Angels continues the Oxford Very Short Introduction writing streak: it’s excellent. A short (as it says) introduction to angels, from their first appearances in Near Eastern Mythology, their spread through Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to their modern reinvention as figures of the New Age. The book runs parallel threads through history, theology and art history, using each to inform the other.
Angels does exactly what it says on the cover.
Robert Heinlein was the Jekyll and Hyde of SF writers. Dr Jekyll wrote tightly plotted stories that whisked the reader into a future that was assumed as part of the story’s structure so that it did not require any long explanations as to how the young hero might be able to ride a rocket to the asteroid belt. And it always was a young hero, for these stories were aimed at teenagers – they’re now called Heinlein’s juveniles. There’s not a wasted word in them.
Mr Heinlein’s Hyde wrote interminable novels with only vaguely discernible plots whose main points appeared to be to advocate for guilt-free sex for everyone and, in particular, for men with their mothers (yucky but true), where no woman appeared whose nipples did not go ‘sproing!’ within a few moments of meeting our narrative hero. I was a teenage boy when I read these stories and the female form was a matter of intense interest and complete mystery to me at the time but I still thought this was icky. These stories were supposedly for adults and they are almost all dreadful.
I grew up with Heinlein’s juveniles and loved them. I moved on to his adult books and, having read the few decent ones early (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers) manfully ploughed through the nipple-springing dross (Time Enough For Love, I Will Fear No Evil) before finally giving up on The Number of the Beast.
I thought I had read all Heinlein’s juveniles so it was with delight that I discovered one that I had missed: Citizen of the Galaxy. I settled down to it, expecting to return to the effortless storytelling that had transplanted me into the future when I was young… only to be bored. Reader, I am truly sorry to say this story does something unique for Heinlein. It is tedious. It is humdrum. It drags on until you start looking to see how many pages before it ends. Looking at when it was written, 1957, it stands just on the cusp of when Heinlein stood on the brink of becoming a preacher rather than a writer. While it doesn’t have the worst excesses of his later works, there are signs. Read his earlier works instead.
You know, I think I might be the problem here. The story begins brilliantly, with an obscure present-day scholar specialising in an even more obscure 18th-century poet being given the chance to travel back in time to meet the object of his studies – only to be marooned in the past. There are beggar kings and warlocks, and all sorts of villains and goodies, although every character has depth, and the story is turbo-charged, powering through adventures in London and Egypt.
So, I ought to love it. And for the first half I did. But then, to be honest, I started getting a bit lost. Because the hero, and the villain, and various other people, all start swapping bodies and I simply lost track of who was who and why they were trying to kill/flee from/avoid other characters. Now, if I had read this when I was 18, when my brain was like a sponge and I could soak in all the details of a story, then I wouldn’t have had any trouble following our hero through all his changes of identity. But now, with my brain pretty full, it all washes through but much less sticks – so I got lost.
So, my apologies, Mr Powers. I think you probably wrote a brilliant story but it’s one I am no longer able to appreciate.
This is basically Groundhog Life – but before you going throwing claims of ripping off ideas at Ken Grimwood, his book came out in 1987 while Groundhog Day came out in 1993. So Grimwood’s in the clear – unless, of course, he’s like his hero. For his hero, Jeff Winston, is maundering along into dissatisfied middle age when – he dies. And wakes up, 18 again, but with all the memories of what happened during the next 25 years of his life.
It’s the ultimate do-over. A whole life, with all the knowledge of your previous life, where you went wrong, where you went right, and everything that happened in the wider world to give you a leg up this time round.
It’s a wonderful exploration of the opportunities and temptations of such a situation and a book so good that I did something I very rarely do with novels – I read it again. The first time I read this was about eight years ago and now I’ve replayed it and it’s just as good second time around – not quite what Winston finds. Highly recommended.
If the characteristic art of World War I was the poem, that of World War II was the novel. Perhaps it reached its highest form in Evelyn Waugh’s incomparable Sword of Honour trilogy, but there were many other fine novels reflecting on the war, such as The Cruel Sea, Schindler’s Ark and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
This isn’t quite one of them. Elleston Trevor went on to write the successful Quiller spy series under the pseudonym Adam Hall. Squadron Airborne is formed from personal experience during the war; it largely follows a single squadron through a few weeks of the Battle of Britain, looking equally at pilots and ground crew, the point of view changing frequently. He does a good job of showing the importance of the ground crew to the whole battle but, presumably because the language was so second nature to him, he uses air force terminology so liberally throughout the book that it’s often hard to understand what exactly is going on: I still don’t know what a mag drop is and why it’s important.
Read for an insight into how all the members of a squadron played a vital role in getting and keeping the planes airborne.
It’s been a long, long time since I enjoyed a bad book so much! OK, that’s a little unfair. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars isn’t really a bad book: it doesn’t push propaganda or advocate for any of the usual nihilistic philosophies that you find undergirding most of modern literary fiction. It just sets out to tell a story, a relatively old-fashioned story at that: a space opera. Galaxy spanning, bouncing planets, a go big story dialled up to the nth power. There were a lot of these in the early days of science fiction but it’s been years since I read anything like this and, yes, I had a blast: sentient symbiotic body suits, evil aliens, FTL drives, battles in space, all the classic tropes of space opera.
