years, had passed away at the age of 84.

 

He taught me English for four of the five years, from 1977 to 1982, that I attended Peebles High School.  It’s impossible to think of the English-literature texts I had to study during those four years – novels like Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1871) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954); drama like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1959), Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959), Barry England’s Conduct Unbecoming (1969) and the Shakespeare plays Romeo and Juliet (1595), Hamlet (1601) and Macbeth (1606); and poems by Robert Burns, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes – without hearing Ian’s voice, with its gentle, mellifluous accent, explaining and quoting from them.

 

He hailed from the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde and, to my ears at least, his accent seemed mellifluous.  Mind you, I came from western Northern Ireland, where folk often spoke broadly, gruffly and roughly.  Compared to there, most types of Scottish accent sounded charming to me.

 

When I was at school, attitudes about educating young people had shifted from the old-fashioned, dictatorial approach to a more humane one.  But even in the late 1970s and early 1980s there remained some intimidating, traditional-minded teachers who made pupils feel as uncomfortable and on-edge in their classrooms as newly-conscripted troops hunkered down in the trenches.  Also, the European Court of Human Rights didn’t get around to banning the tawse – that palm-flaying form of corporal punishment informally known as ‘the belt’ – from Scottish schools until the mid-1980s.

 

But you never approached Ian Jenkins’ classroom with a feeling of trepidation.  You never worried he’d got out of the wrong side of bed that morning and he might lose the rag and start swinging the tawse at the slightest provocation.  No, you looked forward to his lessons because he was a mellow, kindly and jolly soul.

 

And unlike some of his colleagues, he treated his pupils like grown-ups.  I remember the occasional English lesson with him giving way to a debate about one of the big political issues of the time, such as nuclear disarmament – Soviet tanks had rolled into Afghanistan in December 1979, East-West tensions were high and the prospect of the world vanishing in a puff of mushroom-shaped, radioactive smoke was not a remote one – or whether there should be a Western boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a protest against that Soviet invasion.

 

Another issue of great geopolitical importance we discussed was the terrible performance – under the hapless stewardship of Ally MacLeod – by Scotland’s national football team at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.

 

© Revelation Press

 

I remember one lesson that made me wonder how happy he was being a teacher.  In teaching, after all, you tend to talk about the same things year after year, in the same surroundings, with the only element of change being your pupils arriving, growing older, and departing again.  During that lesson we looked at Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1842 poem Ulysses, in which the legendary Greek hero is now an old man, is back home after his many travels and adventures, and faces spending the remainder of his life in peaceful domesticity.  But he decides, “To hell with that!”  He resolves to set sail again and look for new adventures: “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world / Push off and sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.”

 

Wistfully, Ian remarked that sometimes he felt he should follow Ulysses’ example and set off in search of excitement and adventure before it was too late.  And by the time of the poem, Ulysses had already done stuff.  He’d fought in the Trojan War, escaped from the cyclops Polyphemus, encountered the sorceress Circe, survived the Sirens, sailed between Scylla and Charybdis and been the lover of the nymph Calypso.  Whereas Ian had merely taught English at a high school in Peebles.  I’m sure, though, countless Peebles schoolkids during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were glad he didn’t clear off as Ulysses did and persevered with the teaching.

 

He certainly had my gratitude, for the help he gave me with my writing.  I’d been writing stories since I was nine or ten years old and in my teens, after class, I’d sometimes approach Ian clutching the latest piece of fiction I’d penned and ask him if he could read it and offer me advice on it.  The poor man.  At the time I was heavily influenced by the great, if verbose, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and my stories were written in florid prose and featured some hopefully horrific (though more often absurd) subject-matter.  For example, one story I gave him was about a man who comes into possession of a grandfather clock that’d once belonged to a witch and discovers that the witch’s monstrous familiar still lives inside it – the inspiration for this effort was Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House (1933).  Yet Ian was remarkably patient, civil and encouraging in his feedback.  He did advise me to use fewer adjectives, though.

 

I left school in 1982 but kept in touch with Ian and his wife Midge – who was also a teacher, of French, and who at school had had the unenviable task of trying to coax the euphonic French language out of my broad, gruff and rough Northern Irish-accented mouth.  I frequently bumped into them around Peebles and also sometimes called at their house, which seemed a wonderful place to me because: (1) it was full of books; and (2) it contained whisky too, a generous dram of which was pushed my way any time I visited.

 

Ian was always eager to lend or recommend books to me.  The first time I read Ernest Hemingway, it was a collection of Hemingway’s short stories he’d lent me – no doubt hoping I’d discover from it you could write effective prose without sticking three or four adjectives before every noun.  Another book from the Jenkins lending-library important for me was one that introduced me to the ghost stories of M.R. James.  In the early 1980s, in response to his urging, I procured and read a copy of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), now regarded as the most important Scottish novel of the second half of the 20th century.  And he championed the works of Thomas Hardy.  After reading Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), I remember arguing with him – in a friendly way, over a nip of whisky – about the book’s most outlandish character, Little Father Time.  “He’s a bit over the top,” I said.  Ian retorted, “Aye, but he’s fun.”

 

© Penguin Classics

 

I managed, though, to read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) before he did.  In the mid-1990s Ian told me one of his pupils had decided to write her English Sixth-Year-Studies dissertation about it.  So, he thought he’d better familiarise himself with Trainspotting to be able to give her support.  “Well,” I asked, “what did you think?”  He replied, “It’s, er, robust.”

 

Then in 1999, like Ulysses, Ian did set sail in search of new adventures.  Okay, he only sailed 21 miles up the road, from Peebles to Edinburgh, where he became a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) representing the constituency of Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, which included Peebles.  But as this was the first time Scotland had had its own parliament for nearly 300 years, it was a historical occasion and being one of the new MSPs was an achievement.  I’d known he was a political creature and in our conversations politics was a regular topic.  He was a lifelong Liberal Democrat, which led to some bickering between us – again in a friendly way, because it was invariably done over a nip of whisky – because during the 1990s my lapel regularly sported a badge for the Scottish National Party (SNP).

 

I lived in Edinburgh during the late 1990s.  July 1st, 1999, saw the official opening of the Scottish Parliament.  As I’ve said, this was the first time since 1707 there’d been a Scottish parliament, so it was a big occasion with a big parade.  Because the streets of central Edinburgh are narrow and aren’t conducive to large crowds gathering to watch a parade, a giant screen had been set up in East Princes Street Gardens so that folk could watch the festivities there.  That was where I headed.  The parade included delegations of schoolchildren from all over Scotland and, at one point, a group of kids from Peebles High School appeared on the screen.  Then the camera cut to an excited, jolly-looking man jumping up and down and waving at them.  I burst out laughing, which prompted a woman standing nearby to ask, “What’s the matter?”  I told her proudly, “That’s my English teacher.”

 

During his four years as an MSP, Ian served as the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for Education, Culture and Sport.  It pleased me that Robert McNeil, the journalist and sketch-writer who covered the Scottish parliament for the Scotsman newspaper, referred to him affectionately as ‘Jolly Jenkins’.  I worked on the upper part of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and a couple of times bumped into him there – in those days, the parliament did its business in the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly Hall on the Mound, before the official parliament building was opened at the foot of the Mile in 2004 – and, as ever, he was happy to stop and chat.

 

After he stood down as an MSP in 2003, I continued to bump into him and Midge in Peebles.  I’d encounter them at Peebles’ annual agricultural show.  At one show in the early 2010s he told me how pissed-off he was that the Nick Clegg-led Liberal Democrats had formed a coalition government with the Conservatives.  I’d also see them at Peebles’ Eastgate Theatre.  One evening, my partner and I arrived there for a late showing of the 2014 Mike Leigh movie Mr. Turner, which starred Timothy Spall as the unorthodox English painter J.M.W. Turner, and we met the Jenkinses emerging from an earlier showing of it.  “I hear Timothy Spall grunts a lot,” I said.  Bemused, they confirmed that, yes, Spall does grunt a lot in the movie.  Our last meeting must have been in 2015.  That was when I had some work lined up in Kolkata in India and I needed to write the name and contact details of a possible referee on the application form for an Indian visa.  So, I asked Ian if he’d be my referee and, naturally, he agreed.

 

It saddens me that I didn’t see him after that.  My work situation changed, which kept me in Asia for most of the time and reduced my opportunities to go back to Scotland.  Covid-19 happened, which changed my work situation even more and reduced the opportunities to go home even further.  There were many things I’d have liked to tell him during the past ten years.  I’d have loved to report that, finally, I’d managed to read all the novels written by his beloved Thomas Hardy – even the most obscure ones, like Desperate Remedies (1871), A Laodicean (1881) and Two on a Tower (1882).  Not being a fan of Britain’s honours system, I’d have enjoyed ribbing him about the fact that, in 2024, he’d been made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) – though I should add that he got his MBE for very good reasons, for his work for charity and services to his local community.  “Does this mean,” I’d have asked, “you can now call yourself ‘Emperor Jenkins’?”

 

Most of all, I’d have liked to tell him that the number of short stories I’ve had published has now reached treble figures.  My 100th story appeared in print in 2024.  At least part of that achievement is due to the encouragement I got from my old English teacher.

 

After he died, one of my siblings sent me a link to a Peebles Facebook page, where the announcement of his passing had brought a flood of condolences and tributes from people who’d known him, often first of all as pupils in his classroom.  It felt like half of Peebles had posted.  Dozens and dozens of messages spoke of his kindness and decency, his patient and good-humoured teaching, his sense of civic duty, how he did his best to help and encourage the folk he came in contact with, how – whoever you were and whenever and wherever you met him – he was always pleased to stop and blether with you.   Which reminded me that my experiences of the man were by no means unique.

 

So, Ian Jenkins might not have been a hero in the roving, adventuring, Greek-mythological mode of Ulysses.  But in terms of the positive impact he had on many people’s lives, and the simple pleasure of his company, he was a hero – a true local hero.

 

© BBC

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It has happened here

 

© Renard Press

 

Nowadays, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) feels like a story of alternative history, exploring what would have happened in the USA if the historical timeline had taken a twist in the mid-1930s it didn’t actually take.  But when Lewis wrote it, the real timeline and his imaginary one were in the future.  He was peeking ahead to the presidential election of 1936, one year after his novel’s publication, and wondering, “What if…?”  In its original context, then, It Can’t Happen Here was a work of science fiction, though the future imagined was so barely ahead of the present that it probably didn’t seem like that.

