Filling in the gaps reading: "Six Months in 1945" by Michael Dobbs

There are two Michael Dobbs(es). One wrote the original UK version of House of Cards (and is credited as "executive producer" of the recent US version). He is not the author of this book. The other Michael Dobbs (how much he must hate that) is a renowned US Cold War historian and Washington Post journalist. He did write this book, which (I now discover) is the last of a series of three books on the Cold War. 

I say that just to get it clear, because I wasn't so clear when I impulsively picked up this book in Brussels' Waterstones. 

Why did I pick it up? Because I did have a kind of gap, exactly the gap that this book is designed to fill. I have read plenty about the end of World War II, plenty about the Cold War and the early years of the Soviet satellite states, but that bit in the middle, the manoeuvrings between the Allies at Yalta and Potsdam, the geopolitical background to Hiroshima, the transitions from Roosevelt to Truman and from Churchill to Atlee (in this context), had slightly passed me by. Well, this remarkable book did the job.

In a book full of telling anecdote and detail, Dobbs sets out a tightly focused story of how the "Big Three" thrashed out, in many respects unsuccessfully, the deals which determined the shape of the postwar world, one which we still in many respects inhabit today. I have heard quite a lot lately (something to do with my job) about Polish resentment about how they were "sold out", perhaps even "betrayed" by the Western Allies at Yalta. Well, yes, this book makes it all too clear how ambivalent and, yes, guilty, Churchill in particular and Roosevelt felt about the deal they felt able to secure at Yalta and subsequently concerning Poland, but also how, as they say, possession was nine parts of the law when it came to Stalin's intransigence over the new power structures in Poland (in particular) post 1945. 

Relaxation reading: "Whispers Under Ground" by Ben Aaronovitch

Where once there was the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency to provide that slightly guilty low-brow relief from "worthwhile" books, now there is the Peter Grant series of sweetwise-magical-London-copper tales from the Metropolis. This is third in the series, and the third I have read, and while it is true that it will be hard to recapture the delight of discovery in the first book in the series, The Rivers of London, I did not feel the disappointment which came with the second, Moon Over Soho. 

Perhaps it's just that Aaronovitch has relaxed a bit. He seems more comfortable with his characters, less stressed about having them perform for us, so more able to get on and tell his fantastical tale. Once again, it is impossible not to take to hero-narrator Peter Grant, he of formidable Sierra Leonian mum (and the family that goes with her) and just agreeably dissolute jazz-playing London dad, who relates his story in witty, self-deprecating style. The cast of characters is gradually consolidating around him: mainstream senior officers Seawoll and Stephanopoulos who resent, but ultimately accept, PC Grant's specialisation in "weird stuff", formerly high-flying but now fellow magical apprentice PC Lesley May, who is made to be Grant's love interest, but who has to wear a mask to conceal the hideous destruction of her face which occurred in the Rivers of London, DCI Nightingale, Grant's other-wordly Guvnor and only-surviving postwar wizard in the land working for the forces of law and order, the weird and taciturn Molly, housekeeper at magical HQ, the Folly, who definitely has something of the night about her, as well as many delightful minor characters, such as the tribe of smart-talking, bling-toting London-Nigerian water divinities, who pop up not infrequently, ostensibly to give Grant a hard time, while in fact charmed into helping him out of this or that magical scrape.

Modishly Tudor reading: "The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England" by Ian Mortimer

I have committed that most heinous of book blog crimes: to get two books behind, a.k.a not writing the review of one book before finishing the next. So expect cheapskate, two-for-the-price-of-one, abbreviated posts for this book and the next. 

Actually, it won't be that complicated, because both books are sequels, even remakes, of books that came before, and have featured in these pages. The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England is, unsurprisingly, Ian Mortimer's follow-up to the Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England and works on the same concept, namely telling you what you would need to know if you were taking a trip in time to visit a country you think you know but from which you are separated by getting on for five centuries. I liked the earlier book, and, minus only the discovery-of-a-neat-new-idea factor, also very much liked this.

I'll say what I said in 2010, that though Mortimer's concept is not fantastically innovative as the publisher's blurb might have you believe, he does it really well and delivers a satisfying and original book as a result. The main impression you come away with, in the words of the cliché, is that the past really is another country. A visit to Elizabethan England would be more alienating, dangerous and exotic that visiting almost anywhere in the modern world. 

