Sarah Paretsky. Indemnity Only (1982)

 

      Sarah Paretsky. Indemnity Only (1982) Searching for a missing young woman, V. I Warshawski stumbles onto a murder, and eventually links it to a scheme to use a trust account to deposit fraudulent workmen’s compensation claims. A crooked insurance excusive, a crooked banker, a crooked but naive union boss, a too-good-to-be-true young woman of 14, Chicago’s upper crust and its warts, and other such things mark this book as an adventure romance of the knight errant type. Vic is the knight, Chicago is the murky forest, the crooked executive is the dragon, the mob supplies various monsters, the young women are the princess, and of course there’s the treasure, a man’s soul.
     Nicely done, the book supplies a few hours of more or less innocent entertainment. Another of those books that would make a good TV series, but now original material in the same genre has supplanted adaptations. Pity. **½

James Clavell. The Children’s Story (1963)

     James Clavell. The Children’s Story (1963) A little fable demonstrating how easy it would be to change a whole society by taking over the schools. It’s clearly an anti-communist tract, but if it applies at all, it applies to all schools and societies everywhere, and as such does makes one reflect on how we establish and maintain social controls.
     But Clavell’s notion that a simple change in teachers and curriculum would bring about a change in values is so simplistic it’s not even wrong. It oversimplifies teaching and learning to a mind-boggling extent. Clavell has obviously never been a teacher. It also ignores the subtle but nevertheless powerful effects of culture, which always bend ideologies to a culture’s deepest values, not the other way round. Thus, the totalitarianism implicit in Lenin’s reading of Communism made it palatable to the Russians, who were used to tsarist tyranny, and to the Chinese, who were used to a central government exerting power via familial loyalties translated into hierarchy. * (2008)

H. Beam Piper. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (1964)

    H. Beam Piper. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (1964) Calvin Morris, a Pennsylvania state trooper, is slipped sideways in space-time, into a medieval version of vaguely Greek “Aryans” who moved east instead of west and ended up on the eastern side of N. America. He of course takes over, what with his superior knowledge of warfare, honed both in history classes and in combat in Korea, etc and so on and so forth. The local Prince not only takes him in, but promotes him, and eventually subjects himself to him! Kalvan also gets the girl, but apart from some comradely joshing (she’s good with a sword, and very, very smart), and a reference to how nice (!) it is to be married to her, there’s no hint of sex.
     Calvin/Kalvan’s predicament attracts the attention of the Paratime Police, who decide to leave him be, and study what happens when a disturbing factor is inserted into a time stream. Academics disguise themselves to blend in and insert themselves into the same “level”. One of them becomes a commander in Kalvan’s army!
      A typical adolescent nerd’s fantasy, IOW. A hero with close to superpowers, attractive to women, a natural-born leader, etc. Fun, and in a couple of places very funny, too. The book reads very much like a novelette that could eventually be expanded to novel length. It has a number of dangling plot lines, and the characters lack depth, but they feel unfinished rather than merely two dimensional. The Paratime motif is not well worked out. Presumably, some of the Level Five people who operate the Paratime Police will be seduced into staying in this primitive but exhilarating culture. There are hints of this, but the loose ends stay loose. The social and political consequences of Kalvan’s arrival feel like sketches towards a more thorough treatment. The locals accept Calvin too easily; there should be more resistance to his reforms and changes, not because people disagree with them, but because they are new. But pulp fiction moves fast.
       Piper takes a good deal of trouble describing the battle formations and developments, which sound like description of real battles. Has he used actual Civil War battles as his models? I don’t know enough to decide. He also tosses in all kinds of tidbits, such as the local word for mother: madh. He clearly despises anything that smacks of theocracy, or domination of state and society by a religion. He likes strong men, and clearly believes that strong men (and women, I suppose) make history, not the other way round.
        The book belongs to the alternative history genre, which since the 1960s has developed into very sophisticated and much more carefully thought out stories. I’ve started reading a couple of these, and find that compared to this swiftly moving pulp fiction, they are boring, with too much attention to making the alternative history academically plausible, and not enough interest in character and plot. Many of them read like the fictions based on games: the rules constrict and constrain, so that the stories feel more like puzzles and calculations than fictions. But I liked this novelette, it’s unassumingly designed to entertain. The hints of deeper themes and nuggets of fact are a bonus, just the kind of thing that feeds a nerd’s yearning for insight.
     This was Piper’s last book. He suicided shortly after finishing it, and before it was published. Pity. **½ (2008)

Colin Dexter. The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983) & The Wench is Dead (1989)

     Colin Dexter. The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983) Morse must find out whose body was fished out of the canal at Thrupp. At first he thinks it’s a missing Don, but in the end it was the Master of the college. An early Morse, and it displays Dexter’s weakness for the “little did he know” ploy, which becomes more than somewhat irritating. Otherwise, a very workmanlike job. ** (2008)
Update 2013: I reread this book, didn’t change my opinion of it, see the longer review posted 5 October.
     Colin Dexter. The Wench is Dead (1989) Morse, confined to hospital because his bad habits have produced an ulcer, reads a little book, written by a fellow patient who died the first night of Morse’s stay. It tells of a murder perpetrated in 1859, and Morse doesn’t like the feel of the case. He sends Lewis and the daughter of another patient (she works at the Bodleian) to find more information, and works out that the murdered woman was someone else entirely. Satisfactory case, well told, with perhaps too much made of Morse’s inexplicable attraction for the opposite sex. **½ (2008)
Having reread these two books by Colin Dexter, I realise why I haven’t read many more of them. The TV series is much better done. Dexter’s real forte was character, and Morse’s character in particular, which the video producers enlarged, and which John Thaw interpreted so well. Another case of fair-to-middling books providing material for first class movies. However, I shall read the other volumes I’ve collected, I just shan’t keep them.