 

It gives me no pleasure to report that reading the book in the middle of 2025, with the USA sliding remorselessly towards authoritarianism under the presidency of Donald Trump, It Can’t Happen Here doesn’t feel dated.  No, it’s surely more relevant than ever.

 

The novel explores what could have happened if the 1936 election hadn’t been won by Franklin D. Roosevelt – who in fact won it resoundingly, garnering over 60 percent of the popular vote and securing over 98 percent of the electoral college.  In Lewis’s version of events, the presidency is won by a populist maverick called Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip.  It’s commonly assumed Lewis based Windrip on the controversial Louisiana governor and US Senate member Huey Long.  In an ironic twist of fate, Long was assassinated one month before It Can’t Happen Here was published.  The son-in-law of a political rival shot him, though it’s been claimed Long actually died of a wound from a ricocheting bullet fired by one of his trigger-happy bodyguards, who immediately responded to the attacker by pumping him ‘full of lead’.

 

Early on in It Can’t Happen Here, we get to read Buzz Windrip’s campaign manifesto, The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.  This is a grab-bag of crowd-pleasing promises – the government giving every family 5000 dollars a year (point 11) while wealth being capped at 3,000,000 dollars per person (point 5) – and nakedly racist, reactionary and jingoistic rhetoric.  You have to swear allegiance to the New Testament and the flag if you want a job in the professions (point 4), threats are made against the Jews (point 9) and blacks and women are disenfranchised (points 10 and 12 respectively).  Oh, and there’s a sneaky final point, number 15, wherein Congress and the Supreme Court have to cede all authority to the Presidency.

 

The manifesto is popular enough to put Windrip in the White House and, thereafter, the USA experiences a rapid fascist takeover similar to the one Hitler engineered in Germany in 1933-34.  Windrip soon has his own militia / secret police making sure everyone toes the line, media, educational and economic institutions are bullied into acquiescence, and opponents, dissenters and anyone else the regime takes a dislike to are herded into concentration camps – that’s what the novel calls them, several years before the Nazis made the term ‘concentration camp’ synonymous with evil on an industrial scale.

 

The country’s lurch into dystopia is seen through the eyes of Doremus Jessop, a 60-year-old, liberal-minded editor of a smalltown newspaper in Vermont.  Jessop finds out the hard way that the new regime doesn’t take kindly to criticism – he pens a scathing editorial, which leads to an altercation with some officials, which results in his son-in-law being executed.  Afterwards, he’s forced to do an about-turn with his paper’s editorials and news coverage and make it a propaganda mouthpiece for Windrip and his government, as every other official news outlet in America had become.

 

Later, a disgusted and horrified Doremus hooks up with a resistance movement, the New Underground, run by a dissident senator called Walt Trowbridge who’s escaped to and based himself in Canada, and he begins surreptitiously writing and distributing an anti-Windrip newsletter called The Vermont Vigilance.  Later still, Doremus and his associates are rumbled and they wind up in a concentration camp.  But the story isn’t quite over yet for the dogged old editor…

 

© Penguin Books

 

As I said earlier, when you read It Can’t Happen Here today, there’s an elephant in the room – a corrupt, authoritarian, orange-skinned elephant, one with a bad combover, a ludicrously long red tie, a big mouth, a small pair of hands, a tiny but cunning brain, a criminal record, and a penchant for cheating at golf.  Yes, it’s shocking how much Lewis’s novel anticipates what Trump is up to in America at the moment.

 

As with Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which is now better funded than most countries’ armies and is no doubt attracting into its ranks all sorts of far-right nutjobs, Windrip sets up a militia called the Minute Men (MMs) and recruits into it thugs and low-life who relish having the power to intimidate, bully, beat up and murder their neighbors.  Doremus’s life gets progressively harder as Shad Ledue – his former handyman, who’s a lazy, ignorant brute and who lusts after his youngest daughter – joins the local Minute Men and, gradually, shins his way up the pole until he becomes District Commissioner.  And Trump’s enthusiasm for creating ‘immigration detention facilities’, like the notorious ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in Florida, mirrors Windrip’s enthusiasm for creating concentration camps, like the one Doremus latterly finds himself an inmate of.

 

It Can’t Happen Here makes much of the regime’s assault on academia.  Early on, Doremus receives a worried letter from an acquaintance at his old alma mater, Isiah College, warning about how its Board of Trustees is bending to Windrip’s malevolent will.  “What,” he asks, “can we do with such fast exploding fascism?”  Trump has famously tried to do the same with America’s universities – some, like Columbia University, groveling to him pathetically; others, like Harvard, putting up slightly more of a fight.

 

Windrip sees to it that the ‘most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name.”  Trump, of course, has made sure that the present-day Supreme Court is packed with yes-men and yes-women.

 

And in an effort to bolster its authority, Windrip’s regime launches an operation to end ‘all crime in America forever’.  Criminals are “tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent… and two in ten taken in the MMs as inspectors.”  That sounds suspiciously like Trump’s recent takeover of Washington D.C., supposedly in the name of ridding the capital city’s streets of crime, though more likely to divert attention from the possibility that Trump’s name appears in the US Justice Department’s files investigating Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Generally, Lewis’s descriptions of how Windrip manages to captivate the American public, or a section of it sufficiently large to get him into power, are depressingly similar to how Trump weaves a spell over his ‘MAGA faithful’ – portraying himself as an outsider and anti-establishment figure, despite the fact he’s the son of a real-estate millionaire and has had everything handed to him on a plate.  Of Windrip, Lewis says: “…he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering above them, and they raised their hands to him in worship.”

 

Meanwhile, Lewis highlights how the regime puts in positions of authority people who are worthless but unswervingly loyal to Windrip.  That loyalty, of course, rewards them with wealth, power and prestige.  Trump too has populated his government with sycophantic mediocrities, self-serving grifters and dangerous incompetents like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio.  Their single virtue, in Trump’s eyes, is their ceaseless willingness to bow, scrape and debase themselves before him.

 

There’s even a parallel with Elon Musk who, as the world’s richest man and CEO of the social-media platform X, has a massive ability to inform and misinform people and shape their opinions.  The It Can’t Happen Here version of Musk is Bishop Paul Peter Prang, a priest who makes a hugely popular and influential weekly address on the radio.  Like Musk’s voice on social media, Prang’s voice ‘circled the world at 186,000 miles a second’ and practically ‘leapt to the farthest stars.’  (Prang’s character was inspired by a real-life demagogue, the ‘Radio Priest’ Charles Coughlin.)  And like Musk with Trump, Prang enthusiastically backs Windrip for president – but gets short shrift from the man he’s championed once he’s across the threshold of the White House.  Though while Trump merely dropped and humiliated Musk, Windrip sticks Prang in jail and then in an ‘insane asylum’: “No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang again.”

 

All that said, It Can’t Happen Here is not a perfect book.  It has certain features that earn it the dreaded sobriquet ‘of its time’.  The focus is almost entirely on a handful of comfortably well-off white Americans and, though there are brief references to the horrors Windrip visits upon the black community, the book shows no interest in exploring these.  Also, Lewis makes mocking references to sexuality of Lee Sarason, Windrip’s Machiavellian campaign manager, who wears ‘violet silk pajamas’ and obviously has a fondness for strapping young men.  But no mention is made of the regime’s official policy towards homosexuals, which presumably would have been as murderous as Nazi Germany’s.  And male chauvinists will appreciate how Doremus gets to have his cake and eat it throughout the book, in that he’s simultaneously married to one woman, dull, frumpy Emma, and engaged in an affair with another, the bewitching firebrand Lorinda.  He’s never taken to task for this.

 

And the book’s tone can be awkward at times.  Lewis writes it in a folksy, sardonic, Mark Twain-like style that sometimes works, especially when its poking fun at the general hypocrisies, absurdities and idiocies of Windrip’s regime.  It works less well when it’s detailing the brutal realities of that regime – the tortures and humiliations, for instance, that Doremus has to endure while he’s in a concentration camp.  For subject-matter as bleak as this, I suspect the only way to record it is with the precise and dispassionate prose of, say, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

 

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here may not quite make it into the top tier of great dystopian novels, then.  However, in 2025, you’re unlikely to read one that feels more terrifyingly prescient.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Touring Club Italiano

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It could have happened here

 

© Triad Granada

 

Recently, I’ve read a couple of ‘alternative history’ novels that imagine different realities in the 1930s and 1940s: wherein Britain and the USA were taken over by fascism just as Germany and Italy were.  What could have induced me, in 2025, to read novels about Britain and the USA succumbing to fascism?  I really can’t imagine.  Here are my thoughts on one of those books, Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978).

 

Deighton is best known as the author of The IPCRESS File (1962), the book that introduced the world to Harry Palmer, a down-at-heels spy whose humdrum experiences are a corrective to the glamorous espionage fantasy-world inhabited by Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

 

Actually, that description does both Deighton and Fleming a disservice.  Harry Palmer isn’t even the name of the protagonist in The IPCRESS File.  Deighton keeps its first-person narrator anonymous.  The name was only devised for the character in 1965 when the book was made into a film with the non-capitalised title The Ipcress File, directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring Michael Caine.  Also, while the film version is determinedly unexotic and, possibly for budgetary reasons, restricts its action to a non-swinging 1960s London, Deighton’s novel is more expansive.  It allows its hero to do some properly exciting, Bondian things, such as participate in a rescue mission in Beirut and visit an American neutron-bomb test site in the Pacific Ocean.

 

Meanwhile, Fleming’s novels certainly featured exotic locations (the Caribbean, the Swiss Alps, the French coast), exotic activities (scuba diving, skiing, gambling in casinos) and exotic food and drink (caviar, stone crabs, Dom Pérignon champagne), which no doubt tantalised his readers, many of whom were living in drab, austere, post-war Britain and eating such rationing-era fare as pig’s trotters, spam and lardy cake.  But he invested at least some of those novels with a little grit and realism too.  However, just as the medium of film made Harry Palmer more lowkey than the literary original, so a series of over-the-top movies unanchored the character of Bond and floated him off into the realms of total fantasy.  Ironically, the Harry Palmer movies and the first nine Bond movies shared the same producer, Harry Saltzman.

 

© Lowndes Productions / Rank Film Distributors

 

I was reminded of this dichotomy when reading SS-GB because, while its hero inhabits a grey, downbeat world, where dealing with even the simplest details of everyday life can be exhausting, some big, almost Bondian things hove into view and require his attention.  These, though, hardly make his existence any more glamorous.  Rather, they make it a lot harder for him than it was already.