The routine nature of excruciating cruelty, the utter pervasiveness of religious belief in every aspect of daily life, the mind-bogglingly obtuse and ignorant exercise of medicine (a case in point), the unhygienic conditions of daily life and the rigidity of the social class system are all things that would disconcert the time traveller considerably. Similarly, for all Mortimer's helpful provision of a mini Elizabethan phrase book, including a guise to swearing and cursing, the language would probably flummox the modern Brit rather more than he or she would expect.

Enthused reading: "One Summer - America 1927" by Bill Bryson

In the people-I-might-actually-like-to-be stakes, I have already identified Bill Bryson as a front runner. This book has done nothing to modify that opinion. Again, I am struck by the guy's sheer curiosity and the delight he takes in serving up stories of both the ordinary and the extraordinary, both of which he finds in the midst of its apparent opposite. It is typically Bryson to alight on one particular year - indeed the summer of one particular year - and lay it out for us in a breeze of fascinated enthusiasm and anecdote. As ever the research is formidable but lightly-worn, the details arresting and illuminating, the regard inquiring and amusing.

Yeah, so I liked it...

But why 1927, I hear you ask, it is not one of those usual suspects, 1914, 1929, 1933, 1968, 1945, 1989 for example, usually included in the pantheon of twentieth century landmark years. There is a rationalisation for the choice, to which I will come back, but my own suspicion is that Bryson's interest in the year started rather with a typically rather boyish attraction to the two centrepiece occurrences of the book. The first is the famous Lindbergh transatlantic flight and its extraordinary aftermath, the second the remarkable season enjoyed by that supposedly over-the-hill baseball star, Babe Ruth. Hmm, thin pickings, one might think, on which to construct a 550 page popular history, especially for a European audience, which may have heard of Babe Ruth, but does not know the difference between a batting average of 0.295 and one of 0.375, and may be more familiar with Charles Lindbergh as a noted Nazi sympathiser than as aviation hero.

Ambiguously nostalgic reading: "A Delicate Truth” by John le Carré

My heart wasn’t really in this post. A Delicate Truth was the tail end of my holiday reading in Australia, not however completed until well after being thrown back into the frenzy of the rentrée. It duly got finished bittily, rather than in the quick but substantial bursts appropriate to a book like this. Moreover, all this was a while ago, meaning the novel has faded rather from my memory.

Was it a bad book? Actually not at all, with some critics describing it as something of a return to form for Le Carré. I was unaware that he was particularly out of form, except inasmuch as his Cold War glory days (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) are growing ever more distant, though the Constant Gardener was of course a bit of a hit more recently. Over time, I have dipped into Le Carré’s recent novels mainly for lightish relief, often in the form of audio books on long journeys (always read by the author himself, a job he does very well, by the way).

Such was the spirit in which I undertook this book, boosted by a couple of positive reviews in Sunday newspapers.

London-fantastical reading: "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman

Something of a pattern emerging, methinks. I'm getting predictable. As I start this post, I realise that there are a disproportionate number of presaging books for this, indicating that I have some sort of compulsive-obsessive disorder.

I do not refer to the fact that this is the second book by the same author, of course. Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods impressed me mightily a while back, so fair enough to return to him for some more crazy imaginative invention. However, I am beginning to wonder if I have Morlock-like troglodytic tendencies, focused on London. Consider some recent reads:

August 2013: second magical Met copper yarn, Moon Over Soho
July 2013: quirky history of the London underground, Underground, Overground
June 2012: Ackroyd's history of underground London, London Under
January 2012: first magical Met copper yarn involving underground rivers in London, The Rivers of London

Sequential magical reading: "Moon Over Soho" by Ben Aaronovitch

Sometimes it's probably just best to stick with a good one-off. Like my last book, this one was a sequel, but of a rather different nature, the second in an "urban fantasy"series of tales featuring Metropolitan police officer and apprentice wizard Peter Grant facing up to various forms of malevolent weirdness in contemporary London. I liked the first book in the series, which I had randomly bought on the strength of its cover. It was an imaginative, funny, streetwise and page-turning story.

