Book review

Adventures with Words: Brazen Chariots by Major Robert Crisp

28 January 2022
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review, History, Things You Never Knew
Brazen Chariots by Robert Crisp

Some men are bigger than their books. Brazen Chariots is an undoubted classic of tank warfare in the desert during the Second World War but, for Bob Crisp, it was a memoir of just a couple of years in a life of extraordinary adventure.

First, the book: it conveys the heat, the dust, the confusion and, tellingly, the exhiliration that some men feel during combat. Crisp was one such man: extreme situations plugged him into the mains current of life and he revelled in them as much as it’s possible to revel in a battle where death and injury is a constant companion. Brazen Chariots is a brilliant account of fighting in tanks in the desert. But it is only a small part of Crisp’s story.

Not a family man, Crisp nevertheless fathered two sons, who learned of their father’s exploits during the Second World War by reading about them in a comic: Crisp’s adventures were featured as true-life story of heroism. By that time, Crisp had left their mother. There were many, many women in Crisp’s life. His portrait gives a picture of the man.

Robert Crisp

It’s the sort of half smile to break many a girl’s heart. But generally Crisp left his women happy. Towards the end of his life, when he lived in Greece, one of Crisp’s sons flew out to meet his father again. Walking into a taverna, he found his father surrounded by ten adoring women, ranging from 20 to 50. Crisp was living in Greece because, aged 60, he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Faced with death (again) Crisp decided to walk around Crete with a donkey. Rather than dying, he thrived, attracting legions of besotted women.

This was par for his wayward course. Crisp was also a cricketer, good enough to play for South Africa in test matches and the only man to have taken four wickets in four balls twice. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro twice, the second time having to carry his climbing partner, who had broken his leg on the ascent, back down the mountain.

A South African, Crisp was also one of the founders of Drum newspaper, a radical paper for the black townships of his country. As was the pattern of his life, Crisp later fell out with his partners and went off to try something new: running a mink farm, writing for newspapers, gambling.

Nothing else ever really had the intensity of warfare: Crisp had six tanks shot or burned out under him during the war; he was mentioned in dispatches four times, awarded the Military Cross and would have received the Victoria Cross if General Montgomery had not personally stopped the award on account of Crisp’s lack of respect for senior officers and ill-discipline.

Some men are bigger than their books. Crisp towered over his.

Adventures with Words: The Men Who Made the SAS by Gavin Mortimer

28 January 2022
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review
The Men Who Made the SAS by Gavin Mortimer

The title is an excellent example of a publisher shoehorning a mention of a ‘sexier’ subject into the title to pick up readers. The book is actually about the subtitle: The History of the Long Range Desert Group. The LRDG was set up to do exactly what it said: scout and reconnoitre at long range in the desert. The SAS was a separate organisation and while there was a degree of overlap between the two, and some rivalry, they remained two separate organisations throughout World War II.

The Long Range Desert Group really doesn’t need the spurious association: their exploits were just as extraordinary as those of the SAS. Driving deep, deep into the desert, navigating by a combination of speed/distance and compass bearings (the maps were blank for the areas they were going into) they went far far behind enemy lines, lying low there sometimes for weeks at a time, observing, recording, reporting and sometimes attacking. It was this experience of operating independently behind enemy lines for long periods of time that laid the foundations for the Chindits and later special forces operations.

The story of how Major Ralph Bagnold, an inter-war scientist, explored the desert and then used his expertise in desert exploration to set up and train the LRDG is fascinating, as are the many extraordinary characters who became members of the LRDG. Right from the off, the LRDG prioritised men who could think for themselves, setting it outside the usual terms of military reference, and the men who found a home within the organisation more than repaid Bagnold’s faith in them.

It’s also interesting for how, the Desert War won, the LRDG attempted to find a new role for itself in the war for Europe – with relatively little success. The techniques that worked in the desert were not nearly so successful in Europe, leading to the Group’s eventual disbandment. But the template laid down by the LRDG would inform the operations and training of all the later Special Forces units. The book is a fitting tribute to these intrepid men.

Adventures with Words: The Hunter by Tom Wood

28 January 2022
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review
The Hunter by Tom Wood

Part of my day job is writing stories where Space Marines blast aliens – and Chaos corrupted humans – into blood and viscera smeared pieces. Writing battles and fights is something I do, whether it is Anglo-Saxon England or the grim dark of the far future.