 

In Deighton’s imagined alternative universe, SS-GB begins in November 1941.  Nine months earlier, in February, Britain surrendered to Germany.  February 1941 was four months before, in real history, Hitler turned against Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, an event that in in SS-GB evidently didn’t happen because the novel depicts Germany and the Soviet Union as, still, firm allies.  Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, which drew the USA into the war against the Axis powers, occurred at the end of 1941 and hasn’t happened yet.  One wonders if, here, it will happen, given the alterations elsewhere on the timeline.  The USA remains neutral in SS-GB, whilst peering across the Atlantic at a fully Nazi-controlled Europe with wariness and trepidation.  Incidentally, Deighton provides almost no exposition about what has gone on and it’s left to the reader to infer.

 

SS-GB’s hero, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, is a policeman at Scotland Yard who finds himself having to do his police-work under the supervision of the German occupiers.  His immediate superior is General – ‘or, more accurately in SS parlance, Gruppenführer’ – Fritz Kellerman: “a genial-looking man in his late fifties… of medium height but his enthusiasm for food and drink provided a rubicund complexion and a slight plumpness…”  Obviously, it was never put to the test, but Kellerman represents a good guess on Deighton’s part about how many German officials would have behaved if they had been posted to a defeated Britain and put in power there.   They’d have behaved like amiable Anglophiles, dressing in tweed suits, going hunting and fishing on country estates, playing golf, guzzling Scotch whisky and stocking their rooms with British antiques.  (Deighton has fun developing that last idea.  He depicts a bunch of 1940s British spivs running an illicit trade in British heirlooms, aimed at the German occupiers.)

 

Archer fits neatly into those Germans’ image of Britain because he represents another cosy and much-loved British cliché: the famous sleuthing detective.  Recognising him, one occupier exclaims, “You’re Archer of the Yard… You’re the detective who solved the Bethnal Green Poisonings and caught ‘the Rottingdean Ripper’ back before the war.”  Later in the book, Archer plays up his fame among the Germans – at least, the ones who enjoy true-life crime stories – to his advantage.

 

Behind the bonhomie of the likes of Kellerman, however, lurks the despotic ruthlessness of Nazi Germany.  Early on, Kellerman warns Archer about what may be coming.  Of Scotland Yard, he says, “Neither of us want political advisors in this building, Superintendent.  Inevitably, the outcome would be that your police force is used against British Resistance groups, uncaptured soldiers, political fugitives, Jews, gypsies and other undesirable elements.”

 

The story begins with Archer assigned to what looks like a straightforward murder case, a shooting in a rundown neighbourhood called Shepherd Market.  The murder scene is a flat “crammed with whisky, coffee, tea and so on, and Luftwaffe petrol coupons lying around on the table.  The victim is a well-dressed man, probably a black-marketeer.”  Of course, Archer gradually realises there’s more to the case than initially meets the eye.  And, as he grapples with the increasingly serious implications of what he’s investigating, he encounters a variety of characters who may be on his side or may be out to get him.

 

These include an officer in the SS’s intelligence service, an intense and driven man called Oskar Huth, who’s flown in from Berlin and put in charge of Archer and his investigation, and who’s the antithesis of the jocular Kellerman.  When Archer meets him off his Lufthansa plane and inquires where his bags are, he snaps, “Shotguns, golf-clubs and fishing tackle, you mean?  I’ve no time for that sort of nonsense.”  Constituting the one glamorous element that enters Archer’s life during the book is Barbara Barqa, a foxy American journalist who’s been allowed into London by the press attaché of the German Embassy in Washington.  She unexpectedly turns up at the murder scene and, predictably, isn’t all that she seems.  Meanwhile, additional tension comes from Archer’s elderly sergeant, and mentor, Harry Woods.  He’s a man ‘who fought and won in the filth of Flanders’ and ‘would never come to terms with defeat.’  It’s whispered that he has connections with the British Resistance movement, which makes Archer’s position very precarious.

 

As Archer’s investigation continues, I was, initially, a little disappointed by two of the main plot devices that Deighton uses.  These devices seemed to me slightly obvious ones for an alternative-history / World War II novel set in early-1940s London.  One is the race by various countries to develop a game-changing weapon – guess which weapon that is.  Indeed, when Archer learns that the murder-victim was suffering from radiation poisoning, I was reminded of Troy Kennedy Martin’s masterly TV miniseries Edge of Darkness (1985), which had a policeman investigating a killing and finding himself embroiled in a huge conspiracy involving the nuclear industry.  The other plot device is an operation to rescue an important personage whom the Germans have imprisoned in the Tower of London.  If the rescue is successful, it’ll be a boost for Britain’s battered morale and a propaganda win for the British Resistance.  Again, guess who that personage is.

 

To be fair, Deighton keeps both plot devices grounded. They’re wrapped in believably authentic realpolitik involving the neutral Americans, different elements in the British Resistance, and competing factions among the occupying Germans.  And the way one of them is resolved, near the end, caused me genuine surprise.  Also, there’s a subplot involving Karl Marx – whose remains are buried at London’s Highgate Cemetery – that I thought Deighton handled ingeniously.

 

But what really makes SS-GB a pleasure are Deighton’s descriptions of everyday life in occupied London – and what the ordinary population, war-weary, demoralised and living near the breadline, have to put up with.  There’s ‘the green, sooty fog’ with its ‘ugly smell’, which doesn’t quite hide ‘advertisement hoardings, upon which appeals for volunteers to work in German factories, announcements about rationings and a freshly pasted German-Soviet Friendship Week poster shone rain-wet.’  There’s Archer’s landlady, whose soldier-husband is in ‘a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.’  She serves her policeman lodger eggs she got from a neighbour as payment for an ‘old grey sweater to unravel for the wool’, and a cube of margarine, ‘the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers.’

 

And there’s a rather desperate-sounding gala evening at the Metropolitan Music Hall.  This ends with the cast trying to cheer up the dejected London audience by ‘throwing paper streamers, wearing funny hats and popping balloons that descended from a great wire basket suspended from the ceiling’ – leaving the theatre ‘in a chaos of litter that had to be salvaged for re-use.’  The line-up for the evening includes Gracie Fields and Flanagan and Allen.  No George Formby, though.  Probably he’s in a prison camp, as a punishment for punching Hitler in his 1940 movie Let George Do It! 

 

And there are the ruins and wreckage left both by the Blitz and by Deighton’s imagined German invasion.  It’s a grey, wet, cold, blasted place, full of dejected and frustrated people, and it isn’t difficult to envision the London of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) being a little further along the road.  Deighton, who’s still with us at the venerable age of 96, was ten years old when World War II broke out, and he came from the Marylebone area of London.  Presumably, he had images of the city in wartime seared into his memory and didn’t have to stretch his imagination too much to describe SS-GB’s version of it.

 

Thus, SS-GB’s crowning achievement is a depiction of Nazi-controlled London, and Britain, that you can practically see, hear, feel, smell and taste.  Though of course, you really wouldn’t have wanted to.

 

© Harper Collins Publishers

 

Apparently, in 2017, the BBC turned SS-GB into a five-episode TV miniseries, starring Sam Riley, Rainer Bock, Lars Eidinger, Kate Bosworth and James Cosmo.  I haven’t seen it, but let’s hope the BBC made a good job of it.  

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Happy belated birthday, Patrick

 

© Pan Macmillan

 

A month ago, I planned to post something on this blog in honour of the great Irish writer Patrick McCabe, who celebrated his 70th birthday on March 27th.  Somehow, though, I forgot all about it and the Happy-Birthday-Patrick post didn’t appear.  I must have been distracted by something else near the end of March – probably the latest atrocity or lunacy perpetrated by Donald Trump’s administration in the USA.  I can’t remember what.  The atrocities and lunacies have come thick and fast since the Orange Jobby’s inauguration as the 47th American president and it’s impossible to keep track of them.

 

Anyway, here’s that post now.  Be warned that it contains many spoilers for McCabe’s books.

 

Patrick McCabe hails from the town of Clones (pronounced ‘klo-nis’, not as in the 2002 Star Wars movie Attack of the Clones) in County Monaghan, just over the border from Northern Ireland.  Clones is famous as the birthplace of boxer Barry McGuigan, known during his pugilistic career as ‘the Clones Cyclone’, though I suspect McCabe was more intrigued by the exploits of another famous, or infamous, native of the town, Alexander Pearce, the convict, serial escapee and alleged cannibal who was hung in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1824.

 

Clones and the surrounding countryside are obviously influential on McCabe’s writing and that explains some of the affinity I feel for it – Clones is only a 35-minute drive from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, where I was born and went to school. Though Clones is in the Irish Republic and Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and as a result the political and cultural vibes aren’t quite the same, there’s nonetheless much in his books I can relate to: how his characters think, behave and speak and how they deal with, or fail to deal with, the frustrations and absurdities that their environment assails them with.

 

Also, McCabe’s books can be very funny and very dark, frequently at the same time.  If there’s anything I find irresistible, it’s the combination of humour and darkness, done well.

 

The most famous of McCabe’s books is 1992’s The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times’ Irish Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  Like Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), it made such a splash that it both overshadowed his other works and became the measuring stick against which they were all compared.  However, while Lanark and Trainspotting were Gray and Welsh’s first published books, The Butcher Boy was McCabe’s fourth.  It followed the children’s book The Adventures of Shay Mouse (1985) and the novels Music on Clinton Street (1987) and Carn (1989).  That last book is set in a small Irish town, the Carn of the title, that’s clearly a fictional stand-in for Clones and it’s the only one of his early works that I’ve read.

 

© Picador Books

 

Actually, I read Carn after I’d read The Butcher Boy, and for a long time I thought it was published after The Butcher Boy too.  Maybe Carn feels like a subsequent book because The Butcher Boy is set in the early 1960s, while Carn’s plot spans the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  Amusingly, late on, McCabe describes how the townsfolk of Carn have become addicted to the brash American TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91) and are talking about J.R. Ewing and co. as if they’re real people.

 

Carn tells the tale both of two women, Sadie and Josie, who are trapped in the town in different ways – one drudges in the local meat-packing factory, the other is an outcast who returns after a long exile – and of the town itself, experiencing economic growth in the 1960s, witnessing nearby Northern Ireland going insane in the 1970s, and suffering economic decline in the 1980s.  At one point, Josie reflects on the changes, on how “a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.”  Carn isn’t McCabe’s best work, but its blend of sadness, tenderness, bleakness and humour makes it an interesting blueprint for what was to follow.

