“Shatter the Bones”, Stuart MacBride

I’ve long been an enthusiast of Stuart MacBride’s work. Having an Aberdeen background helps of course, but deep down his mixture of gruesome crime with slapstick policing, a wry approach to language and the cultural background that underpins a rich vein of humour add a lot to the oft trod terrain of the police procedural. Fittingly while “Shatter the Bones” has been making its way back and forth across the North Sea with me over the last couple of weeks, last night’s flight up to Aberdeen provided the ideal opportunity to indulge in MacBride’s distinct form of crime fiction.

My wife is often a bellwether regarding whether an author is likely to be of niche appeal to my particular tastes in crime or if they can break out into more widespread appeal. We listened to the audiobook of “Dying Light” one year driving through France, and the opinion of Mrs Southlondonbook was that it worked because Logan McRae wasn’t the cliched over burdened fucked up detective that appeared to invariably crop up in crime fiction. Sure, he wasn’t without an issue or two, but he wasn’t the put upon downtrodden cop that has the scope to annoy.

Sadly I’m now hesitant to suggest bodging another Stuart MacBride on during a road trip. The humour’s still there, Aberdeen’s still, well, Aberdeen, and the writing is still engaging, but somewhere along the lines, something’s snapped in the heart of the story. Logan McRae’s no longer a happy go lucky, lovable, lucky, if slightly rubbish policeman. His demons are now a lot more front and centre, and while the crime in MacBride has always been a bit on the jarring side, the character of MacRae now seems to have been captured by the bleak side of the narrative.

MacBride’s defended this in the past, seeing it as making his lead character fundamentally more interesting, which is probably fair. Detectives with no issues are unmemorable, let’s face it, even Rosemary and Thyme have baggage, but there’s a thin line to tread. In MacBride’s blog (sadly neglected - that I should have the temerity to say such a thing) cuts to the heart of it

Here's the thing though - I don't really want him to end up as a bitter lump of alcohol-soaked gristle. At least, not in the long term. OK, so he's never going to be the same naïve, bushy-tailed wee scamp he was to start with, but I don't see him turning into the classic police procedural cliché. If he does, then it'll definitely be time to kill him off.

Stuart MacBride, 28 May 2009

Reading “Shatter the Bones” you can’t help thinking that MacBride may be tiring of McRae, and maybe in the back of his mind he’s thinking about an endgame, but somehow if we could find a way of conjuring him into being more of an older and wiser scamp I think we’d strike an even happier balance with. Maybe there is hope though. Will Hunter, the protagonist of MacBride’s ‘other’ book - the dystopian Halfhead, is a detective with appalling events in his history, yet he still remains a captivating character. If McRae migrates into this then perhaps there’s hope.

So, what about “Shatter the Bones” as a book? It adopts an intriguing perspective on crime, in that it opens six days after the central crime, the kidnapping of a mother-daughter star pairing on a reality TV talent show, has taken place. This is precised on the cover, and I almost wish it hadn’t been, as getting to grips with the confusion of crime and the level of pressure a police force is under while under an extreme media spotlight would have felt a lot more real if I had been scrabbling to work out what on earth was going on. Narratively it’s interesting as an approach, and I think it works. It means the obvious suspects aren’t trailed in advance, and focuses attention on the uncertainty and dilemmas faced by the investigating officers. 

It bears all the usual hallmarks of a Stuart MacBride novel. In parts it’s sickeningly violent, it has elements of a distressing absence of redemption, but it’s punctuated with laugh-out-loud humour. There is too, a level of satisfaction about the end, in that there is sense that while punishment has been meted out to more than just those deserving of it, the actual wrong doers so actually come to the right sort of sticky end.

Coming strongly throughout “Shatter the Bones” is a level of disdain for the celebrity idolism that permeates British pop culture and the manufactured fame that talent shows push into society. It’s hard to not identify with this, and while describing the book as a moral parable would be going too far, one hopes that the fact that it went straight to number 1 on the hardback best seller lists at least gives one or two readers a pause for thought.

I finished “Shatter the Bones” late last night, staying up longer than intended because there really is that level of compulsion to it. I finished it a little shell shocked. It’s MacBride, therefore there’s plenty in there to shock, but the ending, and I’m not going to spoil it for anyone, is profoundly affecting and bleak. It’s still a really good read, and it reinforces the fact that while MacBride really isn’t for everyone, it works for me. This morning I got up, and ambled through to the spare room and dug out “Blind Eye” to be re-read, sometimes you need that extra bit of Aberdeen in your life.

