bukes #52-#56

It's been becoming a matter of intimidation that the pile of books read but not yet noted here has become so huge. So from now on I'm going to make my notes a bit briefer -- which will make their repeat posting on goodreads.com, where even the most cursory piece of scruff ("Blimey, goo, whotta scorcha on the cover pic YAY YAY YAY") is described as a review, look pretty half-hearted. Well, dammit.

Here are a few sets of notes to reduce the pile a bit.

book #52: A Scandal in Belgravia (1991) by Robert Barnard

The last book of Barnard's I read was Death of a Mystery Writer, a glorious near Colin Watson-style comedy. This book is very much more serious -- and in fact I'd claim it as a fairly substantial work of fiction, reminiscent perhaps of John le Carre, perhaps of Somerset Maugham. Retired UK civil servant Peter Proctor decides to investigate the long-ago murder of his friend Timothy Wycliffe, a crime probably covered up because of government embarrassment over Wycliffe's outrageously gay lifestyle. There are lots of good things to say about this excellent book, not least its portrayal of UK politics during British colonialism's lastish halfwitted hurrah, the Suez Crisis. The book's sole flaw is a stupid twist in the final few lines; forget that and read it for the brilliant rest.

book #53: Diamond Solitaire (1992) by Peter Lovesey

I loved Lovesey's The Last Detective, which introduced the character Peter Diamond. This follow-up, while palpably more far-fetched, is even more entertaining. Fired (er, "resigned") from the cops, Diamond is reduced to working as a night security man at Harrods. One night the alarm goes off, and it's discovered an autistic Japanese toddler has been dumped in Diamond's area. Sacked for negligence, he decides to solve the mystery of where the little girl came from, a quest that takes him eventually to NYC and to Japan. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (some to do with Diamond's non-prowess as a home handyman, others concerning this very British bobby's interaction with the NYPD), but what sticks more in the mind are the moments of genuine emotion. This is a gloriously fast read: get it and read it gloriously fast!

I have a confession to make. Many years ago I took a small daughter to an Author Event at the Exeter (UK) Waterstones. One of the authors was Peter Lovesey. He has the look of an English vicar whose tea parties are the scandal of the parish. He also has extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. He's got extraordinarily bushy eyebrows! said my daughter in one of those whispers that may one day reach Alpha Centauri. Lovesey looked across at us and, if ever eyebrows could be said to twinkle, his did.

book #54: The Ghost Writer (1979) by Philip Roth

This is a minor work: not so much a novel as a series of three linked novellas (plus a short coda). The third of the novellas -- in which the tyro novelist Nathan Zuckerman convinces himself that a young woman for whom he's developed the hots is in fact a survived Anne Frank, or perhaps just someone who believes so much that she's Anne Frank as to make herself so -- is by far the most impressive of the three. The book struck a definite chord with me since I've recently been working painfully slowly on a novella about ghostwriters.

book #55: Daylight Runner (2006) by Oisin McGann

CAUTIONARY NOTE: I'm not 100% sure, but I think this was sent to me by the publisher as a freebie. I declare this because I'd not want to be fined $11,000 by some acne-packed bureaucrat.

It's not so long in the future and what's left of humanity is living in an enclosed environment called Ash Harbor; outside is not the arid desert environment we can in reality expect but a world in the grip of an ice age. Young Sol Wheat and his friends reveal that Ash Harbor is being run by corporate fascists who'll happily murder rather than give up an iota of their power. This is a tremendous page-turning adventure full of sudden dazzling flashes of acuity -- not least about the imbecility of the corporate/covert ops mind set. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the book.

book#56: Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe (1999) by Joel Achenbach

I have to confess my hackles went up as I read the countless power-puffs on the back cover and first few pages of this book: they're all by journalists or prominent authors, none of them by actual, you know, scientists. That, say, Carl Hiaasen or Christopher Buckley thinks a book on the sciences is pretty damn' fine is, to be honest, a somewhat underwhelming accolade, along the lines of an endorsement by Britney Spears or Adam Sandler: what, by contrast, did the editors of Nature think?

Those hackles rose unnecessarily: I have loads of detailed quibbles with the book (it's actually too skeptical about the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe; while that case has been made depressingly persuasively elsewhere, it ain't made here), but overall I thought it was an excellent overview of, in its three parts, (1) CETI/SETI, (2) ufology/ancient astronautism (thinking back, it was probably a bit skimpy on this) and (3) space colonialism/interstellar travel. In the decade since the book appeared some of Achenbach's more timid statements have come to seem quaint -- he clearly thought it'd be a long time before we began to discover much about extrasolar planets -- but that's more to his credit than his detriment (just): better to be cautious than excitable in these fields of speculation.

And there are scores of very pithy observations about the depths of species-suicidal moronism to which our current standards of debate, in which proven reality is regarded as merely a political commodity, have taken us. Here's one:

In a way, she [a UFO nut] was always going to be the dominant one in the room, because all I had were factoids and semieducated notions from my various conversations with scientists, whereas she had beliefs. She could dismiss twenty-five hundred years of scientific inquiry with a few deadly sentences.

I recommend this book quite a lot.

======================

It's late. I'll try to do another books catch-up Real Soon Now, Honest.