wot i red on my hols by alan robson (novus annus)

Hippy New Year.

Amy Meyerson’s novel The Bookshop of Yesterdays is deliberately designed to appeal to book lovers. Consequently I found it quite irresistible, though I have to confess it isn’t always a comfortable read.

Miranda Brooks is a history teacher, living in Philadelphia. One day she receives a startling phone call telling her that her beloved Uncle Billy has died. As a child, Miranda had hero worshipped Billy – he owned a bookshop called Prospero’s Books and Miranda had always taken a secret delight in knowing that she herself was named after Prospero’s daughter from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. She had spent many happy hours in her uncle’s shop, browsing the shelves, falling in love with literature and solving the literary riddles that Billy left for her, riddles that took her deeper and deeper into the world of books. And into the world.

And then, when she was twelve years old, her life fell apart. Her mother and Billy had a huge argument and Billy and his bookshop vanished from her life. Nobody would talk to Miranda about what had happened. For sixteen years there was an emptiness in her life where Billy used to be, and now he is dead. But, rather to her surprise, she learns that she has inherited his bookshop and with it there is one last scavenger hunt that will take her through the bookshelves again and which will eventually lead to a series of revelations that will throw some light on the argument that took Billy out of her life. There are, it seems, family secrets which are dark, disturbing, disconcerting and really quite fascinating…

The novel is a tour through both life and literature and as Miranda and I followed Billy’s clues I re-acquainted myself with a lot of old friends, all the way from Jane Austen, through to John Steinbeck and even, rather surprisingly, Erica Jong. I got a lot of fun out of seeing Erica Jong’s evocative phrase the zipless fuck back in print on the page in front of me for the first time since I read Fear of Flying in 1973. In fact I got a lot of fun out of everything in this this totally absorbing novel. I loved every word of it.

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My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodie Ashton and Jodi Meadows relates the (not entirely true and not entirely accurate) history of Lady Jane Grey, the very brief, nine day wonder, Queen of England.

The young Edward VI sits precariously on the throne of England. He is beset by plots on all sides and is in very poor health. He is desperately trying to stay alive long enough to find out what it is like to be kissed by a beautiful girl. But sadly he has been stricken with a Tragic Disease so clearly an heir will soon be required. Fortunately heirs are waiting in the wings. The most reluctant of these is the Lady Jane Grey…

The story takes place in Tudor England shortly after the death of King Henry VIII. In our world, arguments between Protestants and Catholics defined the political and religious manoeuvrings that eventually brought Lady Jane to the throne for nine brief days before people lost patience with her and chopped her head off so that history could continue properly on its way. But in the world of the novel those disputes have been subsumed by a war between the Verities and the Ethians – Verities are true humans, Ethians are only human for some of the time. At other times they change into animals. Ethians hate Verities and Verities hate Ethians. As all of you well know, that’s the natural order of things.

Lady Jane Grey is married to Gifford, a man who spends most of his time being a horse. Wouldn’t you if you were hung like that? The marriage gives her some insight into both sides of the dispute. It’s an insight she really doesn’t appreciate at all.

The story sort of sticks to real history in a things might have been different if only kind of a way, though the pinches of salt you will need to take in order to make it sufficiently palatable and swallowable are very large indeed. But don’t worry about that. Mostly the story just regards itself as an excuse to tell lots of jokes. There are jokes here to suit every taste – erudite political and social jokes about life in Tudor England, slick and sophisticated literary reference jokes, slapstick comedy jokes and (because the authors are not proud) lots of knob jokes. As Ben Elton has so often remarked, you can never go wrong with a good knob joke.

If you like your history unadorned with facts, if you want your history to make you laugh out loud in embarrassingly public places, you’ll absolutely love this book.

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Crooks by Lou Berney is The Forsyte Saga for the twenty first century starring a family of American (guess what?) crooks rather than a family of British middle/upper class twits. Consequently it’s a lot more interesting, a lot more fun and much, much funnier than was Galsworthy’s sometimes ponderous tome. But it’s no less subtle and thoughtful for all that.