"Atlantic", Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester is one of the authors who, without making a big splash, somehow manages to place his prolific output on my bookshelves without me really noticing. Thus, when I returned from Norway to an impromptu gift of his new “Atlantic” it prompted me to quickly take stock. From the at times derided “Pacific Nightmare” (which still remains as the book I think most scathingly reviewed by the Economist) through “The Map the Changed the World” and “A Crack in the Edge of the World”, among many others, it's clear he's written a lot, and there seems to be a disproportionate amount of it in my library.

Perhaps the reason for this is that Winchester manages to fuse geography, history, and personal anecdote in a genuinely engaging way. His wide ranging 'biography' of the Atlantic Ocean defies classification, but is an absorbing and genuinely fun read, peppered with the sort of material that you want to file away for use in witty and intelligent conversation, or perhaps even better, spurs you read more widely and explore the world hinted at within the confines of Winchester's text.

The subtitle of “A vast ocean of a million stories” hints at the truth of the book - it's not history, biography, geography, or economics, it's an Atlantic miscellany that will not make you an expert on any of these subjects, and as such commenting on specifics of the book becomes difficult. It’s the sort of work that I want to say rewards dipping into, but it doesn’t, it probably does need to be read in a linear fashion, that way the stream of anecdote sinks in, engages, and makes you smile.

A lot of the book requires you to already be pretty au fait with the subjects Winchester is talking about. If you’re unaware of the finer points of Norwegian cuisine (aside, working for a Norwegian company and thus spending a lot of time in that part of the world I perhaps have an unfair advantage) the comment that Amerigo Vespucci is still held by Americans to be the ‘discoverer’ of the New World largely down to pizza being more popular than lutefisk may pass you by.

Throughout the tone is entertaining, opinionated, and wearing its heart on its sleeve hints at the tremendous fun that must have been had in researching the book. Vignettes pop up and make you want to yearn for a post-it note to mark the position, or, in a 21st century way I would send myself emails with cryptic text such as “entertaining anecdote Russian seascape painting p.167” (go on, look it up). Thus, for all that there are times when you may disagree with Winchester, such as with his scathing view of the simultaneous ugliness of contemporary container ships and Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture, you can’t really begrudge him.

Having introduced modernism, let’s talk a little about intextuality. Winchester talks about the Atlantic’s impact on culture through the centuries, but in not quite bringing it up to date I sense a missed opportunity. Covering the ocean’s impact on music, Gilbert and Sullivan is about as pop culture as it gets. This misses the chance to talk about Rod Stewart and 1975’s “Atlantic Crossing” (which of course concludes with the rather apposite “Sailing”) or indeed the magnificently overblown British indie band British Sea Power, who must win prizes for having “Scapa Flow” in a song lyric and managing to put together a monumentally conceptual instrumental soundtrack inspired by life on the Aran Islands. This isn’t however a criticism, more a reflection that Simon Winchester and I have different cultural stimuli, and I suspect that every reader will be able to find points where they wish more had been talked about.

There probably aren’t a million stories contained in “Atlantic”, and truth be told there probably are rather more than a million that could be told. Nobody should worry about this, nobody should buy this hoping that it will be an encyclopaedic exploration of everything to do with the Atlantic Ocean (perhaps along the lines of Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean), but anyone aspiring to have an enhanced repertoire of dinner party anecdotes should absolutely read it.

"Tell No One"

Guillame Canet's slick 2006 thriller has been sitting on my to-be-watched pile for ages. I've had a couple of stuttering starts at watching it, but never really had the time to do it the justice I felt it deserved. All this was rectified on the Eurostar to Brussels last week.

A train heading into a Europe about to be gripped by the world's most monumental thunderstorm provided a suitably menacing backdrop to this noirish piece of cinema. I've blogged before about location - and this is again a case where surroundings matter. "Tell No One" works fine on the big HD TV at home, but somehow it was more fitting to be immersed by it on a small laptop screen whipping through Flanders as the world threatened to come to an end outside.

"Tell No One" is based on a Harlan Coben novel, originally set in New York (and which I haven't read) but translates it into something ineffably French. The world inhabited by Alexandre Beck, struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife, and then thrown the curveball of an email purportedly from her, is not the Paris you see as a tourist. This is a much more real Paris featuring the banlieue, the no go suburbs on the outskirts of the city, as well as the staggering wealth of the Parisian horsey set.