Moon Over Soho picks up where the first book left off, embarking on a fresh tale of magic intersecting with the day-to-day life of the great metropolis, indeed two tales, for, as in the first book, a principal plot line and a sub-plot are woven together and gradually merge. Many of the same qualities are there: streetwise humour, a good eye for the multicultural realities of twenty-first century London, an ability to keep you turning the pages as the plot twists and turns... But, I still felt slightly disappointed. It's not that Aaronovitch has lost his touch, I think it's just that so much of the pleasure of the first book lay in discovering a new imaginative world, the gradual revealing of a parallel reality, as novel and surprising to the protagonist as it is to the reader. The trouble is, you can only do that once, whereafter the next story has to be pitched in the by-now-familiar framework. Somehow, JK Rowling pulled this off better in the Harry Potter series, maybe by keeping more back at the outset, maybe also by having a stronger multi-volume narrative arc. An unfair comparison perhaps, but one that serves to illustrate the point.

Discontentful reading: "Seasons in the Sun - The Battle for Britain" by Dominic Sandbrook

In the lengthening series, "wildly inappropriate reading", this short review concerns the second (actually the third, by my second) volume of Dominic Sandbrook's super-detailed history of the nineteen-seventies, here covering the years 1974-1979. Inappropriate, because the my surroundings, variously an Etihad business lounge in Abu Dhabi, unseasonably warm midwinter Sydney, and seasonably warm northern Queensland, seem a million miles from the bleak, grimy and seemingly terminally declining Britain of the seventies, described in this book. 

These were the years of all-powerful (or so it seemed) union bosses, the decline into  bizarre paranoia of a once hope-bringing prime minister (Wilson), the overwhelming of his successor, a politician who deserves better of the historical record (Callaghan), industrial decline, punk rock, strikes, more strikes and the famous Winter of Discontent, which sets the stage, though few, probably including the protagonists, realised to what extent, for a political and cultural sea-change beginning with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. It is also the period when I personally went from being ten to fifteen years old, and therefore began to acquire some meaningful consciousness of what was going on. (Though, having read this, less than I thought.)  

I don't actually have too much to say about this book, not because there is not a lot to say, but because I have largely said it already, in the review of the preceding volume. Sandbrook writes masterly history, fusing conventional historical sources with germane and insightful references to popular culture, in particular, and justifiably in the context of the seventies, TV programmes such as the Morcombe and Wise Show and The Generation Game, whose audiences were so huge as to represent significant proportions of the population. Again and again, as with the previous volume, this book brought numerous moments of recognition ("yes! I remember that, even if I was only twelve"), as well as new information which had totally passed me by at the time and had somehow failed to impinge since, such as the genuinely weird role played in British government by Marcia Williams, Harold Wilson's advisor, subsequently Lady Falkender.   

Geriatic reading: "The Hundred-Year-Old Man: Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared" by Jonas Jonasson

Nordic literature (TV series too, at that) is supposed to be dark, introverted stuff, right? Well, The Hundred-Year-Old Man: Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is not dark at all, but a joyous geriatric romp through the Swedish countryside in the company of a motley crew of ageing and really-not-that-bad crooks, led, bizarrely by our hero, the 100-year old Allan Karlsson. After he absconds from his old people's home, just before his 100h birthday party is due to begin, steals a suitcase full of drug money and hits the road to nowhere in particular, events continually conspire to expand his band to include an unlikely selection of characters up to and including an escaped zoo elephant.

The vicissitudes of the group, on the run from law enforcers and law-breakers alike, take on the nature of a Swedish road-trip, complete with a couple of relatively harmless murders. But this is all less than half the story, for much of the book is spent in flashback, telling us the past of Allan Karlsson - a past which spans pretty much the entire twentieth century.

Turns out that Allan Karlsson is a kind of long-haul Swedish Forrest Gump, an idiot savant with a knack of being where the action is, hobnobbing with world leaders and incidentally taking a decisive hand in pretty much everything from the Spanish Civil War, through the invention of the atom bomb and Mao's Great March to Reagan's Star Wars programme. Karlsson is on cordial (usually vodka-drinking) terms with two US presidents, Mao (and Mrs Mao), General Franco, Kim Il-Sun and Albert Einstein's not very clever half brother, to name but a few. Pretty much the only one the avowedly apolitical Karlsson cannot get along with, vodka consumption notwithstanding, is Joseph Stalin, who he finds over-sensitive and lacking in human warmth. Besides, that encounter ends badly, with Karlsson spending six years in the Gulag for a minor faux pas.

Over the book's not inconsiderable, but eminently readable length, the flashbacks and the road trip converge, as the forces of law and order converge on the unlikely gang and Karlsson gravitates slowly back to his homeland. What happens then, well, really confirms what we have come to expect of our improbable hero.