The story is all very low key – there is no large criminal empire here, no godfather-esque plotting and intrigue. There is just  the Mercurio family hustling to make a vaguely legitimate living. Their definition of legitimate is, of course, somewhat grey and flexible. They steal, they scheme, sometimes they screw up and then they often have to run away so as to keep at least one step ahead of the angry mobs of marks, policemen and mobsters all of whom want to tear them limb from limb and beat them to death with the soggy ends. But first, foremost and always they are a family and their way of life is in their blood. Buddy, the family patriarch, comes from a long line of petty (and not so petty) criminals in both the old country and also here in America, the new land of new opportunities.

Each section of the book tells the tale of a mini-criminal (more or less) enterprise involving one member of the Mercurio clan and the timeline of the story advances gradually from the mid-twentieth century to well into the twenty first.

We open with Buddy himself, a low life hustler in Los Vegas. He meets Lillian, the love of his life. Together they run heists but eventually, after a long run of success, they step on one too many influential toes, queer their pitch and have to run. They settle in Oklahoma City (of all places) where Buddy takes charge of a more or less crooked nightclub. Subsequent chapters focus on the lives of each of their children as the years pile up, the children leave home and the family extends itself in dubious ways.

Jeremy is a gigolo chasing money by seducing rich old ladies in Hollywood. Unfortunately for Jeremy, rich old ladies often have families of their own who already have their eye on inheriting the family silver. They find Jeremy to be less than charming and they often take against him sometimes in violent ways.

Tallulah is a skilful athlete who ends up performing with an acrobatic troupe in a show in post-Soviet Moscow. The troupe often entertains in private homes which gives her a perfect opportunity to steal this, that and the other valuable trinket. Along the way, Tallulah befriends a 10 year old girl who she finds squatting in squalor in the basement of her apartment building. This friendship changes the direction of Tallulah’s life. Eventually it breaks her heart and leads her into a life-long crusade to take care of the world’s impoverished children. Her family becomes very large indeed and she isn’t related to any of them.

Ray is the closest thing the family has to being a real life gangster. He is six and a half feet tall in every dimension with the build of a brick shithouse. When he talks, people listen. But he doesn’t talk very often. Because of his general quietness he is thought to be slow of intellect. But he isn’t slow at all, he just likes to keep his thoughts to himself. He leaves home at 18 and becomes a bouncer at a Los Vegas nightclub. Alone among the Mercurios, he has no conscience about killing people, though he only does it when ordered to do so by his boss. Eventually he has a disagreement with his boss and ends up killing the man, thus almost by accident inheriting control of the night club, its staff and its monkey. What good is a night club without a monkey? But his whole outlook on life changes when he starts an on-line romance. He decides to turn his life around and break away from the mobsters who control him. He will run the nightclub honestly and become a legitimate businessman. The monkey approves.

Alice is the smartest of the children. Being exposed to crime as a kid sours her and she deliberately turns her back on it, making a high-flying career for herself in corporate law. One day she finds out that her supervisor is being blackmailed for some youthful indiscretions. The blackmailer is threatening her with some quite explicit polaroid photographs that might ruin her reputation if ever they saw the light of day. Rather than saying publish and be damned and living with the consequences, she asks Alice to intercede on her behalf. Alice agrees, and soon finds herself back in the dirty half-world she thought she had left behind her. Long buried instincts awaken – after all, it’s in her blood…

Paul, known as Piggy, is the baby of the family. Like Alice, he is completely legitimate and unlike Alice he doesn’t ever really dip his toes back in the murky waters of his family’s traditions. As the twenty first century grows more and more mature, Piggy organises a family reunion in Oklahoma City, the first in goodness knows how many years. Have the children matured with the passing of time? Are they finally grown-ups? Yes and no. We do learn how the years have treated the family and we can look forward a little bit to what might come next.

None of the Mercurio family are purely villainous even when they’re up to no good, That’s what gives this novel its strength. They are just a family and despite the blood and the guts, the swindles and the schemes of greater or lesser legitimacy, they never lose sight of that larger picture. Because it’s in their blood.

