A Web of Absence

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nina allan

When I read Nina Allan’s latest novel recently, I noted that her work occupies two worlds, one is our everyday reality and the other is somewhere or somewhen else. We doubt this other world, but not sufficiently to dismiss it out of hand. There is an ambivalence which leaves the reader uncertain what to trust.

It is a delicate balancing act, but one that Nina Allan treads with remarkable aplomb. And it invariably leaves me wondering whether I am in fact reading mainstream fiction or genre fiction. No, that’s not quite right, better to say: it leaves me wondering whether I should read the work as mainstream fiction or as genre fiction. What matters in her work is not what the fiction is doing, but the perspective from which the reader approaches the fiction.

And now I have read The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories, which is, frankly, the best collection of short fiction I have read in years. There isn’t a dud here, but I remain uncertain what I have actually read. Turn to the back of the book and read the details of where these stories first appeared: Interzone and Clarkesworld and tor.com and so on. From the credits these are without exception science fiction or horror or fantasy or some such permutation of the fantastic. Yet I don’t believe I can read any of these stories as science fiction or fantasy or what have you. Oh the genre elements are there, but as a decorative detail hung in the background; what is in the foreground, what makes these stories what they are, is a strong sense of the psychological cost of living in quotidian reality. The genre doesn’t matter, we may be reading of a post-apocalyptic future or a landscape with fairies, but that is never what the story is about; what matters is the sense of reality.

The two worlds I talked about in relation to the novel are here, in practically every one of these stories. And what makes the story genre (if we are to approach it from that perspective) is invariably part of that second world, the world of doubt and uncertainty.

One of the things about stories is that they necessarily condense things that might otherwise be dissipated across the greater length and scope of a novel. You can see the shapes more clearly. So as I was reading these stories I became aware that my suggestion of two worlds was really too simple a reading of the work. The extra thing I noticed was that there is always an absence: somebody or something is missing from the protagonist’s picture of the world. More often that not that absence is family: there are missing parents through this book, but also siblings, friends, lovers. And the second world, the thing that promises to take the protagonist out of mundane reality, is connected with this absence, a way of coping with it. It is where the absent person has gone, or how they might be remembered. It is a place of doubt but also of hope, but it is a place that can never be reached, often because it is symbolically the place of death. Or perhaps it would be better to say it is the place where death would be if there were any certainty in this life. In “The Gift of Angels: An Introduction”, for example, the protagonist is a 50-odd-year-old science fiction writer, but the absence is his mother. When the protagonist was a child, she was part of what was meant to be the first manned expedition to Mars, but all communication with the ship was lost shortly before they were due to land on Mars. It is assumed she is dead, it is assumed they all died, but we don’t know; they may be there, still, just silent. And she is not the only character in this collection who is assumed to have died, but without anyone knowing for sure.

“The Gift of Angels: An Introduction” is a sequel of sorts (there are several stories in this collection that share characters and references without specifically continuing the same story) to the title story, which is, to my mind, perhaps the best story here. “The Art of Space Travel” is a perfect example of the generic ambiguity of these stories, and of the role that absence plays in the psychological reality we explore. At first blush, this seems perfectly science fictional (the story first appeared at tor.com): we are some way in the future. Years ago, the first manned flight to Mars was destroyed, perhaps by terrorist action; now, years later, a second expedition is being planned. Except that all of that is largely irrelevant to the story. The setting is a Heathrow hotel where two members of the Mars crew will be staying for just one night on their way to the launch facilities. The two crew members are celebrities, and so the hotel is besieged by cameramen and journalists. But none of this is centre stage, our attention is on Emily, the young woman who is in charge of the housekeeping staff at the hotel. There are two absences in her life. One is her mother, Moolie, who has dementia, which is a great demand on Emily’s life, as Moolie gradually withdraws from this reality. The second is the father Emily has never known. When younger, Moolie was a scientist peripherally involved with the first Mars mission, and there is a suggestion that the father might have been one of the astronauts who died, or at least one of her colleagues. The Mars mission, encapsulated in a book Emily has had since infancy called The Art of Space Travel, becomes the second parallel reality that helps her cope with the absences in this reality. The truth, of course, turns out to be rather more mundane than Emily might like, but that is often the way in Allan’s fiction as the non-mundane fades from view.

Much the same can be said for the other story that vies for my attention here, “The Science of Chance”. The setting is Moscow in an alternate reality in which an atomic bomb was dropped on the city during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, many years later, the city is pretty much back to normal when a child is discovered standing outside a subway station that miraculously escaped destruction in the bomb blast. The child cannot or will not speak, and the only clue to her identity is a purse she clutches ferociously, and which contains nothing but an old newspaper clipping. The clipping dates from just before the bomb, and by following up on it the investigator begins to sense that the child has actually slipped through time from the moment of the explosion. The absence in this story is, of course, the loss of an entire world that might have been had the bomb not fallen, and the child as a revenant from that world-changing moment is the secondary reality. Of course the truth is much more mundane, but we sense that giving up on this dream of a secondary reality is harder than facing up to the absence in quotidian reality.

Tempting as it might be to go on about how much I love each of the other stories in turn (I was particularly struck by “Heroes”, Microcosmos”, and “A Princess of Mars: Svetlana Belkina and Tarkovsky’s lost movie Aelita“), I will resist that temptation. But there is one last thing: what’s with all the spiders? They play a significant role in at least two of the stories here, “A Thread of Truth” and “Four Abstracts”, and I remember quite a few years ago when I was asked to blurb Allan’s novella, Spin, which also has an arachnid fascination. Someday I must find out what’s going on here.

In the beginning

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Adam Smith, David Graeber, David Hume, David Wengrow, Francis Bacon, George Berkley, J-J. Rousseau, John Locke, Jonathan Ree, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes

Let me cast my mind back a few weeks to when I was reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I persist in thinking that this is a fine and important book, despite the comment my post attracted (which I deleted) from some right-wing troll whose main beef with the book seemed to be that Graeber had written an article saying that the pandemic should be the springboard for a major change in society. Yes, well, I happen to agree with Graeber on that, and I remain unutterably sad and angry at the speed with which our serially incompetent politicians set the new normal as being exactly like the old normal, except worse.