Three by Shaw: Major Barbara, How He Lied to her Husband, and John Bull’s Other Island

      George Bernard Shaw. Major Barbara (1906) Shaw’s Preface is as outrageously wrongheaded as usual: he loved the sound of his own ideas. His comments on the way the world works are acutely and cynically accurate, but his inferences about how we should deal with it simply miss the mark. He is very good at presenting us with real and lifelike characters, but when he thinks about real people he goes awry. It’s as if his intellect and his imagination don’t know of each other’s existence.
     The play works well, what with Barbara eventually recognising the value of her father’s munitions-derived money. It would be a pleasure to see on stage. I’ve seen it as a movie, not memorable enough for me to recall much besides the “modern” architecture of Undershaft’s factory. The plotting is perhaps a trifle too pat, but that’s GBS for you: he will make his plays demonstrate his ideas, and that’s when the machinery creaks. When he just goes with his imagination, as in the Salvation Army scenes, the results are brilliant, witty, emotionally true, and beautifully paced. You can find more about the play here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Barbara *** (2008)

      George Bernard Shaw. How He Lied to her Husband (1907) A youthful poet has a (chaste) affair with a well-married and rather silly older woman. He wants her to leave her husband and run away with him. When the husband shows up, he tries to pass off the incriminating letters and poems as being written to someone else, which annoys the husband, who takes the lie as an insult to himself as well as his wife. He wants her to be attractive to other men, to be the subject of passionate love poems, which bolster his pride in having snagged her for himself. So the young lover tells him what he wants to hear, hence playlet’s title. Shaw shows once again that he understands the conventions of romance and courtly love, and the realities of respectable suburban life. I think this play is more successful than many of his more serious efforts. *** (2008)

      George Bernard Shaw. John Bull’s Other Island (1907) I started to read the preface and gave up. GBS was not the best analyst of politics. His notions of how the Irish Question came about, and how it should be resolved, were shown to be wrong-headed by subsequent events. About the only thing he got right was that it would be a protracted and bloody affair if it wasn’t settled quickly.
     The one thing GBS never seems to have fully understood was the lure of power for its own sake. (This leads him to make Undershaft a seeker after profit, which is the only serious flaw in Major Barbara. Profit, i.e. money, is a means and instrument of power, not and end in itself.) Like many idealistic ideologues, he believed that sweet reason would prevail, if it was made clear enough what the benefits would be. He would not recognise the irony of the Canadian toast, “Peace, order, and good government.”
     That sheer bloody-mindedness and paranoid delusions are more potent motives than the desire for peace, prosperity, and lawful order was something he could never see. That’s one reason he (like many other Socialists of the time) kept excusing the excesses of Soviet Russia, for example. He was of course right that the Protestants would have nothing to fear in a Catholic united Ireland, but he couldn’t see, because he couldn’t understand, that religious paranoia would prevent a settlement. He also couldn’t see that the IRA was dominated by psychopaths, who carried on their bloody vendettas not because they expected politically acceptable results but because they liked the murder and mayhem (as well as the loot).
     So I didn’t read the play. I don’t think I missed anything. ** (2008)

Tom Monto. Strathcona: The End-of-Steel (1989)

     Tom Monto. Strathcona: The End-of-Steel (1989) A home-produced, Gestetnered booklet by a publisher who doesn’t use ISBNs, which covers the history of Strathcona from its beginnings as a loosely organised settlement in 1870 (when Hudson’s Bay employees settled there) until amalgamation with Edmonton in 1912. Almost entirely a compilation of direct quotes and paraphrases, with a dozen or so photos, it’s not exactly exciting reading, but it does provide a reasonably detailed timeline. The acknowledgements and sources are worthwhile for anyone who wants to find out more. * (2008)
 

Two entertainments: The Moving Toyshop & Mulliner Nights (book reviews)

     Edmund Crispin The Moving Toyshop (1946) Crispin had a reputation as the “one of the last great exponents of the classic crime mystery.” (Wikipedia). One can see why: The focus is almost entirely on the plot, with the characters little more than collections of tics, with an occasional literary reference or Oxford inside joke to provide a bit of intellectual icing on the puzzle biscuit.
     I enjoyed this book, but wasn’t engaged by it.  An inheritance amounting to over $20 million in today’s money prompts the murder of the primary legatee so that the secondary ones can inherit the whole pile. In order to mislead the police, the plotters have disguised the crime scene as a toyshop. Cadogan, the Watson character blunders into it, enlists the help of Gervase, the Holmes, and the subsequent investigation blunders here, there, and everywhere, eventually fetching up on the shores of a far too complex solution. A mildly entertaining confection, which kept me reading over several days. **

     P. G. Wodehouse Mulliner Nights (1933) A collection of short stories framed as tales told in the Angler’s Rest public bar by Mr Mulliner, who enjoys a wide range of relatives, all of whom., it appears, are prone to the kind of minor embarrassments and spots of bother that tend to interfere with the smooth progress of love, life, and career. Not as wildly surreal in style as the Wooster stories, but covering the same ground, and just as entertaining. **½