Adam Curtis rides again

I have recommended the work of Adam Curtis here before. And if you have any hope (Ha! What an optimist you are!) of understanding the Middle East, then you urgently need to read and watch his latest post.

It is something of a mystery how Mr Curtis comes to be allowed (and presumably encouraged) to poke around in the BBC archives, but his resulting insights are worth ten of any academic tomes on the subject. More power to his elbow and archive-searching, say I.

David Wesley Hill: At Drake's Command

Some eighty-five years ago, an English novelist by the name of C.S. Forester published the first in a 12-book series about Horatio Hornblower. The books were not written chronologically, in terms of the hero's life, but eventually covered Hornblower's career in the British Navy, from Midshipman to Admiral.

The Hornblower books were set in the age of the Napoleonic Wars, and were enormously successful, both in the US and the UK. They were admired by, among others, both Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill, and yet could easily be read by the average schoolboy. In 1951 a successful film version appeared, starring Gregory Peck in the lead role.

Since then, the idea of a book, and possibly a whole series of books, starring a member of the British Navy in times past, must have been seen by many a publisher and writer as a target worth consideration. Patrick O'Brian began a similar series, with Master and Commander, in 1970. And now David Wesley Hill has taken his turn to have a go.

At Drake's Command is set in the late sixteenth century and is subtitled 'The adventures of Peregrine James during the second circumnavigation of the world'. It's just published by the Temurlone Press, where you can read the first chapter, and it's available in trade paperback format through the usual channels. Early reviews are good.

The naval-fiction genre is a small one, but there is, surprise, a web site devoted to it.

China Mieville: London's Overthrow

London's Overthrow is a small paperback -- about 7" by 4.5" -- and it runs to about 96 pages, including the prelims and a few photos at the end.

The book is printed on paper which, as in a newspaper, allows the reproduction of a number of the author's colour photographs; these are done in what I take to be a deliberately impressionistic style. The publisher is the Westbourne Press.

The text began life (in a shorter form) as an article in the New York Times in March 2012.

As for China Mieville, who he? Answer, a very distinguished science-fiction writer: he is a three-times winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and has also won the Hugo, World Fantasy and British Science Fiction awards.

And what are we to make of it all? The title suggests that London has been overthrown. And if so, by whom?

Speaking as someone who lives in the provinces, I can only say that, on the rare occasions when I go there, I am struck by the almost complete lack of Londoners. In a restaurant or a hotel, it is rare to be served by someone whose first language in English. As for Cockneys -- damned if I've seen or heard one for decades. Is that circumstance the same as being overthrown? I don't know. But the character of the place has certainly changed, within my own adult lifetime.

Mieville seems to have wandered around this ancient city, poking his nose into obscure as well as famous places, and giving us, not unreasonably, his impressions of what he sees.

Inequality is one such feature. Rich and poor. Forty per cent of London's children live in poverty, he tells us. But poverty by what measure, and whose definition? Certainly nothing remotely comparable with the nineteenth century. All these poor children wear shoes, and I would bet good money that the majority of them carry a phone.

The picture of London that I get from these pages is of a patchwork of cultures. The Brick Lane mosque, for instance, was formerly a synagogue and before that a church. And Mieville suggests, if I read him aright, that Britain is seeing a mutation of its 'traditional' fascism into a form fixated on these new scapegoats.

I don't think I recognise that 'traditional' fascism, though it's an arguable point, I suppose, based on the UK's history of colonies and Empire. The past was indeed pretty vile in some respects. But would we be better off, for instance, with Sharia law? Would our women welcome being forced into arranged marriages, and being chopped into small pieces if they demurred? I hardly think so.

At the very end, Mieville encounters an old Londoner who is pretty depressed by the scene he now surveys. 'It starts this bitterness,' he says. 'Many become hopeless... Well, let us just wait for things to -- for chaos, really to take place.'

This is, I fear, all too realistic an attitude.

Speaking for myself, I am at a loss to explain how it is that the UK has not already descended into interracial violence on a massive scale. I speak here not so much of London as of the great industrial cities of the north. The streets where my mother and father grew up are now solidly Asian. For block after block.