Anyway, that aside, I said at the time that the book was at its best when it was raising doubts and questions and hesitations, and at its worst when it was being every bit as dogmatic as the people it criticised. One of the problems I couldn’t articulate came right at the start of the book, their particular origin story, if you like. They started with European Enlightenment ideas about the origins of society building on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes (“nasty, brutish, and short”) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“noble savage”). These ideas became a fixed view of how society developed that continue to plague theoretical work in anthropology and archaeology to this day.

Now, that last part may well be true, and the legacy of Hobbesian and Rousseauvian thought may be as toxic as they say. But I felt dissatisfied with their characterisation of Hobbes and Rousseau and their contemporaries without quite being able to put my finger on why.

However, I am currently reading Witcraft by Jonathan Rée. This is a big, marvellous, contextualizing history of philosophy in Britain from Bacon to Wittgenstein, and I really wish I had had the book 50 years ago when I was trying to study philosophy, it would have made a lot of sense of a lot of things. I will be writing about the book at greater length at some point, but that may be some months away; I’m only 200 pages into the book and I feel like I’ve barely begun.

The point is that I am currently revisiting a period in philosophy that was at the core of one of the first courses I took: the period from John Locke through George Berkley to David Hume and Adam Smith, essentially the period when British epistemology really took shape. One of the things that Rée makes clear is the historical perspective in this new philosophy that began with Bacon. There is a consistent quest to get to the origin of everything. It is there in Descarte’s cogito ergo sum, the attempt to strip away everything to get to the origin of our being; Locke was building on a similar idea with his tabula rasa, the proposal that our mind is a blank slate until experience starts to give us the wherewithal from which to build ideas.

Reading this, revisiting these ideas, I suddenly realized why I had been discontent with the first chapter of The Dawn of Everything. In anthropological and archaeological terms it may have been a perfectly fair reading, not so much of Hobbes and Rousseau but of the aftermath of their work. But in philosophical terms it was wide of the mark. What they were doing was part of the philosophical movement of the time. The quest for the origin of human identity, marked by the cogito and the tabula rasa, but common to most philosophical writers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, was commonly extended to all aspects of human life. In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke effectively extended the idea of the tabula rasa, the blank starting point upon which everything learned has to be written, to human society. Hobbes was doing the same; his “nasty, brutish and short” characterization of early humanity is like the Cartesian cogito: stripping back all the accretions of modern life in order to identify what, at base, is human society. The images of early human society – hunter-gatherer becoming herder becoming farmer becoming city dweller – that you find in Hume and Smith as well as Hobbes and Rousseau, was a thought experiment. It wasn’t, this is how things started, so much as, this is what you are left with when you strip away what we know as civilization. Just as, for Descartes and for Locke, the mind is empty until it is filled, so society is empty until it is filled.

This is what Hobbes and Rousseau were writing about. They were not laying out a plan for how the evolution of society had to happen, they were presenting a schema for examining what lay under the political nature of their contemporary English and French society. If subsequent anthropologists and archaeologists took this as a plan for how the past actually worked, they were wrong; and if Graeber and Wengrow thought this was what Hobbes and Rousseau thought they were doing, then they were wrong also.

The measure of all bulk

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Ben Nicholson, Cedric Morris, Christopher Neve, David Bomberg, David Jones, Edward Burra, Eric Ravilious, F.L. Griggs, Graham Sutherland, Ivon Hitchens, Joan Eardley, John Craxton, John Nash, John Piper, L.S. Lowry, Mary Potter, Paul Nash, Robin Tanner, Sheila Fell, Stanley Spencer, Walter Sickert, William Townsend, Winifred Nicholson

The enormous matter of landscape is the measure of all bulk, the floor on which we crawl.

I love this book. It is perhaps the best book about painting I have read, although in truth I haven’t read that many. I want this book beside me, or rather I want the author of this book beside, as I go around a gallery, explaining to me what I am seeing, what I am feeling.

Or maybe not, since Christopher Neve does quote, with approbation, Ben Nicholson saying that he does not like to talk in front of paintings, because it interrupts what the pictures are saying. But then, before this book, I’m not sure I really appreciated what the pictures were saying.

The book is Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting by Christopher Neve. It originally came out in 1990, but this is the revised 2020 edition, with additional content on Sheila Fell.

Sheila who?

Let me introduce you to this book. I like looking at pictures, but there has never been one type or school of art that I have been particularly drawn to. But over the last few years I have found myself more and more attracted to British landscape painting of the 20th Century. This started with a special delight in the pictures of Paul Nash and then spread from there to his brother John, their contemporary Eric Ravilious, and a few of their contemporaries. What I found in this book was how little I know of their contemporaries.

A Landmark, L.S. Lowry

Jagged Rocks under Tryfan, John Piper

What you find in this book are short essays on some 20 British painters. Besides the Nash brothers and Ravilious, there are some painters whose work I am reasonably familiar with (Stanley Spencer, David Jones – though mostly as a writer; I have been meaning to read In Parenthesis since I came across the old Faber edition in my teens, though I still haven’t got around to it – and L.S. Lowry – though I know him for his brilliant cityscapes, there is a landscape from 1936, “A Landmark”, reproduced in this book, that I had never seen before and that I find astonishing), and others whose name I recognize without really knowing anything of their work (Walter Sickert, Graham Sutherland, Winifred Nicholson, Edward Burra). But the book is mostly taken up with painters whose names I have never heard and whose work I have never seen (F.L. Griggs, Robin Tanner, Cedric Morris, William Townsend, Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Ivon Hitchens, Mary Potter, David Bomberg), and my immediate and heartfelt response is: why have I never seen these paintings before. There is also one brief essay, “Melancholy and the Limestone Landscape”, that deals with a bunch of artists not otherwise covered, though the essay is not always about melancholy, or about limestone. Given how evocative the other essays are, this left me wanting more: what would it have been like if Neve had written at length about John Craxton or John Piper?

North Devon Landscape, David Bomberg

Aspatria under Snow, Sheila Fell

The essays are short, passionate, poetic, full of a deep love for the artists and their work. Many of them are based on conversations with the painters (Neve seems to have known most of them), but they are not interviews. The voice we hear is Neve’s throughout. He writes about how the paintings were made (Bomberg continuing to paint outside even when it was raining, Eardley perched on a precarious path above the seascape she painted so often, Sheila Fell unable to get away from the Cumberland village of Aspatria where she grew up, Ivon Hitchens crouching down so the scene was viewed through the uprights of grass stalks) and the techniques used. But mostly he talks about how the artists responded to the landscapes they painted, how the viewer responds to the pictures they see, how the choice of colours affected they way they saw things. It is brilliant stuff, you see the paintings as if they are fresh, still wet from the paint brush.