* * * *

William Boyd’s novel Gabriel’s Moon is a kind of a spy story set in the 1960s. The decade of the 1960s was a time of decolonisation set against the rumblings of a cold war that threatened to blow hot at any moment. The 1960s was also the last hurrah of traditional espionage before it began to succumb to the onslaught of technological change. It was an uneasy time, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

One of the most effective of the post-colonial movers and shakers was Patrice Lumumba who led the Democratic Republic of the Congo to independence from Belgium in June 1960, and who became the country’s first prime minster, He lasted less than ten weeks in office before his regime was brutally overthrown and Lumumba himself was taken away and shot. I was only a small child at the time but I remember quite vividly seeing broadcast newsreel footage of Lumumba, bound roughly with rope, being thrown into the back of a jeep and driven away to meet his death. I don’t think the phrase dead man walking had been invented yet, but that was definitely what I was seeing on the screen of my parent’s television set. It was chilling.

There have long been rumours of Western governmental involvement in Lumumba’s murder. Many names have been bandied about from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high, from people unknown and obscure to world famous figures strutting in the spotlight on the political stage – chief among these was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the President of the USA. He has long been rumoured to have had a hand in Lumumba’s downfall and many believe that he directly ordered that Lumumba be killed. Lumumba, a professed Marxist, flirted with an alliance between the Congo and the Soviet Union. The threat of that would certainly have sent icy chills running up and down Eisenhower’s communist-hating spine...

This possibility of direct Western political involvement in Lumumba’s death forms the backdrop to William Boyd’s novel. It tells the story of a British journalist called Gabriel Dax who is on assignment in Africa at the dawn of the 1960s. He manages to get a taped interview with Patrice Lumumba. On his return to London, he finds that his recordings of the interview bear witness to the actual conspiracy surrounding Lumumba’s death. Names are mentioned, others are hinted at. The existence of the tapes comes to the notice of the intelligence services who seek desperately to get their hands on the tapes before knowledge of their contents leaks out. The scandal surrounding such a leak could bring down governments…

The book is a vivid re-creation of the zeitgeist of the early 1960s, and one of the pleasures it evokes is a feeling of nostalgic time travel to fascinating corners of a long vanished world that most of us will remember only vaguely, if we remember it at all.

Superficially the book claims to be a spy novel, and to an extent I suppose it is, in the sense that Gabriel Dax finds himself being manipulated by the security services in their sometimes desperate attempts to maintain the status quo. But in reality the book is rather more than just that. Primarily it is a meditation on historical forces.

Thomas Carlyle said, somewhat cynically, that The History of the world is but the Biography of great men. But the novel asks how much of this view of the world is true and how much of the history of the world is caused by societal pressures carrying the events along and throwing up "great men" almost as a side effect?

The story is light on the spycraft, political cynicism and office politics that defined the genre in the years when Graham Greene, Len Deighton and John le Carré were busy turning genre spy fiction into literature. Instead it takes a step away from what have now become genre tropes in their turn and has reinvented itself as a thoughtful debate which is involving, cerebral and quite impossible to put down.

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The Little Book of Miriam is a collection of essays by Miriam Margolyes arranged alphabetically by topic for your comfort and safety. Because these essays are by Miriam Margolyes they are, of course, lewd, rude, crude, prurient, lascivious, much concerned with bodily functions and genuinely hilarious. Prudes, puritans and those who are easily triggered should definitely avoid this book.

But her essays are also, on occasion, thoughtful, wise and deeply felt.

Miriam Margolyes is a Jew and so, in theory at least, she fully approves of the idea of Israel. But that does not translate to my country right or wrong. Far from it – she thoroughly disapproves of what Israel has become and she regards Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies as little more than low-life thugs and war criminals. And she says so, loudly and long. You can’t help but admire her courage. Therefore you really do need to read this book. There’s a lot more to Miriam than just dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Don’t get distracted by the surface trappings.