And what do the displaced working-class Brits make of this? They seem to accept it. 'At least,' said my elderly aunt as I drove her past my grandmother's old house, 'they are maintaining it well.' This, mark you, where groups of Asian youths have recently been convicted of grooming underage white girls for sexual exploitation.

What is the explanation for this lack of violence?

Only a supreme optimist could put the present calm down to tolerance and goodwill. It is more likely, I fear, that the educated middle class have given up hope. Everywhere they look there is incurable corruption or incompetence: politics, science, education. As for the banks and big business... Well, words fail. And that's before we even begin to think about the potential of a Eurozone crash wiping out the world's financial system.

And the young -- the ones who might initiate some sort of change -- they seem to live in a state of fugue, made senseless by street drugs, deafening music and the distractions of technology.

Less than fifty years ago, a government-appointed committee, led by Lord Robbins, considered the purposes of higher education, and listed as one of the four most important 'the transmission of a common culture'. The four aims laid down by Robbins were accepted by the government and were built into the Charters of several of the new universities that were created in the 1960s.

But what was 'a common culture'? Did anyone ever know? What are its characteristics? Fair play, honesty, truthfulness...?

Well, if we ever had a common culture, I suggest that our policies on immigration and taxation, to name only a couple, have successfully destroyed it. I do hope that was an accidental result. In 2012, 1 in 4 of the babies born in the UK are to foreign mothers; and in London the number is 6 out of 10.

As usual in his books, Mr Mieville belabours us with long and obscure words; it is a characteristic of his style: tchotchkes, hecatomb, gnosis, quotidian, nonnatives... I have a pretty fair idea of what they mean, or can guess from the context, but these are not words in most people's everyday vocabulary, and I'm not sure that communication is improved by their use here.

The price of this book is £5.99 on Amazon and £7.99 as listed by the publisher. If you seek food for thought, it is here aplenty. But don't blame me if you end up feeling a bit queasy.

Marek Krajewski and the city of Breslau

Don't know about you, but I'm not exactly short of books to read, so I don't often need to go searching for something new. However, I do keep my eyes open, and occasionally the Saturday edition of the Times (London) runs a column on new crime books. Also, occasionally, science fiction. But I don't think it ever stoops so low as to list new romances.

Anyway, couple of months ago the Times made mention of a new crime novel by Marek Krajewski. Sounded intriguing, so I looked him up.

Krajewski is a former academic who taught at the University of Wroclaw, which is now in Poland. And until 1945 Wroclaw was known as Breslau, and it was part of Germany.

If you live in the eastern part of England, you will have learnt that there is nothing between the east coast and the Urals. Nothing, that is, that would stop or slow down the Russian winter wind. Of course, the wind is not really cold by the time it gets to England. Not cold by Arctic standards. But by God it's pretty bloody chilly by English standards. And the point is, you see, there's just a big flat northern European plain until you get to the Urals.

What that means is that there are no natural boundaries. Hence lots of wars over territory. Hence cities changing hands and names. There are only a few rivers to divide the plain up a bit: Vistula, Oder, Elbe, Weser, Rhine. And although they are pretty big rivers they're not big enough to be much of an obstacle to a determined army. So Poland, for instance, has tended either to be very strong and big (1611, my memory tells me, was the biggest it got, but I may be misremembering), or it has been small and weak.

All of which is a bit of background. What you need to know, relative to Marek Krajewski, is that in the 1920s and 1930s, one particular city was known as Breslau, and was part of Germany, and now it's called Wroclaw and it's in Poland. In 2016, should you care, it's going to be the European City of Culture.

So, it is in his home town of Breslau, in the 1920s and thereafter, that Marek Krajewski has chosen to set his series of crime novels. There are four of them so far, and I understand that there will be a fifth. They are translated from Polish, and the UK publisher is MacLehose, part of Quercus. The UK publisher has given several of the books a striking set of covers by Andrzej Klimowski.