Is this all supposed to have a deeper meaning? Well, yes, there's satire; yes, there's moral relativism; yes, there's a quizzical eye cast on world history, but really this is just fun. A lot of fun.

Recommendation? This is one to take to the beach for your summer reading. You can't fail to enjoy it (unless you think it is all really a bit too silly) and it'll go by in a flash. Ibsen it ain't, but if you're up a bit of clever Swedish fun, give it a go.

Perverse reading: "Underground Overground" by Andrew Martin

It is a pretty perverse choice, it has to be said, to read a sideways-look at the history of the London Underground while doing an "executive leadership" course in the Silicon Valley sunshine. But there you have it, it was next in my reading queue. In my defence, I could add that this was my first e-book, thus appropriate to the location, read on my new kindle, which I recently bought in the face of the reality that I cannot practically schlep my usual pile of summer reading books on the long distance holidays we have planned this year. In my further defence, I would say that if you have been obliged to read the latest work of your Stanford Business School management guru at the same time, a little bit of drizzle-doused, understated English quirkiness is probably a reasonable antidote.  (Complimentary copy of said tome, Power Up - actually lower case power up - is beside me as I write. Don't expect a review here...)

At the risk of slightly undermining my apparent commitment to new technology, I should point out that I do possess the old-fashioned paperback version of this book, and bought the kindle version later for travel purposes. I mention the fact merely to point out that this is yet another of that now venerable category of serendipitously-found-books-in-Foyles-St-Pancras. Yes, that modest bookstore worked its magic once more, a few months ago, only to be overlaid by the technological revolution by the time I got round to actually reading it.

Post Soviet Baltic reading: "With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows" by Sandra Kalniete

I have professional dealings with Sandra Kalniete, though she does not (yet) know me personally. She is a Latvian Member of the European Parliament, and is a familiar name to most in the Parliament because of the constant stream of emails emanating from her office publicising exhibitions, films and other events focusing on Latvian history, usually its bleaker aspects. In my case, things are a little more specific, as I was one of a number of addressees of a letter from a group of MEPs, but coordinated by Mrs Kalniete, complaining that the small history section of the Parliament's visitor centre, the Parlamentarium, for which I am responsible, places almost exclusive emphasis on Nazi atrocities in World War II, with scant mention of those committed by the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. (As so often, the holocaust and Auschwitz are cited as the lowest point of human history from which Europe had to recover in the post-war period.)

This complaint is indeed is a relatively common one of Members from Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular from the Baltic States, against what they see as a cultural and historical bias towards a Western European narrative of history requiring correction, or at least balance.

Tricksy reading: "Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, literary superstar. The astonishingly good Atonement and On Chesil Beach made it impossible not to buy and read his next book, Solar, which, though for me not so good, did not dilute the effect, which thus made Sweet Tooth a compulsory purchase. As with all the books mentioned above from the "second phase" McEwan (the first phase being rather more gothic), Sweet Tooth is deeply rooted in middle class Englishness, this time set, in what he has himself described as autobiographical style, in the late sixties and early seventies. 

Reformation reading: "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel

In the last post, about a Pakistani interloper, I made mention of a "hefty historical novel" on which I was embarked and which the subcontinental tale briefly interrupted. So I now reveal that Wolf Hall was the novel in question, and its heftiness 674 pages in my paperback edition. 

This book earned Hilary Mantel her first Booker Prize (with, extraordinarily, the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, winning her second), so it's good. I'm not being ironic, it is good. Mantel pulls off a totally immersive and page-turning evocation of an era made spuriously familiar to my generation by Ladybird history books and a privileged place in the nationalistic school curriculum of my youth, latterly much sighed over by educational and political conservatives.  Mantel's version of Tudor politics and history is of course much more sophisticated and ambiguous than the official version I was brought up on. It should be; her research is ferociously detailed and her understanding of the period profound, even without that research being worn in any way on her sleeve. Just historically, this book seems to me a magnificent achievement.

Interposed reading: "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" by Mohsin Hamid

A cheeky interloper, this book. I am currently embarked on a hefty historical novel, which, though admirable, is not a quick read. So when, serendipitously, this book, of which I had read complimentary reviews, presented itself on a bookshelf in Perugia's Feltrinelli (where else?), I was easily tempted. Three days later it was read and I am back to my historical novel.