I admit, the first chapter, on Paul Nash who is perhaps the painter I know best in this collection, didn’t really seem to work for me. But the next chapter, on Ravilious, left me almost in tears at the end. And suddenly the language was speaking to me. Suddenly this was the best, perhaps the only way to write about painting.

Bathampton, Walter Sickert

Grey Day, Joan Eardley

What is the use, Alice said, of a book without pictures. Well there are pictures here, nicely reproduced on glossy paper. They are small, of course, because this is only a small paperback book, so the details aren’t always as vivid as they might have been. The extraordinary blotchy and somewhat unnatural colours in Sickert’s late painting of Bathampton, for instance, feel as though they should be massive so that you can drown in the colour. And the dark seas of Joan Eardley’s Catterline are possibly murkier than they might be if you were standing in front of them in a gallery. But my main complaint is that there are only 30-odd of them. Only. There should have been hundreds of them, huge, so that every painting Neve mentions, even in passing, you can see what he sees, feel what he feels.

This is a book to make you want to see paintings, because you’ve never seen them like this before.

People are Strange

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David Graeber, David Wengrow, J-J. Rousseau, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes

What do we have in common? We are living beings, with a measure of self awareness (most of us). We have a head, trunk, four limbs (most of us). We have language (most of us), though the languages are so diverse that they are generally mutually incomprehensible. Does any of that make us alike? Politically, culturally, socially, we are individuals; our tastes and interests and inclinations may overlap with other individuals, but rarely align exactly. We do not agree. On anything.

And we know this. It is built in to the way we operate. Politically, democracies are built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed we wouldn’t need to vote on things. Politically, autocracies are built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed one strong leader wouldn’t need to impose his will on the masses. Hell, the fact that we have politics at all is built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed, we wouldn’t need politics.

And everything else that goes to make us social animals, everything that shapes the world we have made, we ways we choose to live our lives, is built upon a foundation of disagreement, difference, strangeness. Laws, fashion, architecture, advertising, religion, art, language, cuisine – all are marks of difference. Where there is unity, it is imposed, it is artificial, or it is temporary.

This is what Thomas Hobbes meant when he insisted that, before the advent of government, people lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short. He was wrong, of course. He was looking at the past through too narrow a focus, imagining that without the imposed artificial unity of “government” other kinds of unity, of social cohesion, were not possible. And as for the kind of top-down, autocratic government he favoured, the less said the better. But for now let us just consider that nasty, brutish and short remark: because this remark still tends to shape the way we consider the distant (and sometimes not-so-distant) past.

We are civilized. Our immediate ancestors were slightly less civilized, or at least enjoyed the fruits of a slightly less civilized political, social and cultural landscape. Our more distant ancestors were quite a bit less civilized. And the earliest ancestors we might choose to contemplate were little better than brutes. Civilization is evolutionary, everything is getting better and better. Everything was always and inevitably building towards the top of the heap where we now find ourselves. Think of it the way Victorians saw Britain as the crowning glory, the natural and indisputable end point of our evolution from Darwin’s apes.

And civilization is technological. The waymarkers on our social and cultural ascent are the inventions we made along the way: fire and agriculture and writing and gunpowder and the printing press and the internet. Look how much stuff we have now; we must be so much better than those who don’t have all this stuff. We forget that the ancient Greeks had steam power, they just didn’t see any use for it other than magically opening and closing temple doors; the Incas had the wheel, there are any number of them on exquisitely made children’s toys throughout the Andes, they just didn’t use them for transport. Stuff doesn’t really measure much, it’s just more and more things we can use or not as we see fit.

We are different. We do things differently, we think differently, we have different goals and different ways for reaching those goals. So why do we assume that human society has followed exactly the same evolutionary path wherever it has developed? It’s the story you get time and time again, there are nuances, variations, depending on which historians you read, but it’s a pretty simple story: first there were hunter-gatherers, then we invented agriculture, then cities developed, and from these grew states, and voila, here we all are today. And as a corollary, those societies that we encounter, in Amazonia or Central Africa, that are still basically hunter-gatherers, are clearly more primitive. It’s why Europeans felt justified in displacing Native Americans: they didn’t have cities, so they are clearly not as civilized as us. It’s why Israelis feel confident in displacing Arabs from their lands, because Arab agriculture is less developed. Its why logging companies feel confident in displacing nomadic societies in the Amazon, because the company is feeding the ever-hungry maw of a far more advanced society. And in Africa, Australia, across Asia the evolutionary tale is just a slightly more sophisticated version of might is right.

And yet … If our civilization has reached an evolutionary peak, why are we so dissatisfied? Why do we feel we have lost something: freedom, perhaps? Why do we feel inequality is growing?

This last question is the starting point for what I feel may be one of the most important books I’ve read in an awful long time: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

(One qualification: when I say “important” I emphatically do not mean that I think it is always right, that I agree with it. Indeed the whole point of the book is to make us question, to say, in the words of the old song, “It ain’t necessarily so”. And that applies to the book itself. When it raises questions, I applaud wholeheartedly; when it, very occasionally, makes dogmatic statements, I hesitate, I think “hold on, maybe not”. To give one, relatively minor, example: when discussing the so-called agricultural revolution, they mention an idea that one researcher has proposed, that wheat domesticated humankind. This they dismiss, quite airily, on the grounds that it takes human intentionality to domesticate anything. Yet I read this passage soon after watching a David Attenborough documentary in which he showed leafcutter ants in the jungle removing a particular type of leaf and carrying them to an underground fungus. The fungus rewarded the ants by secreting a liquor which the ants relished. When the fungus wants a different type of leaf, it changes the liquor, which cues the ants to seek out a different tree. Now it is not clear whether the fungus has domesticated the ants to fetch the leaves it craves, or the ants have domesticated the fungus to give off the liquor they crave, but it is clear that some sort of cross-species domestication has happened here without the necessity for any human intentionality. So, on reading that passage in the book my immediate reaction was to cry: “No!” But that is the beauty and the importance of the book: it is about questioning, about not accepting received ideas, and that includes questioning the book itself.)