Krajewski's lead character, and series detective, is Eberhard Mock, head of the police, and a complicated fellow indeed. Drinks too much, beats his wife Sophie, and so on. He walks (or, more often, gets driven down) the mean streets, which seem to be lined with brothels, casinos where women have to serve as sex slaves to pay off debts (one of said slaves being, at one point, the unhappy Sophie), and so forth. The place is thick with Nazis, freemasons, debauched aristocrats, and all like that.

Question is, can I wholeheartedly recommend these books? Well, yes. Up to a point. I suspect that you need to be interested in the history of Europe in the twentieth century. You need to keep reading when part of you says surely there must be a more interesting book in my pile. But on the whole, it's a rewarding series. Perhaps, if it doesn't sound snobby, one could say that these books are for crime-fiction connoisseurs. I've read two so far, and intend to keep going.

Dean Wesley's Smith's words of wisdom

Some months ago I stumbled across the blog written by American author Dean Wesley Smith. Dean also has a web site which describes his thirty-year (and counting) career as a writer. Most of his output has, of course, been published in the pre-digital era, and the total so far is over 90 novels and 100 short stories. So he's a man of some experience.

I find that Dean has a habit of publishing blog posts which say exactly what I would say if I had the time and the energy (in addition to doing some fiction writing), so I thought I would just link to his sites and leave it to you to explore as you wish (or not).

If you are a wannabe writer, or even a published author with a book that you are trying to promote, there is much here for you to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. (That last bit, by the way, is a quote from the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer, 1662 version. You may think it's a bit poncey of me to quote such stuff, but I heard it in church many times in my schooldays and it has kind of stuck. In any case, it neatly encapsulates my thinking, and advice, on Mr Smith's dicta.)

Dean's view is that the main thing you need to do as a writer is produce a substantial body of work. Stop pissing around, stop reading all that twitter rubbish, and get your head down for a solid ten years or so.

What prompted me to write this little recommendation was Dean's post of 15 October 2012. In it, he notes that all the professional marketing skills in the world will not help you if your novel is not, actually, very good. I have the distinct impression that one effect of the digital revolution is that some readers are not much influenced by reputation. In fact they may not even care that you have one. All they care about is the story. Does it grip at the start? Does it continue to hold their attention? There are numerous examples nowadays of ebooks which are, by normal publishing standards, semi-literate and unpublishable, yet they sell to readers who aren't too fussy about all that spelling and punctuation stuff but just wanna read a good story -- on their smartphone or tablet or whatever. Books? What are they? Oh, those funny square things people carry around.

Anyway, here's the sort of thing Dean has to say, and it's just as true of me as it is of him:

Folks, sorry, but if you have only written one novel or few short stories, promoting a pile of crap just won’t help you.

And trust me, I wrote some really heaping, steaming piles of crap when I started out. We all do. And my piles of crap were pretentious because I came from a poetry background and thought I knew everything about writing. They were rewritten to death because I believed that was the way to create art. They had zero thought to the art of storytelling or what a reader on the other side might be thinking when reading it.

They stank up the place and I had no idea at the time.

Looking back, I have no idea what would have happened to me at that point in the 1970s when I wrote those early stories if I had the modern world of easy access to publishing. I imagine I would have published and promoted them to death and wondered why readers were so stupid as to not understand my great art.

Luckily I didn’t, so I just sent them to editors who paid no attention and sent me form rejections.

Yup. Me too.

A few words in front

This morning I read a blog post by an author who said he'd been asked, some time ago, to write a 'forward' to a book. (I'm inclined to doubt it, but who knows.) Anyway, he did his bit, sent it in, forgot about it, and was then surprised when a copy of the book arrived complete with a 'Foreward' by him.

To which my ungrateful and unimpressed response was, make your fucking mind up, sunshine. If you're going to get it wrong, please get it wrong consistently.

Now I know Americans do things different, as they do in Norfolk, but surely there is no disagreement on this one, is there?

It's a foreword, folks. It's a little intro which goes before the body of the book.

And the spelling does not seem to be in dispute, as evidenced here, and here, and here, and here....

