Book review

Book review: The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

19 January 2025
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The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

This is a very fine addition to the canon of historical detective stories set in exotic locations – but, if you’re like me, you will have finished reading The Janissary Tree with one question uppermost in your mind: surely eunuchs can’t have sex?

Yes, the novel gives a wonderful sense of the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, when a gentle cloud of futility descended over the great city that was once Constantinople and the pashas settled into civilised and genteel inaction. Its hero and his friends and rivals are finely drawn, vivid creations, providing further insights into this strange world.

But could a eunuch really have sex? Because that’s exactly what Yashim the Eunuch, the detective hero of the story, does, and with a particularly beautiful Russian noblewoman at that. Which, so far as I had thought (although admittedly I hadn’t thought much on it), rather ruined the point of creating a eunuch in the first place. Surely, I thought, the point of castrating men was to ensure that they could not interfere with the women of the Sultan’s harem, or any other women for that matter. But here was Yashim doing exactly what I had always supposed was impossible for a eunuch to do.

So, having finished the book, I looked further into the matter (well, did some Google searches, to be honest) and the answer appears to be: maybe. Could be possible, or then again it might be impossible. Pretty well par for the course for internet research. So, dear reader, I leave the question in your hands: do you think it is possible for a eunuch to have sexual intercourse? (Although I do encourage you to read this excellent detective story as a means towards starting your research.)

Troubled by Rob Henderson

8 January 2025
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Troubled by Rob Henderson

As a child, Rob Henderson was in the running for the I’ve-had-it-worse-than-you cup. His mum was a drug addict. Father unknown. Shuttled through various foster homes. Adoptive parents split up, using him as their battleground. Small town America, little to no money, and zero prospects.

The children Henderson grew up with didn’t have much in the way of choices; for most, it resolved to drugs or crime. Henderson, however, took the only other real option: enlistment. He joined the US military.

As with many others, the military began to give Henderson some of the structure his chaotic home life had always lacked. Couple that with a formidable natural intelligence, and Henderson began to make his way out of the milieu into which he had been born. On leaving the military, he was able to enrol in college where his intelligence finally had an outlet. Henderson excelled. After completing his degree, he went on to do a Masters at that most Ivy League of American universities, Yale.

Henderson had arrived among the intellectual elite. The people whose parents and professors made the policies that affected the people he had grown up among. And, basically, he discovered that they were completely clueless. They had not the slightest idea of the effect of the ideas they espoused. Almost all his peers came from intact, two-parent families but all of them argued that there was no reason to say that was better than single-parent families. Their other ideas similarly championed personal and sexual freedom and licence, while they themselves generally belonged to conventionally moral families.

In short, they lived morally conservative lives while espousing complete libertinism.

And they thought this was the right thing to do, not because of its effects on the poor but because it brought them status among their peers. Henderson slowly realised that, as markers of their own status, his peers at Yale were propounding luxury beliefs, a set of ideas that marked them out as different from other, lower-status Americans.

Social status is something that goes deep into our evolutionary past. It was literally a matter of life or death. Now, though, to signal status, when everybody can own a Rolex or an indistinguishable replica, something else is needed because luxury goods don’t do it. The marker for superior social status today is not what you have but what you believe. And who cares what effect that has on people who can’t buy their way out of a husband leaving home or an addiction leading to the loss of a job?

Well, Rob Henderson does and his evisceration of our current ‘elite’ is as measured and savagely polite as any I have read. Read this book. It might be the most important of the last ten years.

Book review: The Shroud by Ian Wilson

3 January 2025
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The Shroud by Ian Wilson

Is it? Is the long linen cloth held at Turin Cathedral the actual burial shroud that his grieving followers wrapped Jesus’s body with after his crucifixion?

That’s what this book sets out to answer and, basically, its answer is, “Yes, it is.”

For myself, I think the case is both weaker and stronger than the one Ian Wilson presents. It’s weaker historically: it’s very hard to get from the Shroud’s first verifiable appearance in the historical record, in 1355 in the unlikely setting of Lirey, a village in France, to the original shroud via its presumed preservation after the Resurrection, through centuries of Roman persecution, then to Constantinople as a holy relic and then a long hiatus after the Sack of Constantinople in 1203 before its eventual reappearance in France.

However, the case is stronger for the image itself. None of the proposed techniques for producing an image like the Shroud come close to the image itself. There were no artists at the time capable of producing an image of this nature. And no contemporary forger would have put the nails through the wrists, for all crucifixion scenes of the time assumed that Jesus had been nailed through the hands, not the wrists.

So the Shroud remains a mystery. If it is a forgery, then it’s forgery would be almost as miraculous as if the Shroud were, indeed, the burial cloth of Jesus. If it’s genuine, then… Everything changes.

Book review: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God by Justin Brierley

3 January 2025
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The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God by Justin Brierley

Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach, laments the long withdrawing roar of the Sea of Faith, the tide of belief slowly receding.

But the thing with tides is, they go out and then they come back in. And, less obviously, tides go in and out at different times in different places. In Britain, religious belief has been in decline for the last half century or so. The same is true of much of Europe. But elsewhere, notably in Africa and China, the opposite is the case.

Justin Brierley has been hosting a podcast where he brings together notable atheist and religious thinkers and has them talk, in a civil and constructive manner. And over the decade or so he has been doing this, he has seen, as have I, a distinct change. The millennarian stridency of the New Atheists has lessened to an appreciation of the human value of shared religious belief: no less an atheist than Richard Dawkins now accepts the cultural value of Christianity to the England that he loves.

Other thinkers, such as the historian Tom Holland, have highlighted how the entire foundations of even the most secular Western thought are built upon Christian foundations. The concern for the victim that underlies much modern thought comes entirely from the Christian view of the sacrificial value of the pure victim that is Christ himself.