So Graeber and Wengrow begin with a question about inequality. They trace this back to the Enlightenment, that curious moment in European history when ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state, about liberty, and about the relationship between the wellbeing of the individual and the growth of technology, all changed. It is a period whose origins can be traced back to the new philosophy of people like Descartes and Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, but which really came into its own during the 18th century leading up to the French and American revolutions, both of which owe their impetus and their guiding spirit to Enlightenment thinking. The ideas about liberty and inequality that emerged in this period seem to be connected to ideas that came into Europe through contact with certain Native American peoples. Graeber and Wengrow specifically concentrate on Kandiaronk, a Huron-Wendat leader whose ideas were disseminated through Europe at this time. But the Enlightenment response to these ideas, particularly as they were expressed by people like Rousseau, tended to suggest the superiority of the European over the “noble savage”; and these ideas informed, and continue to inform, the standard archaeological and anthropological response to the past. The record of the past is of interest in how it grew into modern European civilization; and to the extent that it doesn’t do that, then either the interpretation is wrong or the facts are of no interest. It is quite disturbing how many eminent scholars right up to the present day are quoted expressing exactly that notion.

The problem is that more and more archaeological and anthropological discoveries seem to contradict the standard narratives. But these are two fields that tend to be very focussed on their particular areas. An archaeologist working in Mesopotamia is unlikely to be very aware of anthropological findings from Meso-America. So discoveries that reinforce each other, or that contradict each other, aren’t always noticed. And when they are noticed, the author is likely to be dismissed as a crank. Graeber and Wengrow therefore began this enterprise simply as a way of drawing together theories and discoveries from across the board to satisfy their own curiosity; it only gradually turned from that into the book I have just read.

And it does represent a radical revision of everything I thought I knew about the past. For instance, there is an idea they call “schismogenesis” which suggests that social structures are deliberately set in place as the opposite of what a neighbouring society has adopted. Thus on the west coast of North America there were slave-holding societies bordering societies that emphasised the freedom of every individual member; it isn’t clear which came first, but it seems that one society was deliberately set up because of distaste for the way the other society operated. This is something that contradicts the standard anthropological narrative that societies emerge in response to circumstances rather than as a result of deliberate intent by its members.

Another standard narrative has it that the move to agriculture leads to hierarchies as people are in a position to accumulate wealth and hence power, which in turn leads to the growth of cities. But there are a host of discoveries that contradict each and every one of the assumptions in this narrative. Including evidence of societies that tried agriculture and abandoned it to return to hunter-gathering, and cities that seem unconnected with either hierarchies or agriculture. Patriarchy comes off particularly badly in this book (and they don’t even mention recent discoveries of warrior burials where the warrior in question is a woman). Minoan Crete, for example, has no signs of defensive walls around its cities, unlike the near-contemporary Mycenaean society in mainland Greece. The murals in places like Knossos show bare-breasted women, but naked men, and the women are invariably shown larger than the men. In any other society of a similar vintage, murals that show large male figures are universally considered to be showing kings or other important leaders; so there is no reason to assume the same is not the case in Knossos. And the so-called throne room at Knossos is arranged not for kingly display but as a council chamber where everyone can see everyone else. Meanwhile analysis of the goods Crete is known to have traded with Egypt and the Near East tend to heavily feature things like cosmetics. All the evidence seems to point to Minoan Crete being a peaceful, female led society. But its not the only one, there are similar findings in North America and Mesopotamia among others.

And there is so much more. Too much, almost; there were moments when I was losing track of all that was going on. Cities that seem to be structured on egalitarian lines, with all homes the same and with no palaces or temples. The notion of play-kings, which I found enchanting but I’m not sure I understood it fully. Societies that moved between settled and nomadic depending on the season, and had different leaders and different laws for each situation. Societies in which the king had absolutely no authority. Societies in which captives were either adopted into the tribe or killed gruesomely depending on whim. And more and more and more.

The book is rich, wonderful, questioning, unsettling. Apparently, before David Graeber’s death, it was intended that this would be the first part of a trilogy. We can only hope that David Wengrow has enough material to continue with the project.

And also …

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Georges Simenon, Helen MacInnes

I knew, from the moment I decided to write up every book I read in this blog, that there would be some books where I didn’t have much to say. That’s okay, I thought, I can do a short entry, or I can cover two or three books in a post. These are two books I enjoyed, though I wouldn’t way either of them is particularly special.

First up is I and My True Love by Helen MacInnes. I like Helen MacInnes. I enjoyed her books when I was first into a spy novel jag back in the 1970s, and I am enjoying them again now since I rediscovered them a few years ago. They are substantial paperbacks, around 400 pages in most cases, yet I find them a very quick read. There are quite a few I’ve got through in just a day. They are colourful, usually stuffed with local colour, romantic in mood, cleverly constructed, marred if anything by an unthinking prejudice against anything on the political left. If you encounter anyone in her novels who sympathises with the left they are either a fool or evil. In the main they are a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours.

Most of her books were spy stories in one for or another. Brave men and resourceful women coming together in a desperate battle with Nazis in the early novels, communists in the later ones. The hero and heroine are always attractive, and having overcome the odds they get together at the end. But one or two of her novels dispensed with the spy plot and just told a straightforward romance. This one sits oddly in between. It tells of an unhappily married Washington wife who meets up again with the foreign diplomat that she had an affair with ten years before, and the book is basically about if and how they can get together. Except that the husband is something in American intelligence, the foreign lover is from Czechoslovakia, and someone has been leaking secrets to the Czechs. In fact the spy story aspect is downplayed so that you hardly notice it for most of the novel, as if MacInnes hadn’t quite decided what sort of novel she was writing. And unusually, indeed uniquely among those of her books I’ve read, it all ends unhappily.

The book has its interest, but it is undemanding and far from being one of her best.

The other recently read novel is Maigret by Georges Simenon. We’ve been reading the Maigret novels in sequence, and this represents a strange hiatus in the canon.

The first Maigret novel, Pietr the Latvian appeared in 1931. The 18th novel, Lock No.1, appeared two years later in 1933. In that novel, Maigret announced that he was retiring. The following year, 1934, there was a solitary Maigret novel, this one, just called Maigret. This was the first time that the name of the character had appeared in the title, though many of the later novels would take the form, Maigret and … What is interesting is that this is the last Maigret novel for nearly a decade, the next one, Cecile is Dead, appeared in 1942 during the German occupation (a time when Simenon’s behaviour was questionable at best).