 

The Butcher Boy is a more claustrophobic read than Carn because we’re stuck inside the head of its main character, psychotic youngster Francie Brady.  Told by Francie in the first person, we quickly realise he’s an unreliable narrator.  Indeed, the opening line spells it out: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.”  This isn’t unreliable narration in the style of Kazuo Ishiguro where it gradually dawns on you that the reality isn’t quite as it’s being presented.  It’s unreliable narration where you know fine well the vile and cruel things that are really going on, despite Francie’s deluded blathering, and you read on with (metaphorically) your fingers over your eyes, waiting for the excruciating moment when the penny finally drops.

 

This happens several times.  Francie’s friendship with a comparatively normal lad called Joe Purcell clearly frays much more quickly than Francie thinks it does.  Francie clings to the belief they’re best buddies even when it’s obvious Joe is repelled by the sight of him.  Also, after the deaths of his parents, Francie becomes obsessed with a story he’d heard from his father, Benny, about their honeymoon in the seaside town of Bundoran.  As Benny told it, he and Francie’s mother were young, beautiful and blissfully in love.  We just know from what we’ve seen of Benny, a drunken brute of a man, that the reality was horribly different.  Francie, though, believes in the ideal until he finally goes asking questions at the Bundoran boarding house his parents stayed in.  Only then does he realise the hideous truth.

 

© Picador Books

 

Worst of all is an earlier episode where Francie calms down for a while, works in the local abattoir and lives at home with Benny, who’s – supposedly – still alive at the time.  But Benny is oddly subdued and it’s evident to the reader that he’s died of alcoholism and is slowly decomposing into the sofa.  Francie, in his madness, doesn’t twig on until several months later when the police come calling.

 

Incidentally…  No disrespect to Patrick McCabe, but I have a wee quibble about the book’s continuity.  Francie mentions watching that hoary old American sci-fi TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which was produced by Irwin Allen and ran from 1964 to 1968.  But the book’s later action takes place against the potentially-apocalyptic background of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in 1962, two years before Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea debuted on television.  Maybe McCabe was thinking of the movie that inspired the TV show, released in 1961?

 

In 1997, The Butcher Boy was filmed by Neil Jordan, a writer-director who with movies like Angel (1982), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) has a knack similar to McCabe’s for taking the dreary and mundane and creating something out-of-the-ordinary with it.  Though with Jordan, what’s created is closer to magical realism.  With McCabe, it’s gothic.  The film follows the book fairly faithfully, with a few small embellishments – I liked Sinead O’Connor cameoing as the Virgin Mary.  However, just by being a film, it’s a less suffocating experience, as we’re seeing events as bystanders, not inside from the cockpit of Francie’s head.  Incidentally, McCabe appears among the cast playing the town drunk, Jimmy the Skite.

 

© Picador Books

 

I’ve read claims that Francie’s mental unravelling is meant to symbolise Ireland’s fragile and precarious sense of identity, moving from colonial status to independence and having to navigate such momentous events as the permissive swinging 1960s and the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  But to me McCabe’s next book, The Dead School (1995), is more obviously about that.  It pits Old Ireland – represented by Raphael Bell, the pious, patriotic and upstanding master of a boys’ boarding school – against Young Ireland – represented by Malachy Dudgeon, a product of a dysfunctional family and a member of a younger, less conservative and more fun-loving generation than Raphael’s.  Malachy becomes a teacher and ends up working at Raphael’s school, with disastrous consequences for both of them.  Later, when their paths cross again, things are even worse – one is mad, the other an alcoholic.  The Dead School describes a collision of two different eras, and two antagonistic Irish mindsets, and the result is as unpretty as The Butcher Boy.

 

After the darkness of those two books, I was ready for Breakfast on Pluto (1998), which also made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist.  This recounts the early-1970s adventures of Patrick ‘Pussy’ Brady, described in contemporary reviews as a ‘gay transvestite’ though now I suppose she’d be called a transwoman.  Pussy leaves her Irish hometown and heads to London in search of her biological mother, who’d abandoned her when she was a baby.  Overshadowing everything are the Troubles that have recently bloodily erupted in Northern Ireland and are making their presence felt in London too, thanks to bombing campaigns by the IRA.  With Irish terrorist violence on the menu, Breakfast on Pluto may not sound a barrel of laughs, but I found it hilarious thanks to Pussy’s droll way of describing things.  I also found it curiously uplifting.  Despite having many indignities inflicted upon her, Pussy is a trooper who keeps on going.

 

Breakfast on Pluto was filmed in 2005, again courtesy of Neil Jordan.  The movie version is a bit too long and episodic, but it’s mightily enjoyable and has a lighter, breezier feel than the book.  Cillian ‘Oppenheimer’ Murphy plays the main character, whose name is changed from ‘Pussy’ to the less provocative ‘Kitten’.  This is one of several alterations Jordan makes.  Kitten’s first lover – whom McCabe depicted as a crooked Irish politician in the mould of Charles Haughey – becomes a singer in a rock band, played by Gavin Friday, real-life singer of the Virgin Prunes.  And generally, Jordan glams things up with some pleasantly nostalgic references to early-1970s popular culture.  For instance, the film features both Wombles and Daleks, which I don’t recall being in the original.  McCabe has a cameo in this too, playing a schoolteacher who freaks out when the young Kitten asks him for advice on how to have a sex change.  Sadly, though, Breakfast on Pluto is one of Jordan’s more underrated and neglected films.

 

© Picador Books

 

A year after Breakfast on Pluto, McCabe published a short-story collection, Mondo Desperado. The stories’ titles, like My Friend Bruce Lee, I Ordained the Devil and The Boils of Thomas Gully, tell you what to expect – more of that inimitable McCabe cocktail of the humdrum, absurd, grotesque, macabre and howlingly funny.  Deserving special mention is the opening story, Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge, which memorably begins: “It’s hard to figure out how in a small town like this a mature woman of twenty-eight years could get herself mixed up with a bunch of deadbeat swingers, but that is exactly what happened to Cora Bunyan and I should know because she was my wife.”

 

After that, I lost track of McCabe’s books for a while.  To date, there’s been seven more I haven’t read: Emerald Gems of Ireland (2001), Call Me the Breeze (2003), Winterwood (2006) – which Irvine Welsh reviewed admiringly in the Guardian – The Holy City (2009), Hello and Goodbye (2013), The Big Yaroo (2019) and Poguemahone (2022).  A few years back, however, I did read his 2010 novel The Stray Sod Country, which I thought was wonderful.  It features another of McCabe’s exquisitely-drawn Irish small towns.  This time, the action takes place mostly in the late 1950s, around the time of the launch of Sputnik 2 in 1957 and the Munich air disaster in 1958 – though there are jumps forward in time to add perspective to the 1950s-set plot.

 

The Stray Sod Country has an omniscient and sinister narrator.  This, we learn, is a malevolent supernatural being called a fetch, which has a dismaying fondness for entering the minds of humans, corrupting them and encouraging them to do harm to others.  Sneakily, the fetch foments and escalates feuds between the townspeople.  Thus, for example, a rivalry, then hatred, develops between Golly Murray, wife of the town’s barber, and Blossom Foster, wife of its bank manager.  Meanwhile, in a fit of priestly jealousy worthy of Father Ted (1995-98), local cleric Father Hand fulminates against his old rival Father Peyton, ‘the infuriatingly smug Mayo toady’, now a ‘celebrity priest of Hollywood, America’ who associates with Frank Sinatra.  But he’d be better advised to worry about a disgraced schoolteacher called James A. Reilly.  Father Hand had him run out of town for kissing a male pupil.  Reilly is living as a vagrant in the nearby bog, nursing his wrath whilst in possession of an Enfield rifle from the Irish Civil War, and he’s fertile ground for the fetch.

 

I felt McCabe portrayed the cast of small-town eccentrics populating The Stray Sod Country with more affection than usual.  And he seemed to have a genuine love for the time and place depicted.  Perhaps the great man was mellowing with age?

 

So, I wish Patrick McCabe all the best as he enters his eighth decade.  Barry McGuigan may be the Clones Cyclone, but in literary terms McCabe is the Clones Hurricane – a hurricane of the homespun, the hideous and the hilarious.

 

© Bloomsbury Publishing

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Bernard Cornwell’s (still the) King

 

© Penguin Books

 

A while ago on this blog, I enthusiastically reviewed Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King (1995), the first volume of his Warlord Chronicles.  These books are his take on the King Arthur legend, which he tells in a manner closer to the reality of the Dark Ages than most other interpretations of the legend.  As a gift last Christmas, my partner kindly bought me the second and third volumes of the Warlord Chronicles, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997).  Here are my thoughts on Enemy of God, which I’ve recently finished reading.

 

Enemy of God’s framing device is the same as The Winter King’s.  In the sixth century, an elderly monk called Derfel is writing down the history of King Arthur at the behest of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the Arthurian tales she’s heard.  As a young man Derfel knew Arthur and became one of his most trusted warriors.  A theme in the books is the tension between messy reality and fanciful legend.  Derfel’s version of events frequently disappoints Igraine, accustomed to hearing much more romanticised stories about the king.  At one point she tells him, “There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you!”  Derfel fatalistically assumes that Igraine, later, will doctor his writings and make them more compatible with the legend.

 

The Winter King ended with Arthur triumphing at the Battle of Lugg Vale, a contest brought about by his own foolishness in backing out of an arranged marriage to Princess Ceinwyn of Powys, which massively offended her father, and wedding instead the more alluring but also more calculating Guinevere.  Enemy of God continues Arthur and Derfel’s story by detailing three more major events in their lives.

 

Firstly, Derfel takes part in Merlin’s ongoing quest to retrieve some relics that according to legend were given to the ancient Britons by the old pagan Gods, are known as the ‘Treasures of Britain’ and will, Merlin believes, restore Britain to the golden age it supposedly enjoyed before the arrivals of the Romans and, more lately, the Saxons.  Specifically, they go hunting for a magical cauldron that’s hidden on the island of Ynys Mon (today the Welsh island of Anglesey) off the coast of the kingdom of Lleyn, controlled by the vicious Irish king Diwrnach.  Secondly, Arthur marshals the warriors of most of the Briton kingdoms and sets off to dislodge the most powerful Saxon king, Aelle, from the east of the island – a campaign that eventually brings him to Saxon-controlled London.  And lastly, Arthur finds himself facing a rebellion in his home kingdom of Dummonia.  The rebels have incited the Christian community to rise against the pagan one there, with Arthur unjustly portrayed as the oppressive, Christian-hating pagan-in-chief, i.e., the ‘Enemy of God’ of the title.

