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.
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.
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.
