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.