It’s great fun to read a story where the writer commits so completely to going BIG with not the slightest consideration of probability. So our heroes can cross the galaxy and arrive at an unknown star to find not only the baddies arriving there too, but previous characters, likewise left thousands of light years away, turning up too. The book is delightfully full of unlikely meetings, a nearly perfect heroine with an unfortunate tendency to accidentally kill the people closest to her, and aliens both evil and ugly.
Objectively, the book breaks many of the fiction writing rules you find in how-to-write-your-novel books, from telling rather than showing through Mary Sue characters to the aforementioned coincidental meetings so by those measures it ought to be terrible. But it isn’t. The sheer enjoyment of the writing carries it through.
It’s not easy to cram four hundred years of military, religious and political endeavour into less than 50,000 words but Christopher Tyerman does stirling work. In particular, he works hard to disabuse the reader of many of the false ideas about the Crusades that have become common currency: that they were a land grab by European nobility, that they should be viewed through contemporary political lenses and that the Crusaders were uniquely barbaric.
The main problem with writing about the Crusades is that Steven Runciman casts a long shadow. His books became the source of almost all popular views of the Crusades and it’s only now that his legacy is slowly being unpicked.
Tyerman acknowledges that he is not the writer that Steven Runciman was, but he sets out to gently correct many of the myths that Runciman promulgated about the Crusades. Unfortunately, Runciman was a writer with an eye for the telling detail and no compunction about employing these details to bolster his own rhetoric. Tyerman is nowhere near his equal as a writer, but he is a much better historian.
So read this book for a more staid, but more truthful, account of the Crusades.
Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, the shadow of war hung over us in a way that it’s very difficult for people born after 1990 to understand. There really was a constant sense that the missiles might start flying, whether by intent or mistake made little difference, and the world, well, end. With the vast nuclear arsenals both sides had, that really would have been it.
But then, it was all over. I remember watching it on TV. Solidarity in Poland. Glasnost. Then, marvel of marvels, the Berlin Wall being pulled down, brick by brick, on live TV. The old Soviet order vanished with barely a whimper and hardly any lives lost and… it was over. The confrontation that had defined the half century since the end of World War II was done, basically without a shot being fired.
Or so it seemed. In reality, there had been a series of proxy wars, low-level conflicts, and ideological confrontation throughout the Cold War and, in this book Robert McMahon does a fabulous job of lifting those perilous times out of the memory hole into which we seem determined to cast them.
I don’t really know why that is the case. Looking back, it still seems little less than miraculous that we got away with it. Indeed, so miraculous was the escape that it seems to me that we have almost deliberately forgotten about it, as if to really remember those times would be in some way to acknowledge the irruption of the totally unexpected in human affairs. In most cases when this happens it’s a catastrophe but this was, as Tolkien termed it, a eucatastrophe, the unexpected turn where everything turned out all right. We humans, we are uncomfortable in the presence of the miraculous; we turn away from it. In this case, we have turned away from the history of those years.
McMahon’s short book does a great job of bringing those years back into focus, maintaining the consistent excellence of these Oxford Very Short Introductions. An excellent book.
This was not really what I expected. Having read Geoffrey Wellum’s peerless First Light, and knowing that Kingcome was a member of the same squadron, I had expected something similar. However, reading the introduction, it’s clear that Kingcome died having written only a first draft of the book. It was then polished for publication but Kingcome’s death prevented him adding further material.
As a result, the book is actually much more a memoir of Kingcome’s life than an account of the Battle of Britain, or indeed the Second World War. In fact, there’s surprisingly little on the battle and not too much more on the war. However, Kingcome’s life was fascinating, and the insight into the training and preparations for the war are well worth reading.
There are places where the book suggests it might have become one of the great memoirs of a pilot’s life if Kingcome had been given more time to work on it. As it stands, it’s a valuable insight into the milieu of the sort of man who ended up flying planes in the Second War, and a tribute to a fine man, but it’s not the book it might have been.
One of the great joys for a bookish father is to have a son who’s willing to read your book recommendations – and most of the time he’s even liked the books I’ve suggested he read.
So when Matthew asked me to read a book that he had read, I obviously had to read in kind. The book was Red Rising and he had loved it.
Reading it myself, I could see why he loved Red Rising so much. It is the perfect book for a young man setting out in life and ready to take on the world. But for an old man beaten down by the world, it resonates somewhat differently. For me, it’s a book suffused with regret for the passing of the vigour and energy of youth which, at the time, I thought was mine forever rather than loaned to me at my start. Now, the energy I have left is leavened with thought; something to be held onto and spent wisely.
The struggle of Darrow is the struggle of a young man against a foe that he does not even realise yet can never be beaten; it gave me great satisfaction to read and be, for a while, young again.