This is a dark film full of baroque violence and menace. The fleeting, often unexplained characters, including a truly evil androgenous torturer who just will not die, hint at a richness and deep wider story that works at your mind long after the final credits have rolled. There are some obvious links with "The Fugitive" - a doctor wrongly accused of murdering their wife and seeking the real killer - but these are superficial - "Tell No One" is a very different proposition, and much better for it.

Much of the film's strength lies in what's left unsaid. The enormously appealing Bruno (Gilles Lelouche) walking away from his life, son, and girlfriend is all massively understated, but given what you know he's done for Alex, is genuinely moving.

A film you want to watch and then watch again to see what you missed while you were captivated by the story, and a film you want to persuade anyone who will listen to watch with you.

An American remake is apparently in the works. One has to ask why? Okay the original novel is set in US, but somehow Canet has managed to make this a very French story, and to my mind it should remain so. Sure there might be a call for it, and it might well be a commercial success, especially given the  depressing number of comments on LoveFilm stating that it's clearly rubbish because it's not even in English. This if nothing else is a persuasive argument for leaving this as ultimate cinematic representation of this particular tale. In fact, if your French is up to it, and this is a bit of an ask, because it does explore a lot of dialogue, turn off the subtitles and enjoy the gorgeous film-making.

Among many awards "Tell No One" has won, it secured best soundtrack at the 2007 Cesar awards - and it deserves it - this is almost a film that could work on the radio with nothing done to it, and leaves tunes in your head that stay with you. Groove Armada's "Hands of Time" is more than usually effective. This is almost Michael Mannish in the linkage of music with image, and believe me, it works.

If you've got a LoveFilm subscription, it's a available to freely watch online; even if you don't you should track this film down and watch it. It will make your life better for being in it.

"From Drawing Board to Chequered Flag", Tony Southgate

For someone who first started to be interested in motor racing in 1982 Tony Southgate was consistently present in the background of the races I watched. It helped of course that he was associated with underdogs at that stage; teams like Theodore and Osella were never going to win anything, but with the latter in particular, they were doing something  different, that appealed to me. There was also the real attraction of an attempt to do something with extraordinarily limited resources, which is an ethos that appeals to this day.

In this light Tony Southgate's autobiography has been a long time comings, and it doesn't disappoint. Told in a concise and to the point manner the true richness of Southgate's career, which has involved winning the Indianapolis 500 with Eagle, the Monaco Grand Prix with BRM, and Le Mans with Jaguar and Audi, is revealed.

This is a story that strips away a lot of the glamour that is often associated with motor racing. The red in tooth and claw nature of the sport in the 1960s and 1970s, when death was common occurrence is exposed, but so too is the gritty unrewarded hard graft that working in the industry entailed. The frankly unpleasant birth of Arrows was before my day, but this is told clearly by one of the participants, who has managed to lose a lot of the rancour with the perspective of distance. Back in the 1980s Southgate would refuse to refer to Arrows, instead calling it Arrow (the team name was built up from letters of the founders Alan Rees, Jackie Oliver, Dave Wass, and Tony Southgate), feeling he wanted nothing to do with them. Reading now of his abrupt dismissal and the borderline fraud that valued his 10% of the company at £5,000 you can understand the level of bitterness felt, especially when put in the context of the court battle with Shadow and the supreme efforts in producing a string of cars in Arrows' early years.

The core message here is that while there's a lot of money sloshing around the sport, it says something that Southgate had to work all the way to 2000 to ensure financial security. This is the story of a career where as he put it "I had always been paid well, but there is a difference between living well and having excess money to save for a rainy day" (p.170). You do however wonder if Southgate would have wanted it any different way? He's clear that the excesses of motorsport hold no appeal to him, and in being compelled to work later into his career he got the opportunity to work on some marvelous machinery and make him a figure who neatly spans the era when an individual could have an impact on every aspect of car design to the present, when the complexity of design means that the nature of the beast means cars are now inherently designed by committee.

As well as being a genuinely good read, right up there with recent classics from Vic Elford and John Horsman, "From Drawing Board to Chequered Flag" brings some real new insight for the student of motor racing. In 1982 then Osella designer, Herve Guilpin quit in disgust at the Caesar's Palace Grand Prix, being fulsome in his criticism of Enzo Osella's approach including choice words such as "The reason is always lack of money. The result is the FA1D [Osella's 1982 car] is and always has been a potential public menace" and questions about resource allocation, such as questioning the building of a test track at the Osella factory. For those who want to know more, the full story is told on page 45 in the 1982 Caesar's Palace edition of Grand Prix International magazine.