 

Along the way, Derfel finds happiness with Ceinwyn, the woman Arthur spurned in the previous book, and they start a family together.  He also makes a troubling discovery about who his father is.  Arthur, meanwhile, learns some hard truths about certain people close to him whom he’s loved or, at least, been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to.  That Mordred, the boy-king of Dummonia, for whom Arthur has been acting as the kingdom’s lord-protector until the lad reaches manhood, turns out to be a wrong ’un is the least of the book’s surprises.

 

From wikimedia.org

 

A couple of things make Enemy of God feel different from its predecessor.  Firstly, Christianity is portrayed much more negatively here.  In The Winter King, the Christian Britons co-existed peacefully alongside the pagan ones, and the Briton kings had priests as well as druids in their entourages, ensuring them the support of both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Gods.  This harmoniousness was embodied in the character of the affable and loyal Bishop Bedwin, but Enemy of God bumps him off early on.  Thereafter, the only sympathetic Christian character is Sir Galahad, who’s so decent and broad-minded he even lends Merlin a hand in his quest for the pagan cauldron.

 

Amusingly, Cornwell portrays the Christians’ activities, wailing in tongues, flagellating themselves and generally behaving hysterically as the year 500 AD draw nears – likely, they believe, to be the year when their Saviour returns to the earth – as immensely disturbing to the pagans.  They react to the Christians’ shenanigans with as much distaste and fear as modern bourgeoisie Christians have reacted to the many loopy religious cults that have sprung up during the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

A second difference is that we get far more of Merlin in this book.  In The Winter King, he didn’t show up until page 282, more than halfway through.  I was slightly critical of how he was deployed in the previous book’s plot.  I wrote that “…the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely.  A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day.  He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, ‘Duh-dah!’”  This didn’t sit very comfortably with the book’s attempts to treat the Arthurian legend with non-fantastical seriousness.

 

Merlin’s still something of an issue In Enemy of God, though here it’s to do with how he manages to suddenly revitalise himself.  At different points he seems to be at death’s door, or to have lapsed into senile decrepitude, but then he stages startling comebacks.  He’s like Doctor Who regenerating when his old body is about to die though, unlike the TV Time Lord, Merlin doesn’t actually transform into someone new.

 

Still, Cornwell’s Merlin is an immensely engaging character and he gets the best lines.  While telling Derfel what a lion is, and describing one he once saw in Rome, he remarks: “It was a very unimpressive threadbare sort of thing.  I suspected it was receiving the wrong diet.  Maybe they were feeding it Mithraists instead of Christians?”  When he goes on to talk about a crocodile, and Derfel inquires what that is, he explains, “A thing like Lancelot.”

 

It’s more difficult to breathe life into the character of Arthur.  There’s a danger that his very worthiness will make him seem two-dimensional and dull.  However, Cornwell mostly avoids this trap by highlighting the character-flaws that spring from this worthiness: naivete, gullibility and – paradoxically – being so in thrall to his sense of duty that he becomes villainous.  This last thing is illustrated when Cornwell weaves the tragic, chivalric romance of Tristan and Iseult into his narrative.  Here, the loving but doomed couple incur the wrath of King Mark of Kernow and Arthur feels duty-bound to side with Mark, even though Tristan has helped him in earlier campaigns.  When this ends horribly, Derfel is so disgusted with Arthur that he shuns him for a long time afterwards.

 

© Cartwright Hall Art Gallery / Bradford Museums & Galleries

 

It’s surprising to read a book written almost 30 years ago, and set roughly 1500 years ago, and find elements in it reminding me of 2025.  But Enemy of God does this in different ways.  Living in an era of Trumpian fake news, often transmitted by social media, I found myself smiling ruefully at Derfel’s accounts of how the weaselly Lancelot propagates a false image of himself, one brave and virtuous, by getting the bards to sing songs in praise of him around the countryside.  And after Derfel falls out with Arthur, he goes to those bards and pays for “a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls.  I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.”

 

Also pushing fake news are the Christians.  At one point, a Christian magistrate called Nabur is executed for treason: “These days, of course, he is called a saint and martyr, but I only remember Nabur as a smooth, corrupt liar.”  Later, Arthur has to fight off an ambush in a squalid Christian settlement in the mountains of Powys, led by a filthy, wild-haired fanatic called Bishop Cadoc.  This also gets the Dark Ages equivalent of being reported on Elon Musk’s X: “They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasures to steal – but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it…”  Obviously, “Cadoc was elevated into a living saint…”

 

It’s also interesting to view Enemy of God through the prism of 2025’s Britain, when Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party is rallying its supporters with chants of “We want our country back.”  Although Merlin is a very appealing character overall, it’s not difficult to see parallels between his mission to restore the old pre-Roman Britain and the nostalgic British nationalism peddled by Farage.  Ceinwyn, who’s quite enamoured with Merlin, gives a startlingly Farage-like speech at one point: “When I was a child… I heard all the tales of old Britain, how the Gods lived among us and everyone was happy.  There was no famine then, and no plagues, just us and the Gods and peace.  I want that Britain back, Derfel.”

 

On the other hand, Arthur evokes a more forward-looking – dare I say inclusive? – Britain.  Early in the book, he rejects Merlin’s vision of the island, saying: “This isn’t the old Britain…  Maybe once we were a people of one blood, but now?  The Romans brought men from every corner of the world!  Sarmatians, Libyans, Gauls, Numidians, Greeks!  Their blood is mingled with ours, just as it seethes with Roman blood and mixes now with Saxon blood.  We are what we are, Derfel, not what we once were…”  Arthur might be the greatest hero of British legend, but Farage’s Reform Party wouldn’t want to cite Cornwell’s version of him in their campaign literature.

 

In nearly every respect, Enemy of God is as good as its predecessor.   The only area where I think it pales a little in comparison to The Winter King is its ending.  Whereas the first volume ended with the bang that was the Battle of Lugg Vale, this volume is slightly anti-climactic.  Cornwell was presumably more concerned with manoeuvring his characters into position for the third and final volume than with finishing the second instalment with a bang similar to the first’s.  This is, to be fair, a problem that has beset many a middle volume in many a trilogy.  However, with everything else about Enemy of God so captivating and entertaining, I’m happy to overlook that slight shortcoming.

 

And so, in the near-future, I’ll hopefully get to grips with Excalibur…

 

© Michael Joseph / St Martin’s Press

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The Moore, the merrier

 

© Bloomsbury

 

I first came across the works of Alan Moore in the mid-1980s, while I was a student in Aberdeen.  One day, I discovered a ramshackle shop on the city’s King Street selling tatty second-hand paperbacks and comics out of cardboard boxes at ridiculously low prices.

 

There, I managed to buy most of the 26 issues of a comics anthology called Warrior, which had appeared monthly from 1982 to 1985.  Initially, I was attracted to Warrior because its contents included the continuing adventures of Father Shandor, a comic-strip character I’d been obsessed with in my early teens.  (Shandor was a 19th-century Transylvanian monk who fought vampires and demons.  He’d actually started as a movie character, played by the gruff, no-nonsense Scottish actor Andrew Keir, who was the foe of Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the 1966 Hammer horror movie Dracula: Prince of Darkness.  He became the hero of a comic strip in the late-1970s magazine House of Hammer, whose editor Dez Skinn would later edit Warrior.  At an even younger age, I’d been a big fan of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange and Shandor seemed a darker, more serious and more violent version of that.)  However, it was only one of many serials in Warrior and the most striking of these sprang from the pen of Alan Moore.

 

These included Marvelman, a revival of a British superhero who’d originally been the lead character in a comic book that’d run from 1953 to 1964, and The Bojeffries Saga, about a family of Munsters-like misfits and monsters living in a council house in Northampton, which incidentally is Moore’s hometown.  But it was the dystopian V for Vendetta, penned by Moore and drawn by David Lloyd (with occasional contributions from Tony Weare) that made me re-evaluate what comics were capable of doing.

 

Set in a neutral Britain that’s managed to avoid destruction in a nuclear war but now, in a dire situation after the subsequent nuclear winter, is under the heel of a fascist, totalitarian government, V for Vendetta was the first comic-book serial I’d encountered that seemed both utterly serious and utterly adult.  Yes, this was a time when it was still assumed anything drawn as a series of cartoons, in a series of boxes, with speech bubbles, could never be adult and must always be juvenile.  It also made uncomfortable reading – again, ‘uncomfortable’ was an adjective I hadn’t previously associated with comics – because (a) it was inviting its readers to associate with a hero who was, ostensibly, a terrorist, and (2) the authoritarian society depicted in V for Vendetta didn’t seem that far down the road from the one a certain Margaret Thatcher was engineering in Britain in the time.

 

Ironically, if the world of V for Vendetta was to come about, Thatcher wouldn’t have been in power for most of the 1980s.  Presumably the story had been conceived before the 1982 Falklands War, which gave a massive boost to Thatcher’s popularity.  Back then, it’d looked possible she’d lose the next British general election and the Labour Party, led by the pacifistic Michael Foot, could win it, which would have set up V for Vendetta’s neutral-Britain-survives-a-nuclear-war scenario.

 

Anyway, 40 years later, it’s highly unlikely anyone would only find out who Alan Moore is after rooting around in a box of second-hand comics in a shop in Aberdeen.  After V for Vendetta (published in its entirety by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint in 1988-89), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-86), Watchmen (1986-87), From Hell (1989-98) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019), and his acclaimed work with established comic-book characters like Batman, Superman and Swamp Thing, and his authorship of the tomes Jerusalem (2016) and The Great When: A Long London Novel (2024), and his reputation as a magician and occultist, and his popularity as an interviewee and a social commentator, and his being garlanded with accolades such as ‘national treasure’, ‘sage’ and ‘world’s greatest living Englishman’, it’s fair to say we’re living in an era of Alan Moore ubiquity.  And we’re all the better for it.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Quality Communications

 

Anyway, I’ve just read his 2022 collection of short stories, Illuminations.  Of the nine pieces it contains, eight are good or great in my opinion.  Also, one of the stories, What We Can Know About Thunderman, isn’t a short one but a 240-page novel.  It’s about 30 pages longer than the other stories put together.

