Book review

Adventures in Bookland: Scavenger Zoid by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell

16 January 2017
Edoardo
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There’s nothing better than a bit of robot bashing for some good old blaster fun, and Stewart and Riddell deliver this in pacy, bite-sized chunks in this book. Reading it, I’m reminded of the stories of the generation ships, spending centuries travelling at sub-light speeds to new suns, that were a popular sub genre of science fiction when I was a teenager (a rather longer time ago than I like to think).  Showing that you can’t keep a good sub genre down, it’s obviously time for the generation ships to take off once more, what with the new Chris Pratt/Jennifer Lawrence film, Passengers, and this book kicking off a new series. If I remember right, the first iteration of the sub genre eventually disappeared up its own premises with the slow realisation that this was actually nothing more than Peyton Place in space – space opera became soap opera. Let’s see what happens this time round!

 

Adventures in Bookland: English Fairy Tales and Legends by Rosalind Kerven

16 January 2017
Edoardo
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Stories are the thread on which the world is woven, although nowadays, with the meaning being drained from words all the time, the thread is fraying. But these tales come from a time when words still glittered with all the danger of faerie, which is to say the danger of their truth, and in Rosalind Kerven the stories have found a fine teller. In turns haunting, sharp, unsettling and admonitory, these are the best kind of stories and the illustrations are a superb complement to the tales. Highly recommended.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett

16 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writers

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This, the second book in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, is where Dan Abnett thinks himself completely into the world of Warhammer 40k. It’s almost like a series of Impressionist paintings, or like flicking through the sketchbook of a master draftsman, as he approaches characters, places and situations within the context of the 40k universe, learning its language and creating its stories. As such, it doesn’t have the narrative coherence, the sheer I can’t-stop-turning-the-pages drive of something like the Eisenhorn books, or other Ghosts novels, but it’s richer, in particular for the way it shows an imagination as special as Abnett’s firing into overdrive.

Adventures in Bookland: The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris

16 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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Hands down, the best popular account of what it says in the title on the bookshelves today. What makes this so good is Morris’s brilliant balancing of a consideration of the sources with the narrative imperatives of telling the story of what actually happened. That he does this so masterfully is shown by the fact that, until it was over and I was thinking back over it for the purposes of writing a review, I didn’t even realise just how he’d pulled off the hardest trick of writing history: embedding a consideration of the sources in the narrative without stopping the narrative dead in its tracks. Well done, Marc Morris!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio

16 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Well, it’s a bit dull, really. I know, I know: up to now, one of the iron rules of books about exorcism is that they’re never dull. Mad, sometimes; eccentric, usually; gripping, almost without exception. Almost. This is the exception. And, as such, it is probably much more truthful about the subject than Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil, which is much more involving,  considerably better written and altogether more serious, but I suspect leans so far towards the exceptional as to make it useless as an insight into the normal working of the devil in human lives.

The sort of exorcisms portrayed in The Rite are much more humdrum – and much, much more drawn out. Indeed, I’m reminded of people undergoing thoroughgoing psychoanalysis, a process that demands one or two sessions a week for, quite literally, years, without any guarantee of wholeness at the end. Indeed, since psychoanalysis can be considered as a distorted mirror of religious paths, there might be even more to this comparison than is first apparent.

It’s strength as a book is that it does an excellent job of unglamourising evil: it’s here displayed in all its tawdry tedium. You know that old saying that the devil’s greatest trick is getting the world to believe he doesn’t exist? It’s not true. His greatest trick is persuading writers, artists and almost everyone else that he’s the doomed, defiant figure of Miltonic imagination. I’m not sure of the source (possibly Malachi Martin, which shows what a good writer he was) but someone said the best way to think of the devil was as a reptilian intelligence stuck forever in a repeating pattern of destruction.

So, this book’s great virtue is that no one will go away from reading it thinking that the devil has all the best tunes. All he has is the same old, same old, to the world’s ending. And the men, the priests, meeting him in this struggle have to have the constancy, and the ability to resist the tedium, that this most boring of all angels inflicts upon those he is trying to possess.

God bless them for it.

Adventures in Bookland: An Exorcist Tells His Story by Gabriele Amorth

2 January 2017
Edoardo
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All right, let me be honest here from the off (rather than the middle or the end). The late Fr Amorth was a bit mad.

But before you nod sagely, thinking that was only to be expected of a man who professed to have performed well over a hundred thousand exorcisms during his years of ministry, let me hasten to add that that wasn’t the root of his madness. No, his madness is one I recognise, and it’s one peculiar and particular to a certain class of Italian intellectual: it’s the madness of unrecognition stoked by the frustration of years of unrecognised labour. Italy is a country and culture where intellectual and cultural achievement is admired: to be called ‘Il Professore’ or ‘Il Dottore’ is a great distinction. To be denied recognition for labours strikes at the core of such an Italian.

Fr Amorth was such an Italian. He laboured in a lonely and unappreciated ministry for decades, with virtually no support from bishops or brother priests, and there lies the root of the slight tinge of madness that runs through this book. I don’t believe it has anything to do with the abyss he stared into in his vocation, pulling back people dangling over the pit. In fact, the repetitiveness of his work is strongly suggestive of its validity, for evil is, by its nature, uncreative, repeating the same patterns of fall over and over and over again. Only the good creates. Evil merely spoils.