Maigret is living in retirement in the country when his nephew, a rather incompetent police inspector, is arrested for murder. Maigret returns to Paris to investigate. To be honest, this is far from being one of the better Maigret novels. Without the resources of the Quai des Orfevres, the story mostly proceeds by luck rather than detection. And we know who the baddy is from quite early on, so the only real tension is how the pieces are going to fall out to allow Maigret to get his man.

There is a real sense that Simenon, like Conan Doyle before him, had had enough of his creation. I suspect he wanted it to end with Lock No.1, though even that novel feels like he was running out of steam. There is something almost inert about this novel, maybe it was a contractual obligation because it certainly has none of the sharpness or the invention of the earlier novels. It is going to be interesting to see whether, after a lay-off of eight years and with the intervention of a war, Simenon is able to rekindle his interest. There are, after all, another 55 novels to come.

In the neighbourhood

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nina allan

Yes, I’ve been reading. Not as much as I’d like, but steadily. I’ve just not been keeping up with this blog because, well, I’ve been writing dammit! I finished the first draft of the book on Mythago Wood late on the last day of February, which just about squeezes in to my schedule. Surprisingly. I mean, the draft is just over 31,000 words, which is pretty well bang on my word limit, and that’s not much. It’s well under half the length of what was previously my shortest book, yet at times it was more of a struggle to get those words down on the page than any of my other books. But anyway, mustn’t grumble, the draft is done and I’ve now given myself a couple of weeks to catch up on other things before I return to do a second draft.

Which means I have a chance to get back to writing up the books I’ve been reading. And the first is The Good Neighbours by Nina Allan which is … well, I’m not sure if it is my favourite of her novels because I still have immense affection for The Rift, but it is certainly challenging for the number one position.

And yet I once again had that moment that I seem to get with every one of her novels, the moment when I put the book down and ask myself: “What the fuck am I reading?” This is, I should point out, exactly the reason I value her work so highly.

Nina Allan’s work occupies two worlds. One is our quotidian reality. This is privileged: it is where the novel opens and closes, it is unquestioned. This is the world we see around us, the one we take for granted as real. But at some point another world opens. We may spend some time there, but it remains little more than a glimpse, allowing us not quite enough to judge its nature. This world is questioned within the text, we are told to doubt it, but generally in a way that leaves us insecure in our doubt. This may be a realm as real as our own, it may be the fictional creation of one of the characters, or it may be a delusion arising from some sort of psychological damage. We do not know, we cannot be sure. But it profoundly affects the behaviour of at least one of the characters, so it is real to them.

In a way this is the trick that Christopher Priest pulled off in The Affirmation, but Allan does not collapse the two worlds into one at the end. This necessarily leaves everything ambivalent.

The novel is primarily set on Bute, where Allen now lives, which perhaps adds to the solidity of the scenes of everyday reality. But this isn’t quite real, because there is the sort of mass murder that happens more in fiction than in reality. Shirley, the best friend of Cath, our viewpoint character, is murdered, along with her mother and her younger brother. It is assumed that the father is the killer, but he himself dies in a car accident while driving across the island. And this is where we start to question the assumed reality of all this, because the father, John Craigie, is not driving to the ferry to get off the island; in fact he is driving in the opposite direction. This seems perverse, no one can say why he is driving that way, but then, no one asks. Also, the gun that was used is missing. Where did it go, and where did someone like John Craigie get a gun in the first place? Nobody asks: the police have identified the killer to their own satisfaction, he’s safely dead, why bother with fiddly details. This reality is a world of assumptions, and it is not altogether clear how valid those assumptions are.

Years later, Cath returns to the island. She is now a photographer working on a series featuring murder houses, ordinary everyday homes that were also the scenes of notorious murders. The Craigie murders is an obvious part of this series. But again with Cath there is a sense that reality is not so solid as it should be. Oh the external reality is almost hypersolid: I’ve not been there, but I suspect you could walk the streets of Rothesay and point out the house, the fish and chip shop, the café, and all the other places mentioned in the book. But is Cath that solid, that real? Because Cath still engages in conversations with Shirl. Supposedly this is all in Cath’s mind, her memory of Shirl’s colourful turn of phrase, yet these dialogues (some of which can be really quite long) have a real-world effect on Cath’s opinions and actions. Already we are being schooled to think in terms of a parallel reality that touches and interacts with our own.

Then we learn that John Craigie, bully and brute though he was, believed in fairies and was afraid of them. Are there fairies? Does it matter? Even if there are no such things as fairies, can they have real world effects? That’s what underpins the novel. In various ways, small and large, we keep seeing the real and the unreal rubbing up against each other. It is not just the interplay between worlds, John Craigie looking into the realm of fairy, Shirl speaking out from the land of the dead; there are other hesitations and uncertainties that raise doubts at every turn. Is Cath’s seeming romantic relationship with the woman who has moved into the Craigie house real or imagined? Is there anything more than coincidence in the fact that the person who witnessed John Craigie’s car crash was also involved in another murder that had been the subject of Cath’s previous photographic series?

And John Craigie, whatever else he may have been, was a master craftsman who had made an exquisite dolls’ house for his daughter. But when she examines the dolls’ house, Cath realizes that he had built into it a secret room, a room to which there was no apparent entrance. Then, when she searches the Craigie house, Cath finds a hidden compartment within a bedroom cupboard, a compartment that shouldn’t exist, that seems to occupy a strange twist in reality. She reaches within that compartment and finds nothing, then she feels again and finds the gun, almost as if it came into existence the moment she reached her hand out. But of course there is no way to know whose gun it was, or who fired it.

The story ends, satisfyingly, with lots of questions but no answers. As in The Rift, the explanation the reader chooses to accept depends upon which reality they choose to believe. As a novel of ambivalence and hesitation, this is superb.

Ten

Tags

Beatles, David Kynaston, Rolling Stones

It was the year I turned ten. I didn’t yet realize how grey the world was, how limited; these were things I would discover over the coming years. But this year, no, this was a year for watching Dixon of Dock Green (I hated it even then: so dull, so full of nice people being nice) and Thank Your Lucky Stars (which I loved because I didn’t yet have an inkling of how much better pop music could be). I was ten, my world was limited to the television (I saw nothing wrong with the Black and White Minstrels except for their choice of music, and was irritated by Billy Cotton’s Band Club without being able to say why), to football in the street (that, I think, was the year I got a Manchester United football kit for Christmas; how quickly that ended, not because of any imagined danger, our road was wide and quiet, but because I didn’t enjoy football), and to beginning to think about going to the big school (I read a lot of school stories, and as a result was starting to think about Manchester Grammar School; well that never happened).