 

Fortunately, given its length, What We Can Know About Thunderman isn’t the story I consider to be a dud.  No, I think the dud is the penultimate one, American Light – An Appreciation, which purports to a poem by an imaginary Beat poet called Harmon Belner, choc-a-bloc with references to the ‘San Franciscan and Beat culture’ and the ‘post-Beat counterculture that prevailed in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s’, plus an introduction and copious footnotes by an imaginary scholar called C.F. Bird.  Connoisseurs of all things Beat may find it a delightful pastiche, snapshot and celebration of the movement, but it simply didn’t appeal to me, someone who finds most Beat writers tedious, pretentious and arsehole-y.  (How I cheered when I read what Keith Richards said of Allen Ginsberg in the former’s autobiography: “…Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything.  It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”)

 

What We Can Know About Thunderman on the other hand is a fictionalized history of the American mainstream comic-book industry where the foundational superhero of that industry isn’t Superman but a Superman-like character called Thunderman.  It’s also an indictment of the business, which has inflicted indignities and belittlements on numerous writers and artists, including Moore, over the decades.  For instance, Moore is justifiably bitter about losing ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to DC Comics.  (When he made a guest appearance in a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, Milhouse Van Houten was shown making a grievous faux pas by asking Moore to autograph a DVD featuring the DC Comics characters, Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation.)

 

Although the characters in Thunderman have unfamiliar names, comics fans won’t have difficulty linking many of them to real-life publishers, editors, writers and artists.  I’m not particularly knowledgeable, though even I recognized one Sam Blatz “…in his tilted hat, his jacket slung over one shoulder like Sinatra…” and wearing ‘snazzy sunglasses’.  Blatz’s chief talent is for titling characters: “…at least Sam’s monsters looked great, drawn by Gold or Novak, so that all he had to do was think up whacky names…”  Yes, Blatz is Moore’s sour reimagining of Marvel Comics’ head-honcho Stan Lee.  That would make the artists ‘Gold’ and ‘Novak’ the more talented, but less financially rewarded, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.  There has been writing online, some of it in great detail, about who the cast-members of Thunderman represent in the real comics world.  If your expertise in the field is lacking, as mine is, it may be useful to have one of those online pieces handy, for consultation, while you read the story.

 

Thunderman is impressively bilious as it charts its characters’ progress during the 20th and early 21st centuries.  They start as young, naïve comic-book enthusiasts, become comic-book creatives, and wind up as middle-aged predators or victims: variously corrupt, grasping, sociopathic, perverted, ridiculous, embittered or crushed.  The story is told from a range of perspectives and in a range of styles and formats, including interviews, monologues, reviews, playscripts, internet-forum discussions, psychoanalysis sessions and comic-book panels (described in written form), as well as in conventional prose.  If not every part works equally well, the assorted viewpoints and formats keep it fresh.  Fear not if something isn’t quite engaging you – something different will be along in another few pages.

 

My favourite sections were the comic-book panels, which chronicle how the creators of Thunderman, Simon Schuman and David Kessler – thinly-veiled versions of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster – were conned out of the rights to the lucrative Thunderman franchise by American Comics, the story’s stand-in for DC Comics; and a series of reviews that evaluate how Thunderman has been adapted to the large and small screens.  Again, Thunderman’s exploits in the cinema and on TV mirror Superman’s.  I particularly enjoyed the review of Thunderman IV: The Search for Love, obviously inspired by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.  However, while Superman IV had the late Chrisopher Reeve in the title role, trying to preserve his dignity in a poor film, Moore brilliantly imagines Thunderman IV featuring Robin Askwith, star of those dire British 1970s sex-comedies, the Confessions films: “…most of the supposed humour rests in the mullet-styled hero using his Thundervision to see through the walls of ladies’ changing rooms, complete with BOI-OI-OING sound effects.”

 

© Canon Group, Inc. / Warner Bros.

 

Elsewhere in Illuminations, Moore stretches his imagination and writing abilities with The Improbably Complex High-Energy State.  This is both a cautionary tale and a riff on the paradox put forward by 19th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who mused that it was statistically more likely for a self-aware brain, perceiving an infinite universe, to come into being through random fluctuations of particles than it was for an infinite universe itself, as postulated under conventional cosmological theory, to exist.  In other words, we’re more likely spontaneously-created entities thinking we see an infinite universe than we’re actual parts of an infinite universe.  Moore’s story has such a brain – and a lot of other stuff – appearing soon after the universe does.  As it becomes aware of its unique situation, it rapidly develops human, and depressingly familiar, personality traits.

 

From the birth of the universe in The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, Moore moves to the end of the world in Location, Location, Location.  He describes the apocalypse in majestically vivid Book-of-Revelation fashion, but sets the action in the unassuming English market-town of Bedford.  This is where the real-life Panacea Society, believers in the teachings of the 19th-century prophetess Joanna Southcott, believed the site of the original Garden of Eden to be.  They also maintained a house on Bedford’s Albany Road as a residence for the Messiah to move into after the Second Coming.  In Location, Location, Location, it transpires that, yes, the Panacea Society got it right and Jesus Christ – who’s presented like a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing ‘cool dad’, with a pierced ear and a T-shirt saying ‘I may be old, but at least I got to see all the best bands’ – has just arrived in Bedford to claim the house.  The story is told through the eyes of an understandably distracted solicitor called Angie, who’s been given the task of overseeing the handover.  This she has to do while images of giant winged beasts with lions’ heads and battling squadrons of angels fill the sky above.  Location, Location, Location is an excellent example of Moore’s ability to combine the jaw-droppingly fantastical with the humdrum and mundane.

 

But the stories I enjoyed most in Illuminations were a trio of tales that struck me as belonging to a school of spooky British fiction that stretches from Arthur Machen, via Robert Aickman, to Ramsey Campbell, in that they present the supernatural in very British settings: everyday, awkward, slightly rundown and tawdry.  Not Even Legend features an organization of hapless paranormal investigators called CSICON (the Committee For Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal), who are trying to get to grips with some cryptid-type beings so adept at hiding themselves that no one, until now, suspects they even exist.  Not Even Legend has a complicated structure that rewards the reader’s patience when it becomes clear how clever the story’s premise is.  And Moore’s enthusiasm for inventing strange new types of monsters is endearing.  He mentions such creatures as Snapjackets, Mormoleens, Jilkies and – most prominently – Whispering Petes.

 

More conventional is Cold Reading about a phony, but pathetically self-justifying, clairvoyant who spots an opportunity to make easy money when a man asks him if he can contact the spirit of his deceased twin brother.  A twist can be seen coming, but the story’s mixture of cynicism and melancholia, and its evocation of a bleak wintry night in Northampton, make it very atmospheric.  Finally, I greatly enjoyed the title story, which takes place in a dilapidated, seen-better-days British seaside resort.  Moore obviously relishes describing the setting.  The tale of a middle-aged man returning to the coastal town in which, during his childhood, he used to holiday with his parents, it reminds me slightly of the Harlan Ellison short story One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970).  And there’s something about it that calls to mind the Gerald Kersh story The Brighton Monster (1948) too.

 

Your enjoyment of Illuminations may depend on your willingness to spend half of it reading a novel that’s a diatribe against the American comic-book industry.  I was happy to do so, and I got a lot out of that story and out of the collection generally.  Illuminations really did light up my reading life for a few days.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Matt Biddulph

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The literary Bond revisited: The Spy Who Loved Me

 

© Vintage Books

 

First published in 1962, The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and holds several records in the Bond literary canon.  It clocks in at 198 pages, making it the shortest Bond book.  It was also the last book to appear in a world that knew Bond as a literary and not a cinematic character, because its publication came just six months before the release of Dr No, the first Bond movie produced by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman.  And it was the worst-received of the books.  The Daily Telegraph reacted to it with a despairing “Oh Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear!”, the Listener dismissed it as ‘unremittingly’ and ‘grindingly boring’ and the Observer demanded, “why can’t this cunning author write up a bit instead of down?”

 

Once the critics had stuck in their knives, Fleming himself disowned the book.  He asked his publisher not to print a paperback edition of it, a request honoured until two years after his death.  He also stipulated that any movie version of The Spy Who Loved Me could never use the book’s plot, only its title.

 

I’m sure that 15 years later when Cubby Broccoli got around to filming The Spy Who Loved Me, he was distraught about this.  “You mean,” lamented the cigar-puffing mogul, “I can’t follow what happens in the book?  I have to put other stuff in my movie instead?  Like cars that travel underwater?  Giant oil-tankers that swallow nuclear submarines?  Roger Moore skiing over a clifftop and saving himself with a Union Jack parachute?  No!  NO!”

 

© Eon Productions

 

Well, I’ve finally read the original, much-maligned The Spy Who Loved Me.  My initial reaction was Ian Fleming at least deserved credit for venturing off the beaten track.  Fans of his previous eight books were surely surprised when they started reading it in 1962 and discovered they were hearing a first-person narrative voice rather than Fleming’s usual, authoritative, third-person one.  “I was running away,” it begins.  “I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from the drabness, fustiness, snobbery and claustrophobia of close horizons and from my inability, though I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race.  In fact, I was running away from almost everything except the law.”

 

The first-person voice is that of Viv Michel, a young French-Canadian woman who’s been left in charge of a closed-for-the-winter motel called The Dreamy Pines Motor Court in the mountains of northern New York State.  After a first chapter where Viv doesn’t cope well with a thunderstorm raging above the motel’s empty cabins, playground, swimming pool and golf range – she stupidly pulls an electrical switch at the same moment that a bolt of lightning lets rip, and the resultant electrical shock knocks her unconscious – she spends the next eighty pages explaining how she’s ended up in this situation.

 

She describes her early life in Canada; being sent to a finishing school in England where she “was made to suffer agonies” for her accent, for her table manners “which were considered uncouth”, for her “total lack of savoir-faire and, in general, for being a Canadian”; and finding work in London while suffering the afore-mentioned “sequence of untidy, unattractive love affairs”.  After the last affair results in her having an abortion in Switzerland, she returns to North America, where she resolves to search for adventure and self-discovery and shake off the memories of the men who’ve used and abused her.  So she purchases a Vespa 150cc Gran Sport and sets off on a road trip.  It’s on the road that she comes across the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, where she gets offered employment; first as an end-of-season receptionist and then, when it closes for the winter, as a caretaker minding the premises until its owner, one Mr Sanguinetti, arrives to take possession of the keys.

 

Viv’s position at the Dreamy Pines feels slightly like that of Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and things soon go as badly for her as they did for the ill-fated Jack.  Two hoodlums with the nicknames Sluggsy and Horror show up at the motel in the middle of the night and take her prisoner.  It transpires that Sanguinetti is a gangster and the pair are henchmen tasked with burning the place to the ground as part of an insurance scam.  Viv, the only witness, looks likely to be torched along with the motel.

 

It’s here that we encounter the single detail of the book that makes it into the 1977 film ‘adaptation’ with Roger Moore.  Looking at Horror’s face, she notices “a glint of grey silvery metal from his front teeth,” indicating that “they had been cheaply capped with steel.”  Sound familiar?