Insubordinate reading: "Tribes" by Seth Godin

What do you get when a famous blogger and New York guru writes a book? Short sentences is what. Short paragraphs too. Lots of colons. Wisdom is best communicated through aphorism. Lots of them, indeed.

This is a short book and a quick read. It contains 147 pages. But, fear not, the pages are small, the margins generous and the print sizeable, while the paragraph breaks and subtitles are abundant. Seth Godin knows what he thinks and means what he says. Which is basically this: in the modern world success for individuals and organisations does not come from managing processes, it comes from leading tribes.

If you want to make a difference, if you want to get on, be a heretic and lead a tribe, says Godin. Here are three examples of how he says it:

Leadership isn't difficult, but you've been trained for years to avoid it. I want to help you realise that you already have all the skills you needs to make a huge difference, and I want to sell you on doing it. The best thing is that you don't need to wait until you've got exactly the right job or built the organisation or moved up three rungs on the corporate ladder. You can start right now. (p.13)

***

Crowds and Tribes

Two different things:
A crowd is a tribe without a leader.
A crowd is a tribe without communication.
Most organisations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organisations assemble the tribe.
Crowds are interesting, and they can create all sorts of worthwhile artifacts and market effects. But tribes are longer lasting and more effective. (p.30)

***

The Look of the Leader

What does a leader look like?
I've met leaders all over the world, on several continents, and in every profession. I've met young leaders and old ones, leaders with big tribes and tiny ones.
I can tell you this: leaders have nothing in common.
They don't share gender or income level or geography. There's no gene, no schooling, no parentage, no profession. In other words, leaders aren't born. I'm sure of it.
Actually, they do have one thing in common. Every tribe leader I've ever met shares one thing: the decision to lead. (p.145)

Do you see how that could get a bit tiring after 147 pages?

It's just as well he's basically right, otherwise it would also be deeply irritating. As it is, it is both mildly irritating and mildly illuminating. At moments, it was even mildly inspiring. He is right. At least I think so. But this is one of those cases where a blog post has been stretched to book length. A nice idea, and some good illustrative anecdotes, do not really need 147 pages to be related. Frankly, after a while, you've just had enough, you've got it and you start to get nit-pickingly fussy about paragraph length and sentence construction. Which is a shame, because I enjoyed reading this book - I even enjoyed being irritated by it - and this review is coming out more negative than I feel.

But I still have a slight block when it comes to forms of thinking for which the subordinate clause is off-limits.  Could it be that more complex grammar reveals doubt? Nuance? Lack of Authority? Ambiguity? Sometimes you just want Mr Godin to be a heretic himself and write a long sentence... Go on, dare you.

Recommendation: worth reading, probably. But I suspect not much more than the blog. www.sethgodin.com, by the way.

Twisting reading: "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn

Dear reader, surely you have read Gone Girl? Everyone else has, it seems, which makes writing this small review largely redundant except as record keeping. But maybe there is someone still out there unaware of this publishing phenomenon, which pops up in all sorts of "best books of 2012" lists (admittedly sometimes in the crime/mystery/thriller category). Assuming there is such a person, I will endeavour not to spoil, though to talk about this book without talking about the twists and surprises it delivers is not an easy task.

Inter-connected (?) reading: "A Possible Life" by Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks is a master of his art, no question. His range is famous; why, he recently even wrote a James Bond novel, dutifully in the style of Ian Fleming, Devil May Care. For me, he is in that select group of must-buy novelists, and he has not so far disappointed. I thought his last novel A Week in December was superb, one of the best state-of-the-nation books I have read. So when I saw A Possible Life displayed in Nottingham Waterstones, I grabbed it from the shelf.

Wow reading: "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

The author of this rather good blog was the one who talked me into reading this book. In fact, I suspect it was part of a larger plan to convince me of the merits of the graphic novel, to which, in standard British fashion, I have been rather sniffily resistant. Neil Gaiman (British, actually) usually authors graphic novels, one of which, World's End, I was prevailed upon, by the self-same Tayebot, to read and, truth to tell, very much enjoyed (though never wrote up on this blog, you will note). American Gods is not graphic, at least not in the literal sense, but a 635-page conventional paperback novel - though "conventional" is certainly a misnomer from a content point of view. Anyway, perhaps the missionary idea behind getting me to read this was that I would thereafter ineluctably be drawn to take the graphic plunge for real. You never know, I've already been checking Amazon...