My horizons were narrow in that narrow little year, but then, I suspect everyone’s horizons were narrow. We none of us saw how it was all going to change, how dramatically, how radically, how quickly.

Which is David Kynaston’s thesis in his latest book. The previous volumes in his magisterial “Tales of a New Jerusalem” have been big books. So big, indeed, that they have been broken into two volumes each by the time they make paperback (the most recent one, Modernity Britain, had been published in two volumes even in hardback. And within that expanse they had covered a lot of ground: Austerity Britain took us from 1945 to 1951, Family Britain from 1951 to 1957, Modernity Britain from 1957 to 1962. But the new volume, On the Cusp: Days of ’62, is slim, barely 200 pages, and its focus is limited to a few short months in the middle of 1962. It opens, as the last volume ended, in the middle of June 1962, roughly at the point when Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain was published. It ends, very precisely, on 5th October, with just two people paying to watch the Rolling Stones perform at the Woodstock pub in North Cheam (oh how redolent of Tony Hancock and the whole black and white feel of 1950s Britain that address is).

On the Cusp follows the pattern that Kynaston has made his own in these books. He takes us day-by-day, month-by-month through the period under consideration, gives us headlines, the shape of political and economic affairs, looks at the books and essays of the time to get a sense of how these political and economic affairs were being viewed. But he intersperses all of this with diary entries, often culled from Mass Observation, to give us the picture of people shopping, going to the cinema or theatre, watching television, listening to music. There’s a lot about what was on television, because that was what was coming to dominate people’s leisure time. 1962 was when Steptoe and Son and That Was The Week That Was were first aired (saw them both, loved them both), and also Hugh and I, the first of the seemingly interminable and resolutely unfunny Terry Scott comedies that I hated from the start. It is oddly off-putting at first, a mass of seemingly disconnected information, quotes from ordinary people and from people who were about to become famous. On that storied day in October 1962, as the book ends, for example, we learn that Sandra Goodrich (15, the future Sandie Shaw) was working in a Ford factory in Dagenham; Glenda Jackson, 26, was being described as “pale and edgy” in a review of a play by the Watford Observer; Tom McGrath, 21, founding editor of International Times, was running a jazz club in Glasgow; John Ravenscroft (23, future John Peel) was selling crop hail insurance in Texas; Sandy Denny, 15, was at school in New Malden; and “Roy Strong (27, future youthful extrovert director of the National Portrait Gallery) was an assistant keeper there and still living wholly in the past”; and so on, four pages of such glimpses. And yet the more you read, the more you become attuned to the sights and sounds and smells and feel of quotidian reality in that now long gone age.

There’s a chapter that focuses largely on agriculture and on rural living, and another that looks primarily at life in Wales. We see the Night of the Long Knives, but don’t really see how fragile the Macmillan government was. On the surface this is still the 1950s, a Britain that hasn’t changed, that isn’t going to change, that sees no point in changing.

And yet …

We get the first oblique references to Christine Keeler, a diary column in Queen magazine that named no names but refers to a chauffeur-driven Zil arriving at her front door as a chauffeur-driven Humber leaves from her back door. It is not public yet, but the Profumo scandal is about to burst, and bring the government down with it. There is a letter written by someone senior at Bovis referring to Councillor Smith, who is T. Dan Smith. It is not public yet, but the whole corruption scandal in the North East is about to burst. There are people living in slum housing whose landlord is Peter Rachman. It is not public yet, but the scandal of the slum landlords is about to break. And we see the Beatles recording their first single, “Love Me Do”, which is released on 5th October. And we see the lukewarm response to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the latest example of gritty, northern, New Wave cinema (everything was New Wave in the 50s and early 60s, from films to fashion, science fiction was late getting in on the act). But on 5th October, the same day that the Beatles release their first single, Dr No is released, heralding a new wave of fast-paced, glamorous, colourful British cinema.

The Sixties is about to begin in earnest.

And me, I turned ten just two weeks before “Love Me Do” and Dr No appeared simultaneously. I have vivid memories of seeing the Beatles on Thank Your Lucky Stars, their first appearance on national TV in Britain. I also have a vivid memory of watching Dr No in the cinema; but I was only ten, I couldn’t have done – but I can remember it. All of that was to come in the next year. But 1962 was when it all changed, did we but know it.

From a distance

Tags

Andrew Haswell Green, Jonathan Lee, Samuel J. Tilden

So, for a couple of days there at the start of the year my plan to get back to reading more seemed to be working. But then it hit a brick wall. Not the result of any of the physiological or psychological problems of last year, but simply because I had started writing. I began, right on schedule, work on my next book, and I don’t read as much when I’m writing: the words going round and round in my head need to be my words, not someone else’s. But I’m taking a brief break from writing, largely because I’ve been suffering sciatica in my right leg, and sitting at my desk for long periods is proving uncomfortable. So, before I get on to the next chapter, I thought I owed myself a chance for my leg to rest up a bit. And therefore I’ve been reading. In particular I’ve been reading The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee, an author I’d not come across before.

The novel begins on Friday 13th November 1903, when octogenarian Andrew Haswell Green is shot and killed by a stranger in front of his Park Avenue home. The novel then moves back through his life, and forwards through the repercussions of his murder. Let me say right from the start that it is an interesting structure, very well handled, and the result is an excellent novel.

Except, at first, I didn’t believe in the character. This Andrew Green is from a poor farming family who goes on to become the guiding force behind the creation of Central Park, the person who oversaw the introduction of the New York Public Library along with the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Natural History, he was the person who oversaw the recovery of the city after the overthrow of Boss Tweed, he was behind the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and he pushed through the uniting of the five boroughs to create Greater New York which was also known as the Great Mistake. Yeah, I thought: if you want to write about the radical transformation of New York in the latter years of the nineteenth century you’ve got all the material you could want here. But putting all of this at the feet of one man, and then having that man go on to be murdered in a bizarre shooting, is asking us to swallow a bit much, isn’t it?

So I went away and checked. Andrew Haswell Green was a real person. Andrew Haswell Green did everything on that list. Andrew Haswell Green was killed in exactly this way.