 

© Eon Productions

 

By now we’re more than halfway into the book.  Back in 1962 at this point, readers must have been panicking: where the hell is Bond?  Well, he appears at The Dreamy Pines later that same night – Viv’s first impression of him is that he’s “good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way” with a scar that “showed whitely down his left cheek” – and he explains that his car has suffered a flat tyre on the road nearby and he’d like to get a room.  He soon wises up to the situation and joins forces with Viv.  The next seventy pages play more like a Mickey Spillane novel than a Fleming / Bond one, with considerable running, hiding and shooting before Sanguinetti’s scheme is thwarted and Sluggsy and Horror end up dead at the bottom of the local lake.  Then Viv and Bond indulge in some love-making and then, as abruptly and enigmatically as he arrived, Bond slips off again.  In the final pages, Viv muses: “He was just a man who had turned up at the right time and then gone on his way.”

 

Though The Spy Who Loved Me wins kudos for bravely departing from the usual Bond formula, there are moments when seemingly Fleming remembers it’s still a Bond novel and is forced to compromise, with awkward results.   He wants Viv to be more believable than the average Bond girl, which is why we see her depicted as a working Londoner.  But on the other hand, as a Bond girl, she can’t be too ordinary so she also gets a French-Canadian back-story to make her appear more exotic – the overall effect of which feels contrived.  Also, while Fleming wants her to be feisty and independent, he needs her to have a vulnerable side too – to be a credible damsel-in-distress, for whom Bond rides to the rescue as a knight in shining armour.  That may explain the opening chapter where she panics during the storm and, frankly, comes across as a dolt.

 

And to make up for Bond’s late entrance into the plot, Fleming feels obliged to bring his readers up to speed on what Bond’s been doing in the meantime; so we get the telling of a previous Bond adventure.  In a twelve-page chapter entitled Bedtime Story, Bond explains to Viv in detail how he ended up on the road that night.  He was driving south after an operation in Toronto wherein he and the Canadian Mounties prevented the assassination of a Russian defector by the KGB and SPECTRE.  By this point, Bond and Viv know the extreme danger posed by Sluggsy and Horror, so you’d think they’d have other things to focus on besides telling stories.

 

One thing I found surprisingly impressive about The Spy Who Loved Me is Viv’s account of her love-life in London.  It’s as far removed as possible from the fantasy romance / sex scenes associated with the Bond novels.  Just out of school, she gets involved with a youth called Derek Mallaby, whose posh, confident veneer hides, temporarily, the fact that (a) he’s desperate for sex and (b) he’s clueless about how to have sex.  What follows is a painful tale set in the England of “drabness, fustiness, snobbery and claustrophobia” that existed before the 1960s started swinging and the permissive era arrived.  The only privacy Viv and Derek can find for making love is in a small balcony-box at a cinema, “a meagre-looking place, showing two westerns, a cartoon and so-called ‘News’ that consisted of what the Queen had been doing a month ago.”  Their attempted lovemaking, on the floor with Derek on top “in a dreadful clumsy embrace”, is anything but sensual and ends abruptly when a furious cinema manager bursts in on them: “Filthy little brats…!  I’ve a damned good mind to call the police.  Indecent exposure.  Disturbing the peace.”

 

Barely articulate about what they’re trying to do, relying on strained expressions like ‘doing it’ and ‘being a sport’, and not even knowing what a condom is called and having to describe it to a shop assistant as “one of those things for not having babies”, Viv and Derek are products of a repressed, joyless, monochrome Britain that the Bond novels, with their exotic glamour and glitzy hedonism, were supposed to give readers of the era an escape from.  No wonder The Spy Who Loved Me pissed so many of those readers off.

 

Once Viv and Derek have properly ‘done it’ a few times, Derek proves to be a cad and dumps her.  She then gets into a second relationship with a German man called Kurt, which culminates in her getting pregnant, having an abortion and being dumped a second time.  Kurt “had inherited strong views about mixed blood… and when he married, it would be into the Teutonic strain.”  Fleming’s well-known dislike of Germans is on full display here.

 

This part of the book is so interesting because it suggests Fleming, a writer not noted for his empathy with women, is trying for once to think outside his normal male-chauvinist box and identify with a female character having a hard time in a world populated with predatory, shitty men.

 

Alas, this is rendered null and void later when Bond, hardly un-predatory and un-shitty himself, turns up and Viv promptly goes doe-eyed and weak-kneed at the sight of him; implying that Viv’s problem wasn’t men, it was just the absence of a fully-fledged alpha male like Bond to satisfy / tame her.

 

And, late on, Fleming truly sabotages his cause when Viv comes out with this jaw-dropping assertion: “All women love semi-rape.  They love to be taken.”  These ten words have rightly earned Fleming and The Spy Who Loved Me much opprobrium and they undo whatever good work he did with his depiction of Viv earlier in the book.  I’d like to say they show an attitude towards women that’s wildly and rightly out-of-date nowadays – but of course in these Trumpian times, the era of Andrew Tate and Conor McGregor, there’s probably loads of male influencer-wankers out there in the so-called ‘manosphere’ who’d agree with Fleming’s sentiment.

 

In the end, I have no reason to disagree with the many people who label The Spy Who Loves Me the weakest of the Bond novels.  The contradiction at its heart, that it’s a Bond story and yet wants to be something other than a Bond story, makes it uneven and inconsistent.  And it’s all over the place in its sexual politics and, at worst, those politics are unspeakable.

 

But it deserves a little respect for attempting to do something out-of-the-ordinary, and thanks to Fleming’s always-amenable prose it’s an easy-enough read.  And, in parts, hints of a better book glimmer through.  It’s The Spy Who Tried Something Different.

 

© Penguin Books

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Malaysian macabre 2: The Muse and Other Stories by Chua Kok Yee

 

© Penguin Books

 

More Halloween-inspired stuff…

 

The Muse and Other Stories is the second collection of Malaysian horror tales I’ve read recently.  The other was My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim, which I reviewed on this blog a few posts ago.

 

The Muse… is the work of Chua Kok Yee.  Like Tunku Halim, he seems to have led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence – turning into a horror writer after sunset and penning stories of gruesome terror, but during the sunlit hours doing the sort of respectable, wholesome job that your parents would boast about you doing at dinner parties with friends.  In Halim’s case, he combined horror writing with being a legal expert who practised corporate and conveyancing law.  In Chua’s case (if I’ve located the correct person on social media), the non-horror world knows him as an accountant and ‘Adjunct Professor at University Putra Malaysia’, with ‘a history of working in the food and beverage and consumer goods industry’.  Which shows you should never judge by appearances.

 

There are eight stories in The Muse…  It starts strongly with the title tale, a cynical take on the idea that there are beautiful (inevitably female) muses whose only function is to channel inspiration towards great (inevitably male) artists.  In reality, this has often been a case of women who were talented artists in their own right having their work ignored and being used, abused and eventually abandoned by those supposedly drawing inspiration from them.  See, for example, Camille Claude, muse to Augustin Rodin, an artist herself, who ended up spending 30 years in an asylum; or Dora Maar, muse to Pablo Picasso, a photographer, who ended up needing psychiatric treatment and afterwards took solace in religion.

 

In Chua’s story, an up-and-coming novelist, and married man, called Mark Lee Wing Sen has an adulterous relationship with a younger woman called Leanne, which seemingly causes a new fervour and intensity in his writing: “…Leanne’s voice kept echoing in my head.  The characters, plot and structure of the story flowed into my mind as if it was demanding to be told…  I was almost like a new person after Leanne and I started our affair.  Throughout the years, she inspired me more than anyone or anything else in the world…  Her fingerprints are all over my books.  She was my muse; a flowing river of inspiration that provided sustenance to this storytelling.”  However, their relationship turns sour and worse, leading to causing obsession, murder and madness.  And it doesn’t stop there.  The ‘river of inspiration’ continues to flow into Mark from Leanne, but the writing she induces in him now is deadly in nature.

 

Rather brilliantly, the story’s two heroes – Mark’s agent Arun and a physician called Dr Leong whom he summons when he discovers Mark in shockingly poor health – cite the works of Stephen King when they realise they’re up against a supernatural foe and find themselves speculating on matters of good and evil.  In particular, they discuss Father Callahan, the weak-willed priest in Salem’s Lot (1975), who’s unable to stand up to the chief vampire despite being armed with a cross.  This is because his faith isn’t strong enough, which renders the cross useless: “At that moment, the cross lost its power and the vampire won.”

 

© New English Library

 

Elsewhere, two stories have scenarios where a pair of characters who knew each other as children meet up years later – and with their unexpected reunions come unsettling twists.  In Remember, it’s a boy, Ah Hong, who’s suddenly contacted by his long-lost sister, Yee Ching.  In Under the Mask, a young girl called Anna encounters a young man called Jiang whom she recalls was an orphan from a charitable institution sent to live in her household for a time.  The institution had a programme whereby its orphans were temporarily given ‘a chance to be part of a natural home.’  Remember’s twist is slightly predictable, but the one in Under the Mask is shocking and upsetting.

 

Several stories showcase Chua’s sense of humour.  Sword of Angel amusingly combines a gritty Malaysian crime drama with a fantasy story in the manner of the classic Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger movie A Matter of Life and Death.  Admittedly, this is a pretty warped variation on A Matter of Life and Death.  An incompetent gangster gets himself killed whilst on his way to rub out an informer, but then is raised from the dead by a mysterious shapeshifting angel known simply as ‘Mike’.  The angel wants him to carry out a different assassination – that of a seemingly innocuous kid called Calvin, who needs to be terminated because “the angel in charge of his Fortune Scale screwed up” and made him supernaturally and harmfully lucky: “He’s not merely ‘lucky’.  He is an abomination!  You know, luck is not infinite.  It comes from a pool, and every time this Calvin drinks from it, someone else is deprived of their rightful share.  And I’m telling you, he is guzzling it down.  I have to put a stop to it.”

 

The gangster is less than happy to find himself back in the world of the living in a zombie-like state, bearing the scars of a recent autopsy: “…my body was festooned with stitches.  They looked like huge, black centipedes on my arms and thighs.  The worst was the huge Y-shaped incision that ran down my torso.”  Later, he’s also displeased to learn that he’s not the only dead gangster Mike has reanimated in order to take out Calvin.  The story is enjoyable largely because of its hapless and grumbling protagonist and it’s gratifying when he finally figures out a way to turn the tables on the devious Mike.