Yes, I know. Ought to get out more, wrong side of bed, grumpy old bugger, better things to do with his time...

But it's all about communication. About the smooth and unhindered transfer of facts and ideas from one human to another. And such smooth transfer is not aided if some of us have to break off from reading and go bang our heads against the nearest wall.

The teenage writer sensation revisited

A day or two ago I noticed yet another variant on the familiar tale of a dramatically young writer being hailed as a sensation. And I thought to myself with a weary sigh, Oh dear. Here we go again.

And yet, on closer examination, the detailed story in this case turns out to be a little different. This time it may not spell, as it so often has in the past, disaster for a young person who is entirely undeserving of such a nasty fate.

Here's the story so far. And it turns out to be a month old, though I have only just noticed it. HarperFiction, says booktrade.info, acquires 17 Year Old Debut Novelist. Perhaps they don't like hyphens at HarperCollins, and they don't seem quite sure whether they are HarperCollins or HarperFiction, come to that; but let us not nitpick as if we were a grumpy old Englishman with peculiar views about the teaching of punctuation (if any) in modern schools.

It was the headline about the dazzling young writer which made my heart sink a bit. And to suggest why, allow me to mention the case of Jenn Crowell, whom I briefly mentioned in my book The Truth about Writing.

In 1997 there were press reports that Hodder & Stoughton had paid £500,000 for the UK rights to a novel entitled Necessary Madness, by 17-year-old Jenn Crowell. American rights were bought separately. If the name and the title do not ring any bells, that's because the book didn't sell well. It did not even appear in the top 100 paperbacks for the following year.

Well, that's the silly kind of thing that happened in those days. An agent would get herself all excited, either genuinely or for sales purposes, and would ring her favourite editor in a breathless state, make the big pitch, talk it all up, young author, photogenic, TV shows, bullshit, blah blah blah.

And then later, after the book had failed to impress or to sell, they would all try to forget it had ever happened. Leaving the young author, of whom so much had been expected, and whose friends and family had been led to expect a massive success, film version, fame, fortune, glitter, Oscars, prizes, life of glamour.... Leaving her where? High and dry, I suspect. Deeply disappointed, at best. Suicidal, at worst. Writers do tend to take such failures rather seriously, especially if they're young and lack perspective. Most experienced writers, myself included, have had such setbacks, though seldom, regrettably, on the £500,000 scale.

Jenn Crowell produced one other novel, and has made a success of her life in other directions. And congratulations to her. But it isn't quite the career that we were led to expect by the hype, is it?

We can find numerous other examples of the superhyped young authors, from Francoise Sagan in the 1950s to the babes in arms of recent years. And all of them lead me to the conclusion that too much too soon is a dreadful fate. And that is why I sighed, just a little bit, about the news of a 'six-figure sum' being handed over to Abigail Gibbs.

However... God is merciful and it seems that this case is different. In this instance it is not a matter of temporarily deranged drinking buddies, agent and editor, getting together and making entirely false sales forecasts on the basis of no evidence whatever other than pure hunch and a misplaced faith in their own infallible ability to spot a winner.

No. In this case the writer comes with a small army of fans behind her.

Abigail, it seems,  'is a phenomenon online, publishing The Dark Heroine: Dinner with a Vampire serially on writing website Wattpad since she was 15-years-old. To date, it has been read over seventeen million times. She has a global following, with readers all over the world who have become fans of her characters as well as of their creator. There is already an enthusiastic online subculture of devotees to Violet, Kaspar and Fabian.'

So this time it may not all end in tears.

Alan Furst: Mission to Paris

I think I've read everything that Alan Furst has published. If I haven't, it's an unconscious omission. And I wrote about him at some length in 2005.

So, what of his latest, Mission to Paris? Well, once again, it may be just me, but I thought this one was disappointing. It is a feature of Furst's work that it is (for me) patchy. All you can do is suck it and see.

As in all his work, the pre-war period and the European setting are immaculately researched; and the period details, even if invented, are entirely convincing. The portraits of the Nazis are accurate and, I'm afraid, all too realistic in revealing (as I mentioned in 2005) what an appalling and terrifying bunch of shits they all were.