Tony Southgate brings a different perspective. When he visited the Osella facility at Volpiano to discuss the project for fitting an Alfa Romeo V12 engine to the FA1E, not long after Guilpin's outburst, he was clearly pleasantly surprised. Summing it up he states "Compared with the likes of Arrows and Shadow, Osella looked very impressive. Where teams allocate their money is always a case of individual priorities, and in Osella's case he obviously spent a lot of it on the factory." (p.126). Different observers, different perspectives, and different circumstances, but it all clearly shows how primary sources can be so contradictory.

"From Drawing Board to Chequered Flag" is beautifully put together and tells a fascinating story. It deserves to be read by anyone with a real passion and interest in motor racing in the latter part of the 20th century.

"Payback", James Barrington

Since an idle purchase of "Foxbat" at the Eurotunnel crossing in the autumn of 2007, I've enjoyed James Barrington. It's nonsense, requires a significant suspension of disbelief, but as a fried, leafing through the first pages of "Payback" in The Rake one evening this week commented, for nonsense, it's pretty well written.

Throughout Barrington's work it is possible to discern a steady reigning in of his protagonist, Paul Richter. In "Payback" he's a more straightforward character. He's an individualistic and unorthodox intelligence officer, not necessarily anything unusual in a spy thriller, but now there's no merging in of him being a Royal Navy fighter pilot. This, on balance, is a good thing. Barrington can undeniably write both spy fiction and techno-thrillers, but when the genres were fused quite so firmly it somehow didn't quite work.

"Payback" is thus a tighter story, and has a tight geographic focus on Dubai. Here we can see a clear example of how real world events can undermine an author. The Dubai here is a super-rich Sheikhdom basking in opulence, and it is almost certainly an accurate representation of what it was like while Barrington was writing. Sadly by mid-2010 the financial collapse of Dubai has transformed people's perception, and somehow the idea of the Dubai government blithely paying off terrorists with billions of dollars doesn't ring quite so true. Other little niggles, such as Dubai airport's Terminal 3 being described as "soon to open" when it's been working since 2008 are more easily glossed over, but still illustrate how hard it is for an author to achieve complete veracity.

In truth though, there are some aspects of a thriller such as this where accuracy is needed. Getting the technical details wrong, or just making them up, will jar with the seasoned reader of such material, and Barrington doesn't miss a step here. Other aspects of background, such as the issues with Dubai or the riding roughshod over the finer details of intelligence process can be seen as areas where it's unfair to criticise a work for being unrealistic; the function of a book like "Payback" is not to inform, it is to entertain. The end product is a highly readable and enjoyable book. As with everything else Barrington has written, it's not great literature, but doesn't seek to be. It's summer, people will be flocking through airports, "Payback" is the sort of book to readily keep you distracted while cooped up on a long haul flight.

Furst in a hot climate

I find myself on the horns of a dilemma.

My marvellous small local bookshop in Beckenham had a copy of Alan Furst's "Spies of the Balkans" in stock on day of release. I've read the first few pages, and it's clearly a Furst; there's something about his use of place and language that as many others have said, manage to convince the reader you're in 1940s Europe - I'd always thought that this was just smoke and mirrors convincing me as a Gen-Xer that he was convincing until I gave my mother a copy of "Night Soliders". Mum is going to be 81 this year, and lived through World War II, and even though she did so as a child, the fact that she thinks Alan Furst captures what the period was like works for me.

So where's the problem? I would appear to have a new, unread, Alan Furst in my possession; why am I debating whether I should start it now?

Before answering this, let's rewind briefly. Alan Furst was introduced to me by Salon Magazine (read on AvantGo on a Conpaq Ipaq) back in 2001. Prompted by this I picked up "The World at Night" and was captivated. This was a February, and I was commuting listening to Sara Ayers (very obscure I accept) and some of her songs such as "The Waiting Room" - the combination of Furst's brilliance, wintery rain battering against old slam-door South London rolling stock, and Ms Ayre's cold ambient music made for something magical. There's even something about the covers from his works then, which were, and still are, works of art.

This defines Furst. He talks of a world at night, where moral equivalency imposes a darkness on peoples' souls, and where stinging rain slants into the faces of doomed protagonists. He does this brilliantly, and as a reader in fitting surroundings you're physically propelled into his world.

Rewind.

It's a hot June in the UK. I'm about to go to India for a week. It's hot.