Andrew Haswell Green

So my question is: how in all my readings on American history have I never come across this man? How has he disappeared from history? (In an oddly moving penultimate chapter, Lee steps forward to tell us that the one statue of Green was crated up and lost, the one portrait of him still hangs in City Hall but in a place where it can’t be seen by the public, a laboratory in his name at New York University was torn down. The only genuine surviving monument to the man appears to be a bench bearing his name in an obscure corner of Central Park.) And with all of that in mind, how come there aren’t dozens of other novels about him, because the man is surely a gift?

Not that I especially warmed to Andrew Green. He is an austere, pernickety, lonely man. But that is part of the point. Given how much of this novel is based on fact, I’m assuming this is too, but the main point of the novel is an unconsummated homosexual romance between Green and Samuel Tilden. (I do know about Tilden: he was the losing Democratic contender in the disputed presidential election of 1876; though I didn’t, of course, know of his connection with Green.) Tilden died a bachelor, as did Green, and they were long time friends and colleagues. There is nothing definitive to suggest that either was homosexual, though at the time discretion on such matters, particularly in the higher reaches of political and economic life, was taken to extraordinary lengths. And Lee is similarly discreet: early in the novel there’s a passage where Tilden introduces Green to an elite private library, but then severs the relationship on the advice of other members of the library. At the time, Green (and therefore the reader) takes this to be on grounds of class; looking back, there may be more to it. But then, this is a relationship which never goes beyond occasionally holding hands. Both men achieve much, but are left lonely and disappointed.

Incidentally, I don’t think that the disputed election is meant to be a reference to recent politics. Tilden’s political life is barely mentioned in the novel. But Boss Tweed, who appears only once late in the novel, appears like the spitting image of Donald Trump, and I’m sure that’s not accidental.

As for the murder: Green was killed by a poor black man who mistook him for someone else. The man had, years before, had an affair with a prostitute and was now convinced that she was being kept from him by a rich protector called Green. Except that the prostitute was now one of the richest women in New York with a string of properties across the city, and to protect her elite clientele, she referred to them by code names of her own devising, including Mr Brown, Mr Green, Mr Grey and so on. The murder is another Great Mistake. Though the chapters concerning the police detective who unravels this are perhaps the only parts of the novel played as comedy. The murderer would live out his days in an insane asylum, the detective would be killed on a new case; I assume both are real.

Green’s discreet, lonely, emotionally unfulfilled life is conveyed also in the way the novel is written. We are told constantly about the thoughts and feeling of different characters, yet we never feel that we are inside their heads. Even the description of their thoughts seems to come from outside, from a distance. And I’m sure this is intentional, because distance is referred to constantly throughout the book, and always with approbation. Of the city, we are told: “The trick to living here was to find a form of distance from the city itself.” Again: “The Battery was a spot that had perfected a quality Andrew thought of often: distance.” And when Washington Roebling is showing Green and Tilden the work on Brooklyn Bridge: “On the New York side, so small, so distant now, the first stone had not even been laid.”

This is a strange and full life, but it can only ever be known, only ever understood, from a distance.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Benjamin Black

Tags

Benjamin Black, Georges Simenon, Graham Swift, John Banville, William Boyd

I first came across John Banville sometime in the mid-1970s when his novel Kepler came out. I bought the hardback, loved it (I reviewed a subsequent reprint of the book), and since then I have read just about everything he has written. There are few contemporary writers I keep up with as assiduously I do Banville (Graham Swift and William Boyd come to mind), but his work is incredibly various. The historical ones, (Kepler, Doctor Copernicus), were vivid and convincing; his novel based on Anthony Blunt, The Untouchable, is sharp and engaging; but others, such as his Booker Prize winner, The Sea, seem to me so etiolated that you have to fight your way through a fog of allusive prose to find out what didn’t happen.

I have seen Banville speak a couple of times, once specifically on Georges Simenon. I can’t think of two more different writers than the author of The Sea and the author of Maigret, and yet there was an obvious connection between the two. So it was no great surprise that he started writing crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, starting with Christine Falls in 2006. The Black novels are hardly Simenonesque, the prose, while tighter than some of his John Banville novels, is still a lot looser, more elaborate, than you are likely to find in Simenon. But in these novels plot is to the fore, and they are indeed good plot-driven stories.

Most, though by no means all, of the Benjamin Black novels feature an alcoholic Dublin pathologist, Quirke. And they are interconnected in the way that they use the crime as a way of digging into the abusive control of 1950s Dublin society by the Catholic Church, and the corruption of the political class sheltering behind the power of the Church. This is an impoverished, grey Dublin where the physical and sexual abuse of children in Church-run orphanages and schools is an accepted part of life. There are few if any characters in the Benjamin Black novels who are not in some way damaged by the very society they inhabit.

Banville made no secret that he and Benjamin Black were one and the same. The books tended to declare on the cover: By John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. It was rather like the difference between Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks: the two names allowed the author to take different liberties with their writing.

Then, a year ago, a new John Banville novel appeared: Snow. And it was a crime novel, indeed it was a very distinctive Benjamin Black novel, yet the name Black appeared nowhere on it. It was a crime novel set in 1950s Ireland, and though there is a new central character, the rather austere and lonely protestant, Detective Inspector Strafford, Quirke does get a passing mention. And it is a novel that features corruption in high places, and the malign influence of the Church.

Now there is what is advertised as a new Strafford novel, April in Spain. Only Strafford doesn’t even appear until more than half way through the book, and even then mostly plays a supporting role. The central character is Quirke, and the story itself is a direct sequel, set four years later, to the third of the Benjamin Black Quirke novels, Elegy for April (2011). In that earlier novel, incest within the family of a prominent government minister results in a boy admitting to murdering his sister, April, and then committing suicide. Now, reluctantly on holiday in Spain with his new wife, Quirke encounters a doctor at the local hospital and recognizes her as April.

Quirke immediately telephones his daughter, Phoebe, who had been a friend of April’s. Phoebe tells the Dublin police, who arrange that Detective Inspector Strafford should travel out to Spain with her to confirm the identification, and to try to discover why her brother had confessed to her murder. But Phoebe also tells April’s uncle, the cabinet minister, which is why a one-time associate of the Kray twins is also heading out to Spain with a gun.