 

Similarly, Duke of Zhi has supernatural forces making an intervention in the world of the living and compelling an unfortunate mortal to do their bidding.  The reason this time is more mundane.  The denizens of hell, led by the narrator’s deceased mother, are concerned about the Loh family, who ‘run the Chinese funeral paraphernalia shop called Loh Paper Enterprise’ and are ‘the best funeral paraphernalia shop in Kuala Lumpur.’  The highlights of their ‘funeral paraphernalia’ are their lavishly detailed paper mansions that, according to Chinese custom, are burnt at funerals in the belief they’ll be passed on to the deceased in the afterlife, where those dead souls can live inside them in comfort.

 

The narrator gets a glimpse of the paper mansion he purchased from the Lohs for his mother, which now accommodates her in hell: “I was inside a huge hall, filled with exquisite-looking furniture.  The chairs were carved from wood, painted in gold and decorated with intricate carvings…  A crystal chandelier hung majestically high above, while every inch of the walls was adorned with abstract motifs of animals.  Yes, it was the most elegant room I had ever been in…. ‘Hey!  I know this place!’ I exclaimed, and jumped to my feet.”

 

It transpires that the young man set to inherit the Loh family’s business, despite having ‘talent that could rival his grandfather,’ isn’t interested in taking it on.  “He doesn’t know his importance to us here in the afterlife, because he’s a non-believer…  Despite his gift, he prefers to run a hipster coffee shop instead…  Millions of souls would be forced to stay in substandard mansions…”  The bewildered narrator is tasked with convincing Loh Junior to abandon the coffee shop, keep the family business going, and keep providing  the spirits of the dead with opulent housing.  It’s a task that, predictably, he bungles.

 

Duke of Zhi is amusing with its depiction, in these Trumpian times, of an afterlife whose inhabitants of are just as obsessed with real estate as living souls are.  It also touches on a rather sad fact in the real world, which is the art of the “traditional Chinese paper house crafters… is quickly dying as an increasing number of people seek alternative ways to honour their deceased relatives.”

 

I also like the story because it features the demon Horse-Face, one of the guardians of hell in Chinese mythology.  You can see a human-sized effigy of him at Haw Par Villa, the most fascinating museum in Singapore.  There, he stands at the entrance of the Villa’s most famous (or infamous) attraction, a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell.  I wanted to write something about Haw Par Villa on this blog during the run-up to Halloween 2024, but couldn’t find the time.  I will soon, though.

 

 

Also touching on local folklore are the stories Akuan, which draws on legends of the harimau akuan, that is, ‘were-tiger, were-leopard or were-panther’, and Feed the Boy, which features a toyol.  A toyol, the latter story’s protagonist hears from a mysterious antiques dealer, is “the soul of an unborn baby possessed by a djinn.  By nature, a djinn is wild and fiery.  It’s the baby’s soul that tempers its more dangerous side, turning it tame and obedient.  The soul will be weakened if it’s not fed by the blood of its master.  When that happens, the wild nature of the djinn would take over.”  But fed by blood, and kept ‘tame and obedient’, a toyal scuttles off to commit crimes on its master’s behalf.  It uses its diminutive size to enter other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their valuables.

 

This suits the protagonist of Feed the Boy, Edry, a hard-up food-delivery man “feeling envious of old school friends who were driving new Japanese cars, while he could only afford a motorcycle.  He felt like a loser whenever he delivered food to beautiful houses and condominiums, because their bathrooms alone were more spacious than his rented room.”  Edry’s fortunes take an upswing when he acquires a toyol – which disconcertingly has a name, Aamir.  He grows rich thanks to Aamir’s ‘nightly heists’ and feeding it with his blood, which it extracts from his toes, seems a small price to pay.

 

He becomes less keen on the creature when, a few years later, he gets married and his wife becomes pregnant.  It’s then that he learns how “sometimes a toyol can become excited by the presence of another child in the household.”  What follows, chronicling Edry’s attempts – inevitably doomed attempts, because this is a horror story – to get rid of Aamer, makes this for me the best tale in the book.

 

With its mixture of the up-to-date and the traditional, and the gruesome and the funny, and with its references to both Malaysian and Western culture,  I found The Muse and Other Stories a solidly entertaining read.  So, I recommend you to purchase a copy of it and enjoy the products of Chua Kok Yee’s fertile imagination.

 

Alternatively, of course, you could send your tame toyol crawling into your nearest bookshop, library or Amazon book-warehouse after business hours and procure a copy that way…

 

From linkedin.com

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First blood to Rampo

 

© Tuttle

 

And another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Japanese writer Hirai Taro, who lived from 1894 to 1965, was such a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, America’s doyen of macabre and mysterious fiction, that he used the penname ‘Edogawa Rampo’.  English-language names sound somewhat stretched and distorted when converted to the syllable-systems of Japanese – my own name is pronounced ‘Ee-an Sumisu’ – and Taro’s penname was basically a Japan-ised version of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’.  Say ‘Edogawa Rampo’ quickly a few times and you’ll find yourself reciting the name of Baltimore’s greatest man of letters.

 

Accordingly, during his literary career, Rampo wrote in similar genres to Poe.  He didn’t merely pen horror stories.  Poe’s name is now so synonymous in the West with tales of terror like The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), The Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) and so on that it’s often forgotten how innovative he was working in other genres.  In particular, he helped create the detective story with his trilogy of stories about crime investigator C. Auguste Dupin, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Maire Roget (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844).  And it was largely in detective and crime fiction that Rampo made his name.  He even helped to found the Japanese Mystery Writers’ Club.

 

Rampo’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1956) is an English-language collection of nine of his best short stories.  Not only does it take its name from Tales of Mystery and Imagination, described by Wikipedia as ‘a popular title for posthumous compilations of writings by American author, essayist and poet Edgar Allan Poe’, but it combines stories from those two genres Poe helped to popularise in the early 19th century, the horror and the detective / mystery ones.  It has to be said the two styles mesh together nicely in this collection.  There’s a weirdness in Rampo’s detective fiction that ensures it doesn’t feel that different, tonally, from his morbid horror stories.

 

Among the crime stories, you get villains attempting to commit the perfect murder with schemes that involve living a double life as an invented character (The Cliff), impersonating someone who looks exactly like them (The Twins) and the fear of sleepwalkers that they might do something ghastly whilst moving in a trance-like state (Two Crippled Men).  All three have a last-minute twist wherein the main characters get their come-uppance from someone who’s even smarter than they are, or by a small but fatal act of negligence – the sort of minor blunder that would have Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo swooping down like a hawk.  Talking of Falk’s beloved shabby-but-canny TV detective, The Psychological Test is a very Columbo-esque tale of how a pair of investigators use an ingenious method to get a suspect in a murder case to incriminate himself.

 

Meanwhile, The Red Chamber takes a trope popular in 19th and early 20th century English fiction, that of a comfortable, wooden-panelled gentlemen’s club where the tweedy members congregate after dark and, with the lights turned down, proceed to tell each other scary stories.  In Rampo’s gentlemen’s club, however, things get shaken up when the evening’s storyteller, a newcomer, boasts about being responsible for “the murder of nearly a hundred people, all as yet undetected’ and proceeds to explain how he did it and got away with it.  Several harrowing twists later, it’s no surprise that the story’s narrator, a long-term member of the club, concludes: “…we unanimously agreed to disband.”

 

The other four stories in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination are macabre ones.  They possess the same oddness and intensity of his crime stories, but cranked up to higher levels.  The Hell of Mirrors is about a man who becomes obsessed with optics, with ‘anything capable of reflecting an image… magic lanterns, telescopes, magnifying glasses, kaleidoscopes, prisms and the like’ and with mirrors: ‘concave, convex, corrugated, prismatic.’  Typically with Rampo’s fiction, this obsession spills over into another obsession, a sexual one.  The protagonist is soon using telescopes to pry through the windows of his female neighbours and using periscopes to ‘get a full view of the rooms of his many young maidservants.’  The story reaches its climax when he devises a mirrored, optical device so depraved it ultimately induces madness.

 

The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture, on the other hand, is the one Rampo story in this collection that veers off into the supernatural.  It reminded me very slightly of the M.R. James story The Mezzotint, though the picture in that story was a spookily lifelike one that recorded a horrific event.  In Rampo’s story, a similarly lifelike picture serves as a testimony to a sad, doomed and one-sided romance.

 

That leaves two stories, The Human Chair and The Caterpillar, which I think are masterpieces.  The Human Chair concerns an ugly and reclusive craftsman who makes a living fashioning luxurious chairs, whilst getting a perverse kick out of imagining ‘the types of people who would eventually curl up’ in them.  Eventually, driven insane by his desire to get intimate with the folk who’ll acquire and use his chairs, he designs a bulky one containing a secret, human-sized cavity, inside which he hides himself.  The chair and its maker end up in a hotel lobby, where the latter gets his jollies from feeling the bodies of the guests rest on top of him.  No one “suspected even for a fleeting moment that the soft ‘cushion’ on which they were sitting was actually human flesh with blood circulating in its veins – confined in a strange world of darkness.”

 

The story is told in the form of a confession, sent as a letter to a famous lady novelist.  While she reads it, she begins to wonder about the suspiciously large and comfy chair she’s seated in, which has found its way to her study after being in a hotel.  There comes a final twist that nullifies what’s happened before – or perhaps doesn’t.

 

The Caterpillar, written in 1929, is an early, literary example of ‘body horror’.  The central character is an unfortunate young army officer so maimed and mutilated in battle that he comes home resembling the larval-form insect of the title.  This puts understandable strain on the officer’s wife, upon whom, totally helpless, he depends for care and attention.  In fact, The Caterpillar is more about the wife than the husband, with the hideous situation gradually pushing her into the realms of madness – of sadistic madness, because she starts taking her woes out on her husband, who can’t do anything to defend himself.  The story works both as a feminist tract, showing the plight of women whom society expects to be wholly devoted and subservient to their husbands, and as a horror story exploiting male fears of emasculation.  It’s a grim and powerful read, packing as much of a punch as it did when it first appeared, nearly a century ago.

 

I think the original Edgar Allan Poe would approve of Rampo’s tales.  They’re deliciously dark and twisted, and frequently ingenious, and sometimes funny too – a lot of the humour derives from how his villains, when telling their stories, like to revel in their own cleverness and degeneracy.  It’s just a pity that Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the only English-language collection by Rampo I’ve come across.  I’d really like to read more of his stuff.  Unlike a certain character played by Sylvester Stallone, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Rampo 2, Rampo 3, Rampo 4 and Rampo 5.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Mainichi Graphic