So it’s quite something for me to say that I found The Hunter just too violent. It’s not that it’s bad – far fromt it, Tom Wood writes a taut, thrilling story – it’s simply that the body count is so astronomically high that having finished the first in the Victor the Assassin series I have absolutely no wish to read any more of his adventures. Which is a shame, as Victor looks like he could be an interesting protagonist – not many assassins for hire have an annual confession stop, where they go to a priest to confess their sins – but I’m afraid it’s just too violent for me. I mean, the first chapter saw Victor killing eight people, one a woman, sent to kill him, and the body count simply escalated thereafter. I like to think the death of people means something, even if they are themselves killers, and the sheer number of people Victor kills makes this impossible. So, not for me. But if you like ultra-violent, high-pace thrillers, then it could be for you.

Adventures with Words: The Long War for Britannia 367-644 by Edwin Pace

28 January 2022
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review, History
The Long War for Britannia by Edwin Pace

History is difficult without sources. For the two centuries between the Romans leaving in 410 and the mission of St Augustine, who arrived in Kent in 597, we have the barest handful of contemporary documents. It might not matter, if not for the fact that these centuries were the foundation of everything that happened afterwards in Britain: the Romano-Celtic Britannia that slipped out of history at the start of the 5th century reappeared in the 7th century as a country divided, with Anglo-Saxon kingdoms controlling what would become England, Welsh-speaking princedoms in Wales, and Scotland split between Pictish and Irish kingdoms.

Later historians, starting with Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and going on to medieval writers, told the history of these missing centuries, recounting how the pagan Anglo-Saxons had arrived in Britain and displaced the native Britons. But these were histories written centuries after the events they described, and over the last half century historians and archaeologists have grown increasingly sceptical about the value of these accounts. In particular, the findings of archaeologists have served to cast doubt on the one-off departure of the Romans and the ethnic cleansing narrative of the Anglo-Saxon conquest.

However, on its own, archaeology provides snapshots: it struggles to construct a narrative. Abandoning the ancient sources has left us in an ahistorical darkness, with almost no named actors. In The Long War for Britannia, Edwin Pace has stepped bravely into the dark, mounting a thoroughgoing examination and defence of the ancient sources.

His argument is based in large part upon systematising the differences between the various accounts of the time. Pace argues that many of the discrepancies that have caused historians to discredit writers such as the 9th-century Nennius were caused by mistakes the medieval authors made in trying to fit dates originally calculated by the Roman consular calendar and insular regnal dating into the Anno Domini system adopted by the Venerable Bede. Pace also argues that the key contemporary writer, Gildas, who wrote his On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain around AD 530 by Pace’s reckoning, can be understood by placing his work into the theological framework of the monk. Working off these arguments, Pace concludes that there really was a King Arthur and that he can be identified as the Proud Tyrant of Gildas’ polemic – an unusual but fascinating conclusion.

Pace goes on to identify other people from legend as real historical characters, most notably arguing the Uther Pendragon was actually the 7th-century Mercian King Penda, the last great pagan Anglo-Saxon king. With his mastery of the written and archaeological sources, Edwin Pace has mounted a thoroughgoing and compelling argument for elements from the ancient authors as being worthy of the attention of serious historians. Many historians and archaeologists will disagree with Pace’s conclusions but, together with Miles Russell’s recent book Arthur and the Kings of Britain, there is now a serious, if not necessarily convincing, argument for looking at the ancient chroniclers afresh. Highly recommended for anyone with a deep interest in the roots of England.

Adventures with Words: Sink the Bismarck! by CS Forester

27 January 2022
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review
Sink the Bismarck! by CS Forester

C.S. Forester is better known for his Horatio Hornblower novels but this World War II novella is well worth a read. Sticking to the events around the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, Forester tells a gripping story, interpolating invented dialogue – we obviously have no record of what was actually said on the command deck of the Bismarck – with a masterful narrative account of the events.

The main flaw is one that Forester could not have remedied when writing the book: we now know that British intelligence had cracked the German Enigma code but when Forester wrote his book this was still top secret. I would like to read an account of the hunt for the Bismarck that includes this so we can learn how much difference this knowledge made.