Hopefully, in heaven, Fr Amorth can see that his work is now much more appreciated and even bishops (an old saying famously remarked that the paths of hell are paved with their skulls) have come to realise the necessity of taking the devil and all his works seriously.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Blood and Blade by Matthew Harffy

1 January 2017
Edoardo
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In Blood and Blade, Matthew Harffy’s recreation of the violent and crucial decades of 7th-century Britain reaches a new depth and resonance. His hero, Beobrand, is a man whose soul has been as much branded by the events of the previous two books as his body has been battered by them – and how good it is to have an action hero not shake off wounds as lightly as a shower of rain. In this book, Beobrand has to travel the path his wyrd has placed him on, between competing kingdoms and the collision of religions. Harffy handles the many action scenes with his customary skill and realism – this is not a book for the faint hearted – but it is in the portrayal of the relationship between Beobrand and a lowly thrall that the author reveals a deepening appreciation of the human condition and how, even in the midst of the most violent of times, people will strive for love and human contact.

Adventures in Bookland: Recce by Koos Stadler

1 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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A profound paradox lies at the heart of this book, a paradox not even hinted at in its subtitle (“Small team missions behind enemy lines”), although it is mentioned, without comment, in the book’s blurb. For while it is an intriguing and insightful examination of the specialised and deadly world of special forces’ operations, what is skated over is who these special forces were and what they were fighting against.

The special forces were part of the South African army and they were fighting the guerillas of SWAPO, the organisation struggling to free South West Africa (now Namibia) from the racist control of the apartheid regime in Pretoria. And the author of Recce, Koos Stadler, was one of the men fighting to preserve that regime.

For some, that in itself might disqualify the book from reading lists, but that would be to miss another of the paradoxes at the book’s heart: while the author is fighting to defend the indefensible, reading Recce brings the reader to the slow realisation that good men can be committed to fighting for what is wrong. For Stadler is undoubtedly a good man and a good soldier, serving his country, his people and his God as best he knows how. Nor is he, the servant of a racist regime, in any way racist himself: how could he be, when in the long border war he served alongside so many black African soldiers, creating the sorts of bonds of mutual trust and friendship that staring into the face of death together forge between men.

And this reveals the book’s final paradox: how many black Africans fought alongside the South African army against the guerillas of SWAPO. So the book’s final lesson is that, even in the struggle against apartheid, things are never just black and white.

Adventures in Bookland: The Path to War by Michael Neiberg

1 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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At the dawn of the 20th century, the United States was a power hiding behind oceans. In the first decades of the 21st century, it is the world’s only hyperpower, able to project its military and cultural influence to every corner of the world. This fascinating book – at least, it’s fascinating for those with an interest in the political and sociological history of America – tells how America made the decisive turn towards engagement with the outside world.

It may be hard to realise now, but through most of its history, isolationism has been the strongest strand to America’s foreign policy. Its founders and first generations of immigrants crossed the sea to escape the wars and persecutions – political and religious – of the Old World. Having found a home in the New World, they had no wish to engage in the wars of their old homes. So when the First World War broke out, America remained neutral. Not only did this keep it out of the war, neutrality brought huge profits in its wake, as American goods and products found ready markets among all the combatants.

But such blood profits sat uneasily on American consciences, bought as they were in the immolation of a continent that many Americans still thought of as home. For none was this problem more acute than for German-Americans. Where did their loyalty lie? At first, they pushed for continued American neutrality. But as the war continued and incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania increased anti-German feeling, such a position became increasingly untenable. War was coming. And German-Americans, in common with Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans and the other national groups, came to the one, common conclusion: they were Americans before they were anything else. Thus, the First World War killed off the 19th-century American experiment in multiculturalism (played out in a multitude of national-language newspapers and societies) and ushered in a new consciousness of what it was to be American.

Neiberg tells the story of this profound change through an encyclopaedic knowledge of the time, ranging from popular songs, through speeches and newspaper articles, to the letters of people ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to ordinary mothers contemplating the possibility of their sons being called up. It’s a great piece of scholarship – but only bother with reading it if you’re interested in the subject.

Adventures in Bookland: King Cnut by WB Bartlett

31 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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Ask the man in the street how many times England has been successfully invaded and he’ll reply, “Twice: the Romans and the Normans.” Ask a historian, particularly one specialising in constitutional history, and he’ll add a third: William and Mary’s invasion in 1688.

They’re all wrong. There have been at least five successful invasions of England. These three, plus the slow-motion carving out of an England separate from Britain by the Anglo-Saxons and then, fifty years before the one date in English history everyone knows, the Vikings finally succeeded in what they’d been trying to do for the previous 150 years: grab the country.

This long-overdue book is about the Viking invasions that first crippled and then ended the reign of England’s worst-ever king, Æthelred, and the man who finally succeeded him, Cnut. In Denmark, his homeland, Cnut’s name is invariably followed by his appellation, ‘the Great’, but in England, where he spent most of his adult life and where he was buried, he is all but forgotten, his fame as a conqueror eclipsed by the man who followed him, fifty years later. Bartlett’s book seeks to redress that balance and it does a good job of demonstrating what a remarkable king Cnut was, holding together a sea-spanning empire encompassing Denmark, England, Norway and much of Sweden.

As a sea pirate with imperial pretensions, Cnut did all that he could to ensure the history makers of his time – the clerks of the Church – were on his side, as well as doing what he could in later life to atone for the judicious murders of his early life that had made his grasp of the crown more secure. The book is thorough in its exploration of the man and his time, although a little on the bloodless side. This is no fault of the author, but rather inherent in the limited contemporary sources – mainly chronicles and charters – which do not lend themselves to rounded character portraits. Later Norse sagas add colour but the careful historian, and Bartlett is careful, has to be cautious about adding these details to what is a sober assessment of England’s forgotten conqueror.

And the tide story? First related by Henry of Huntingdon in the 12th century (a century after Cnut’s death).