Apart from Tom Holland, other intellectuals are coming round to the idea of the value of Christianity, such as Niall Ferguson. Outside intellectual circles, it’s interesting to note the increasing number of Premier League footballers who put faith at the centre of their life, privately and publicly, such as Bukayo Saka, as well as celebrity conversions such as Russell Brand.

All these suggest that we may have reached the turning of the tide. Combine this with the fact that atheist and agnostic couples have significantly fewer children than religious couples, and it suggests that the 21st century will see not the death of religion but its rebirth – even in the supposedly secular West.

Book review: Penitent by Dan Abnett

31 December 2024
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Penitent by Dan Abnett

I think, in this book, Dan Abnett may have invented a new genre: medieval baroque. Penitent combines the medieval, military SF tropes of 40k fiction with a gorgeous, lush baroque sensibility, rather as if Edgar Allen Poe took to writing 40k after a particularly stiff dose of laudanum.

Book review: Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin

31 December 2024
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Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin

It’s interesting looking at the spread of reviews about this book online. Most are positive – and mine will be too – but there are two significant subsets who loathe it. First, the extreme Turkophiles, for whom any history of the Ottomans that does not paint their empire as an unalloyed good and a general beacon of good governance, and secondly, the Armenian apologists, who lament Goodwin’s skating over the Armenian genocide. Of the two, the Armenians have the greater reason to be annoyed; the Turkophiles will never be satisfied.

For myself, I found it the most thoroughly enjoyable one-volume history of the Ottoman Empire that I have read, and I highly recommend it.

Book review: Dragon’s Blood & Willow Bark by Toni Mount

31 December 2024
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Dragon’s Blood & Willow Bark by Toni Mount

An interesting compendium of the various treatments and cures provided by medieval doctors. As it turns out, they were much better in some areas, in particular the treatment of battlefield injuries, than you might expect: men survived some truly horrific injuries and lived to fight another day. However, there was a little too much of the old and tired trope of the Church banning research. Nevertheless, a good research book for the period.

Book review: Brendan by Frederick Buechner

26 December 2024
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Brendan by Frederick Buechner

What to make of those tales of early medieval saints who stood neck deep in freezing water for hours at a time, or who put to sea in tiny coracles without oars, trusting to God to take them where He would, be that to a new land or a water grave? They are men so very far from modern sympathies and sensibilities that it’s almost impossible to believe that they did such things – but they did.

Bringing them to life is difficult. Frederick Buechner, however, managed this feat brilliantly in his novel, Godric. He attempts it again in Brendan, a story about the Irish saint famous for setting forth in one of those little boats, to not quite the same effect. Where Godric is narrated by the saint himself, and credibly told in such wise, Brendan is told by a companion and friend, who stands in some ways for the reader: unsure but interested. However, in such matters, lack of certainty is ultimately fatal: the water will freeze the blood, the waves close over the boat, the narrative founder on ‘maybe’.

The book does, however, succeed in portraying well the sheer strangeness of 6th century Ireland and how very far it’s culture was from ours today. So read Brendan for its lyrical sensibility and its window into a very strange world.

Book review: The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard

26 December 2024
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The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard

The collection of stories about the dragon, Griaule, gathered in this volume contain one of the most extraordinary ideas in fantasy fiction: a dragon so huge that it forms the landscape: a mouth that opens into a vast cavern, a back that forms a range of hills, claws like towers. The dragon in question is petrified, an evolving ecosystem of life living on and in its remains. But although it does not move, it still, apparently, lives in some geological way, its influence moulding and shaping the lives of those who inhabit the nearby settlements and further afield.

As I said, it’s one of the most fascinating ideas ever put on page. But as to whether you will like it, that depends a lot on what you think of magical realism. As written, the book draws a lot from that genre, even to its setting in an invented but clearly South or Central American country. If you love magical realism then you’ll adore The Dragon Griaule. If you hate the genre, then steer clear of this novel. For myself, I am relatively indifferent to magical realism, in particular a realism that generally concentrates on the degraded and the decadent, so that reduced my appreciation for the book. A brilliant concept written in a style that I am not particularly sympathetic towards.

Book review: Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

26 December 2024
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Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

In between other books, at the moment I am re-reading some of the stories I read when I was young. Seeing Blind Voices on the shelf at my parents’ house, I remembered being enchanted by an atmosphere of fairground mysticism when I read it and, taking it from the bookshelf, I read the blurb and then the back cover – and remembered again that this was Tom Reamy’s only book and that he had died before Blind Voices was published. This aura of tragedy overlay my memory of the book: all I could remember was a halo of heat and brassy fairground music; I had no recollection of the story itself, other than that I had enjoyed it.

So I brought Blind Voices home and set to reading it again. And, yes, there was a travelling show, although it was an out-and-out freak show rather than the travelling fair with outlandish exhibits that I vaguely recalled, and yes, the story is suffused with the heat and dust of summer on the flat grain plains of the American heartlands. But is it a good story?

Well, yes, but when I first read it – checking the copyright date that was 46 years ago! – I had not yet read Ray Bradbury. The story is basically Something Wicked This Way Comes with more sex (I’m rather surprised that the teenage me that read the story didn’t remember this at all) and children who you start off thinking are protagonists but end up being merely observers. Now, it’s clear that it’s a good story rather than a great story, one that wears its influences so clearly that it’s almost a homage to Bradbury.

However, it does still retain its air of quiet tragedy for I think it’s clear that Reamy would have gone on to be a major writer in his own right if he had not died so young. He had talent and he was on his way towards finding his own voice but he had not got there yet with this book.

A note about the cover: it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen, and bears no relation to anything in the book. Please don‘t judge this book by its cover!