Adventures with Words: Holes by Louis Sachar

27 January 2022
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review
Holes by Louis Sachar

With the explosion in children and young adults’ fiction over the last twenty-five years set off by JK Rowling’s Harry Potter book you’d think there would have been many great books among the bomb. But, as with all publishing explosions, most of it is mediocre and the best is just good, rather than being great. Holes might just be an exception: it really might be great. We’ll only know for sure in fifty years time, but even now, nearly twenty five years after it was first published, the story holds up really well. It’s helped in this by having narratives set in different time periods, so it’s less tied to the present than most children’s books, but most of all it’s the way that Sachar brilliantly structures his story that makes it stand out. He weaves the apparently disparate storylines into each other and then, at the climax, brings them all together in what is something of a masterpiece of resolution.

It also avoids the if-you-want-it-hard-enough-you’ll-get-it cliche that bedevils modern children’s fiction and films: the book has lessons and wisdom to impart, but they are lessons and knowledge hard won – like digging holes in the hot sun.

Adventures with Words: Random Harvest by James Hilton

19 November 2021
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review
Random Harvest by James Hilton

James Hilton, author of Goodbye, Mr Chips and Lost Horizon, was a best-selling author of his day (the 1930s to the 1950s) but, like so many popular writers, his writing is ignored by the literary establishment, dismissed as the sentimental harking back to a lost pre-lapsarian or at least pre-Great-War England. It’s not true. What his work is, rather, is an examination, through carefully crafted stories, of the trauma of the Great War and the presentiment of the greater war coming soon. Not all writers working in the interregnum between the wars sensed that there would be another conflict; most wrote on oblivious to the gathering storm. Whether Hilton was consciously aware of this, or simply sensed it, I do not know, but the foreboding of the future is there even while the characters in this story deal with the long aftermath of the First World War.

The story moves between points of view, starting in the first person with a graduate student meeting Charles Rainier, an eminent figure in politics and business, but then switches to the third person as we learn that Rainier served in the Great War, was injured and lost his memory, waking up two years later in Liverpool having completely forgotten what happened in those lost years. Rainier returns to his family and, while curiously detached, he helps save the family business, saving many livelihoods, and enters politics, all from a basic sense of doing his best but with an underlying void and loss.

The story is essentially about Rainier’s rediscovery of what happened to him during his lost years and the twist at the end is beautifully engineered. It’s a subtle, moving story about loss and recovery, written before anyone had come up with the term post-traumatic stress disorder by a writer from a generation that had more right to be stressed than any other in history.

Adventures with Words: The Tripods trilogy by John Christoper

26 October 2021
Edoardo
2 Comments
Categories: Book review
The White Mountains by John Christoper
City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher
The Pool of Fire by John Christopher

As a boy, I all but lived in the local library. Indeed, the most exciting days of the year for me were the couple of days before an official bank holiday because then you were allowed to take two books out on a card, rather than just one. So that meant I could borrow eight, eight books from the library over a bank holiday weekend. Of course, I loved being able to buy books but we did not have much money and besides, if I had bought the books I read, we would have had to sleep in the garden for lack of space! So the library was my door to wonders, and adventures, and ideas, and I went through it two or three times a week. Perhaps the most enjoyable moment of all was getting home with my treasure trove of books to read and then deciding the order in which I was going to read them. My normal practice was to put aside to the end one (or if it was a bank holiday weekend and I had eight books piled up in front of me, two) reliable books that I knew, because I had read the author before, I would enjoy. I would pick another favourite to start off with and then, for my middle reads, turn to the ones that I had picked to see where they would take me, not knowing too much about the stories beforehand.

That was how I came to read John Christopher’s Tripods novels. I must have been quite young when I read them as I remember I borrowed them from a long-closed library in Archway and we moved from the area when I was eight – so at least fifty years ago! That’s a long time for books to stay in the memory, particularly without rereading them, but I had retained a vivid impression of them, and in particular the Capping by which the aliens exerted control over the entire adult population of the earth. It’s not hard for a child to believe that all adults might be being secretly controlled by aliens! What’s even better is to think that children might be the ones to save everybody – and that is exactly what happens in these books. Brave Will Parker runs away before his own Capping, makes a dangerous journey through France to the White Mountains (which I now know to be the Alps but did not know at the time) and becomes a member of the secret resistance to the Tripods. Then, in the second story, Will infiltrates the city of the alien tripods and learns their weakness. And in the final story, Will is a key figure in the plan to overthrow the aliens.