And therein, for me, lay the rub. My age is such that I have some personal memories of the second world war. So for me, it's not just an interesting period of history, like, say, Tudor times. It's a time when people I was just old enough to know personally went off to war and didn't come back. (You might, perhaps, care to look at my review of an autobiographical book, To War with Whitaker, where I discuss this personal history in the antepenultimate paragraph.)

So, I didn't take to Mission to Paris. In particular, I find that it prompted me to start thinking about all the present (largely financial) difficulties in the Eurozone. It seemed to me that there are worrying parallels between the Europe of 1938 and the Europe of today. Massive problems,and everyone just hoping that, with a bit of luck, they will all go away. Let's hope they do, otherwise the financial system of Europe (not to mention the world) will probably collapse.

So, for me, reading Mission to Europe was an unnerving and unsettling experience. And, frankly, I don't read novels to be unnerved and unsettled.

After writing the above, and only after it, I went to the novel's Amazon.com page, and found it instructive to read the one-star reviews. These contain, I fear, a large measure of truth; though the reviewers are, I think, unnecessarily brutal. I would give it two or three stars. But I also think it is worth noting that nearly all of the one-star reviews clearly come from educated and literate readers who had hoped for so much better.

As for the price business, which I discussed the other day, I can only say that I am very glad I didn't pay £9.99 for the Kindle version.

The multiple causes of mouth-frothing

Every so often -- well, about twice a day, actually -- I come across something about traditional/legacy/print/big 6 publishing which rouses me to a blood-pressure-raising fury during which I may well attack the furniture and, on occasion, start biting the carpet. Yesterday, for example, the news that three harmless ladies were kindly offering to consider unagented manausrcritps for a whole two weeks was enough to do it. And I did suggest, afterwards, that perhaps I might have got out of bed the wrong side. No such thing, actually. This was just another instance of the mouth-frothing stimuli to which I am daily subjected.

Here's another one. Passive Guy, who is American and a contract lawyer by profession, offers the following:


Passive Guy has often been struck by the similarities between the way publishers and agents regard authors and the way former slave-owners regarded former slaves following the American Civil War and for many decades thereafter.

In a million different ways, the attitude manifests itself.

Why do slaves and authors get whipped? They brought it on themselves. If they had done what Ole Massah told them to, he wouldn’t have whipped them. Good slaves don’t get whipped.


Enough said, I feel. Further contemplation of these words will entirely spoil my tea. To which I am really looking forward.

SF and the amazing generosity of publishers

Perhaps it's just me, but I get the feeling that a great many novels these days have a touch of fantasy, science fiction, paranormal, and the like (see, for instance, the Rivers of London series). Either that, or they fall outright into one of those categories.

Anyway, news reaches me of a recent science-fiction novel by Geoff Nelder. Titled Aria, it comes with recommendations from such as Jon Courtenay Grimwood, who is no mean judge. It has also appealed, I see, to Gladys Hobson, who forever has a place in my heart as the fearless author of a book about a Granny in search of an orgasm.

Meanwhile, Harper Voyager, which is HarperCollins's science fiction and fantasy imprint, has announced that they will lower themselves sufficiently as to agree to consider 'complete and unagented' manuscripts for a period of two whole weeks. Galleycat has the story.

I must say that when I first read this announcement my lip curled and I was inclined to turn my head and spit. But then, gritting my teeth, I tried hard to understand their point of view. And, yes, I suppose it's just arguable that it is not cost effective for a publisher to wade through piles of unsolicited slush. But either do the job properly, for ****'s sake, or don't do it at all. Two weeks? What kind of impression does that give? To me, it says, arrogant, stupid bastards, frankly. Clearly, they don't expect to find anything. But just to show willing, just to show that their heart is in the right place.... Et cetera, et cetera. I don't happen to have a novel to offer them, but if I did I think I would write in and tell them where to shove it.

Perhaps I just got out of bed the wrong side.