This is not a novel in which mysteries are solved, which I suppose brings it closer to earlier John Banville novels. But truths are uncovered, political repercussions are felt, and there are tragedies. It is a gripping novel, I read it in a day which is something I haven’t done much of recently.

Curiously, I notice that the John Banville Bibliography on Wikipedia does not list Snow, and counts April in Spain as a Benjamin Black novel, which it explicitly is not. Clearly some people are still confused by the identities of Banville and Black.

Checkmate in Berlin

Tags

Ernest Bevin, Giles Milton, Louis Menand, Winston Churchill

[This is by way of an experiment, albeit one I fully expect to fail, or more accurately one I suspect will fizzle out into silence before too long. Whenever I do my roundup of the books I’ve read during the year, I find that books I remember having lots of things to say about at the time I was reading them, end up with some bland remarks in my summary. Ah, if only I had written about them as the year went by. Except, I’ve thought about this many times in the past, and the idea has faded to nothingness if it ever even got started. And anyway, there are plenty of books I read where there really isn’t much to say about them. Look at all the Maigrets I’ve been reading recently, wouldn’t endless blogs eventually stutter into dull repetition over the weeks? So as often as not the idea has died before it ever really got started. But I can’t get rid of the idea completely, it keeps coming back to haunt me. So I’m going to give it a go for one year, if only to prove once and for all that I don’t have the stamina to keep it going for a full year. So let’s see how far I can get …]

I cannot remember when I first heard about the Berlin Airlift. It was almost certainly during my schooldays, because I have a vague memory that I once wrote an essay in class about the airlift. But though it lodged in my mind as a curious and rather dramatic interlude in the story of Cold War relations, I never really knew much in the way of detail about the event. Did it last for just a few weeks, or for a year or more? I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. (in fact it was just short of a full year.)

Which is why I found Checkmate in Berlin so interesting. It is, at the same time, the most detailed and the most straightforward account you could hope to find.

Milton begins with the Yalta Conference in February 1945, which we can safely identify as the starting point for the Cold War. Roosevelt was dying and really wasn’t up to the argy-bargy and excessive drinking that any conference with Stalin involved. Churchill, meanwhile, was drunk most of the time, didn’t bother reading his briefing papers, and was inclined to make promises that caught everyone on his staff completely off-guard. (I couldn’t help noticing how closely this unflattering portrait of Churchill resembled our own dear Churchillian leader.) As for Stalin, he was, as ever, forensic and brutal. He made demands that the others were too weak or too dull-witted to resist; and he made promises that he had no intention of keeping though the others fell on them with relief. George Kennan (one of the stars of Louis Menand’s The Free World, so I was familiar with this part of the story) understood exactly what Stalin was doing and where Soviet foreign policy was heading, but it would be another couple of years before his clear-eyed analysis would be recognised and adopted by the US State Department.

This failure by the West to understand that the Soviet Union was no longer their reliable wartime ally would be a feature of international relations, in Europe and particularly in Berlin, for the next several years. The Russians raced to capture Berlin and large chunks of Germany; the British and Americans hesitated, moved slowly, and worked on the unshakeable principle that they must do nothing to upset their Soviet allies. Despite a binding agreement to split Berlin into three sectors, Russian, British and American (the French sector was carved out of the British and American sectors some time later, though the French were barely acknowledged by the Russians), British and American troops and administrators were prevented from entering the city for several weeks while the Soviets openly looted it, and kidnapped a host of scientists, engineers and their families, many of whom would never see Germany again. When the British and Americans finally reached the parts of the city they were supposed to administer, they found no infrastructure, no machinery, no intact buildings, no medicines, and virtually no food or drinkable water.

The real miracle of Berlin was how quickly and how effectively the military administrations of the Western sectors made the city at least barely liveable. The two men chosen to head up the western sectors seem to have been unusually well-chosen, though you might not think so from their names: Colonel Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley for the Americans and Brigadier Robert “Looney” Hinde for the Brits. Initially Hinde was more reluctant to antagonise the Russians than Howley was, though the two eventually formed a good team countering Russian provocations. But in time, of course, Hinde was replaced by somebody totally unsuited to the job, a stiff, by the letter military man with no obvious redeeming features at all, which left the British side slow to react as tensions escalated towards the blockade.

Of course, the Russians were single-minded in their approach to Berlin. They wanted to squeeze the West out of the city, take over Germany, and protect the Soviet Union with a cordon sanitaire of Soviet-friendly puppet states. Indeed before the war had even ended they had flown in Walter Ulbricht with a team dedicated to securing a smooth transition to communist rule. The trouble is, they bodged it. They knew that an overtly communist rule would be unpopular (the officially sanctioned rape and looting that Russian troops had perpetrated on first entering the city had seen to that) so they helped to establish a centrist Social Democrat party, but then on the eve of city-wide elections, they used bribery, intimidation and straightforward threats to arrange a merger of the Social Democrats with the German Communist Party. But they had misjudged the mood of the city and in the subsequent elections the new Socialist Unity Party was soundly defeated. Only the Russians didn’t admit defeat, they installed their own people in the city government regardless of the election results, they refused to allow the popular Ernst Reuter to be installed as mayor, and they created their own police force under the leadership of a former Nazi thug.

Even so, there were powerful voices in both Washington and London who wanted to continue to appease the Soviets. But the defection of a Soviet diplomat in Canada, and the subsequent discovery of the atom spies, helped to change attitudes. Meanwhile in Berlin Howley in particular had been convinced that the Soviets had to be stopped, and he proved adept at winning the propaganda war. Eventually, the Russians fell back on coercion. In June 1948 they closed all the land routes to Berlin, and shut off supplies of food and fuel. While Howley in Berlin called for an airlift of supplies, the new British administrator in Berlin, General Herbert, predicted the western allies would be defeated by October, and the government in Washington was similarly pessimistic. But the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, declared that “under no circumstances will we leave Berlin.” And after that it was impossible for the Americans to withdraw unilaterally. The problem with an airlift was that it would require a minimum of 4,500 tons of food a day to keep the city alive, which worked out at 1,800 flights a day. How the logistics of all this were worked out and maintained, even through the weeks of freezing fog in that impossibly cold autumn when flights were often impossible, is an absolutely gripping story.

I have read and enjoyed other stuff by Giles Milton. He is a good storyteller, and marshals the fact well so it is always clear what happened and why. But I suspect this could be his best to date.