It’s heady stuff for a child to read and Will has sufficient flaws to make him a thoroughly believable and relatable character. It was a joy to read the books again after so long and feel the thrill of recognition as characters I had not remembered but immediately recalled made their appearances in the story, particularly Beanpole, the clever French boy that escapes with Will to the White Mountains, whom I realise now I had identified with.

Fifty years on, did the books stand the test of the passage of half a century and the very different world we live in today? Yes. Absolutely yes.

Adventures with Words: Archangel by Gerald Seymour

19 October 2021
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review, History

Already we forget. It’s thirty years since the Berlin Wall came down and the prisoners stumbled from the Gulags, but we are busy forgetting. While the Holocaust has, rightly I suppose, spawned an industry of remembrance, the victims of the Soviet Gulags are disappearing into a historical black hole. It seems no one is interested. Neither in the suffering and deaths in the Gulags, nor the almost miraculous end to it all: a Soviet system that seemed as unyielding as the Wall itself fell all but overnight and with virtually no bloodshed. We can look back at the events leading up to the end of the Soviet block and the finish of the Cold War but its actual denouement seems to cast a pall of unreality over people: it’s as if, seeing a miracle, people cannot bring themselves to look at it, but rather forget.

A large part of that forgetting is the Gulags, the system of forced labour camps that the Soviet Union employed to dispose of dissidents and counter-revolutionaries. While not extermination camps per se, nevertheless estimates suggest that around 1.5 million people died in the Gulags, worked and starved to death, frozen, diseased or simply executed and thrown in ditches. The great chronicler of Soviet cruelty, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, seems to have been removed from literary consideration while the Gulags themselves have been brushed under the carpet of the new Russia.

Archangel was written when the Gulags still ground people through the system, and takes the reader on an uncomfortable trip back into still fairly recent history. Long out of print (I picked my copy up from a second-hand bookshop) it tells a slightly unlikely story of a doomed attempt to overthrow the Gulag system from within. It’s unlikely in that the protagonist is a captured British agent and it seems unlikely that any such revolt would be led by a foreigner, but the story vividly conveys the every day acts of defiance and humanity that allowed the inmates of the Gulags to remember that they were men. As such, Archangel is a great book for this age of forgetting and if you can find a copy I strongly urge you to read it.

Adventures with Words: The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault

15 August 2021
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review

“All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy – and that is as well, for one could not bear it – whose grief is that the principals never met.”

I first read ‘The Mask of Apoll’o when I was in my teens and the book’s last paragraph, and particularly its last sentence, has haunted me ever since. Now, decades later, I reread the story that I might remember what lead up to that last sentence and it is indeed as devastating a story as that final sentence demands. For I read the book because at the time I was also reading the dialogues of Plato and ‘The Mask of Apollo’ tells the story, through the eyes of the actor, Nikeratos, of Plato’s attempt to put his theories of statecraft and the philosopher king into practice by teaching Dionysus, the tyrant (in the ancient Greek sense of a king relatively untrammeled by the restraint of law) of Syracuse in Sicily, the principles and ethics of philosophy, and of Plato’s brilliant pupil, Dion, a Syracusan aristocrat who could have seized the throne for himself.

The decades had rubbed away Renault’s brilliant depiction of the realities, at least so far as we can reimagine them, of Greek theatre, but it had not removed the tragedy that hangs over the story. The first-order tragedy is a man, Dion, by temperament and training perfectly suited to be the philosopher king of Syracuse who turns down the chance precisely because he is a man of pre-eminent virtue and will not usurp a throne that is not, quite, rightfully his. This is coupled with the tragedy of Dionysus II, oscillating between his good and evil selves, with Plato as the physical presence of his decaying conscience.

This is a thorough examination of the workings out of political philosophy in reality and is thoroughly absorbing, highlighting all the best features of historical fiction in its bringing to life of an ancient culture, the events within that culture and the people who lived through those events.

But it is final chapters of the book, after Plato’s death, that bring it to a higher level of tragedy. Nikeratos travels to Macedonia with his theatre company and there meets a young prince in his early teens but already almost god-like in his charisma, a fire seeking fuel for its burning. The young Alexander has a tutor, and no ordinary tutor for his teacher is no other than Aristotle. But the fire in Alexander’s soul is, Renault implies, searching for a different fuel. Alexander burns through the world seeking it, but what he is looking for in the world has already left it, broken at the failure of his attempts to foster a perfect kingdom. Hence the final, gutwrenching, sentence of the book.