I've tried reading Furst in a warm climate before. I got "Blood of Victory" on day of release and treasured it, saving it for a long laconic holiday we'd scheduled for late September 2002 in Umbria. A bucolic quiet surrounding should have been perfect, but it wasn't. Leaving aside that Furst is best talking about cities, it didn't quite work when sitting beside a pool in Italy's late summer warmth. I loved it as a book, but it didn't worm itself into my soul as other Fursts have.

So. I have "Spies of the Balkans" in my hands. On Sunday I do the long multi-leg flight to Chennai for a week working with my development team, and will want many books as support (quod vide) for business hotel bound nights. 

It should be a no-brainer. 

I have a new Alan Furst to read. 

...It doesn't work.

Chennai in Southern India is hot. Rain or shine next week is going to be a very hot week. I'm going to crave moments of quiet when I can savour condensation on the side of a glass to try and cool me down. This isn't Furst terrain. Even although "Spies of the Balkans" is set in Greece, it starts on a rainy winter night in Salonika. This isn't material for a hot climate.

Alan Furst is being left at home.

I'm desperate to read "Spies of the Balkans". For all that I wish he'd return to the sprawling narratives of "Night Soldiers" and "Dark Star" anything he writes is still an immediate candidate for Desert Island Book. Somehow however I know I'm missing something when the environment isn't there. "Spies of the Balkans" is going to go onto the TBR shelf and I'm going to avoid reviews of it. It's going to stay at behind when I go to Chennai and wait for us to be reacquainted in the European autumn. 

Maybe I can swing a Eurostar run to Brussels in November. Whipping through Northern France with sleet stinging against the window is when you should read Alan Furst. He paints a magnificent picture of Europe before and during the fall of man; reading him deserves an appropriate backdrop.

It's late, and I'm writing on my small sitting room netbook. I may well revisit this entry and put in some imagery and hyperlink it so that I can really set this in context, but I liked writing this, and a blog should reflect freshness of thinking.  Goodnight.

"Divided Houses, The Hundred Years War III ", Jonathan Sumption

British QC Jonathan Sumption has been writing his monumental history of the Hundred Years War for over 20 years now, and there's still probably another couple of volumes to go, which at his current rate of writing, will see us through to 2030 or so, a writing project that will have taken almost as long as its subject matter to complete.

The first volume was a surprising gift from a friend's father in 1990 - I'd been the beneficiary of his generosity in the past, as he disbursed the books he accumulated in a career at Irish broadcaster RTE, but I remember being struck that this was a rather more impressive gift than usual. Sadly it remained largely unread through university years - somewhat ironic given the courses in medieval history I took, only picked up when working life and exigencies of a commute impelled me to raid the large unread pile that a decade in higher education can leave you with, and the publication of the 2nd volume reminded me of the first's existence.

Size makes these books daunting, but right from the start, with the lavish description of the funeral of Charles IV in 1328 you realise that this is something deserving of your time. Reading weighty hardback tomes isn't easy on South London commuter trains, especially when you're also trying to juggle a cup of coffee, but some efforts are worth it.

The work is rooted in a traditional highly narrative form of history. As such it may not be scholastic, and academics may legitimately question whether it says much that's genuinely new, but it's probably better for it. Much in the same way as I prefer Runciman's somewhat discredited history of the crusades to more modern interpretations of the Latin East, Sumption's treatment is capable of immersing the reader in the 14th century world, and sweeping you a long with the period's inherent drama.

In terms of location it reminds you that France really is very big, but also that through much of the terrain familiar to British visitors to the continent there runs a rich vein of history when France and England were inextricably linked. It's also a timely reminder that the Hundred Years War was not just a Franco-British affair but in reality a much wider European conflict dragging in the low countries, Spain, and Italy and serving to shape the continent in many ways.

It does also reinforce some key points. Medieval warfare was not perpetual combat - financial realities meant it couldn't be so, and for those whose familiarity with the period is driven by the (admittedly rather good) Medieval Total War computer game or the more elaborate battle scenes in "Kingdom of Heaven", it comes as a surprise to be reminded that warfare was not conducted with a cast of thousands, instead small handfuls of fighting men would in the main shape the course of battle - cataclysmic confrontations such as Crecy or Agincourt (the latter still far from being covered in Sumption's work) very much the exception.

Despite this, it's probably not popular history - it's far too weighty for that, and this is a real shame. History such as this, talking about Kings, Queens, and battles, isn't trendy today, but it's the sort of story that can get people interested and excited. The French to their credit have grasped this with the magnificent visitor centre now at Azincourt, one can only wish that more of this would percolate through in Britain.