Paris Settings: Works of contemporary and historical fiction by two Master Novelists.

Two novels, each of which features some action set in Paris, each written by one of my top 10 authors.

Love is Blind by William Boyd

Set at the end of the 19th century it tells the story of Brodie Moncur, his life as a young musician turned piano tuner, and the woman he falls in love with, Lika Blum, his battle with tuberculosis and his flight from Lika's vengeful suitor. 

What Amazon says:

When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. Moving from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again, Brodie's love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.

Love is Blind is a tale of passion and revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man's life and an exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Guardian Review: 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/love-is-blind-by-william-boyd-review

Boyd is one of my favourite authors, this is not his best but it is a heart-warming love story.

Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks

Francophile Sebastian Faulks made his name with bestselling France-set period pieces. Birdsong transported readers back to the trenches of the First World War, while Charlotte Gray told the story of a British agent working with the Resistance in Vichy France during the Second World War. As such, it’s fitting that his new novel, although ostensibly set in the present, is thoroughly steeped in history. The author’s affection for Paris drives the stories of a French-Algerian teenage immigrant and an American academic in the city.

The Literary Review has said that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; the Sunday Telegraph called him "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book". Faulks' 2005 novel, Human Traces, was described by Trevor Nunn as "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century."

Paris Echo is a novel about and composed of tangled threads. Faulks has two central protagonists: 19-year-old Tariq, a runaway from Morocco; and the 31-year-old American postdoc researcher, Hannah, whose box room Tariq ends up lodging in. Hannah is in Paris to examine the testimonies of women who lived through the German occupation. She listens to the extraordinary witness of the women in her desire to understand their lives. Through them she finds a city bursting with clues and
connections. Tariq, meanwhile, has some vague idea of finding out more about his mother’s history. She died when he was 10, but was brought up in Paris, born to a French father and an Algerian mother. Though all the more pressing is losing his virginity. For him in his innocence, each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise.

As the narrative flits back and forth between them, so too the stories Hannah spends her days listening to – which Tariq sometimes helps her to translate – become part of the book’s narrative, while also slowly infiltrating the characters’ experiences of the contemporary city.

Traversing the city on the Metro, Tariq finds himself in a strange shadow land of such “daylight ghosts” – at certain stations he sees passengers littering the ground, their used tickets folded into the “V” for victory that so angered the Germans during the war.

It is in the passages that relate to wartime that Faulks finds himself, yet again, in that territory about which he writes so graphically and movingly. For example, passages towards the end of Where My Heart Used to Beat, another of his historical novels, are heart-rending.

The Guardian Review:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/03/paris-echo-sebastian-faulks-review

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay

What Amazon says:

Bletchley Park was where one of the war’s most famous – and crucial – achievements was made: the cracking of Germany’s “Enigma” code in which its most important military communications were couched. This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain’s most brilliant mathematical brains, like Alan Turing, and the scene of immense advances in technology – indeed, the birth of modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in North Africa.

But, though plenty has been written about the boffins, and the codebreaking, fictional and non-fiction – from Robert Harris and Ian McEwan to Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing – what of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked there during the war? What was life like for them – an odd, secret territory between the civilian and the military?

Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties – of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson, the novelist, once threw himself in) – of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at codebreaking, of the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels – and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other’s work.

So.… what did I think:

Without any facts at my fingertips, but only hearsay from occasional broadcasts about Bletchley Park and the Enigma code I have always had a rather glamorous notion of the place, a hothouse of a select group of brilliant people who put their minds to the cracking of the code and who had  eureka moment.  So the story of a rambling house populated by thousands of men and women, recruited in sometimes  most chancey and haphazard ways in order to set about the long slog of the interception and decoding bit by bit of the German code, was a revelation. McKay manages to convey from the outset that there was an atmosphere of informality and disorganisation at the house that was overcome by the British talent getting on with things.

I loved the way Sinclair McKay tells a story of human beings, sometimes so aristocratic, and others so ordinary who were united in loyalty to their mission.  A loyalty so solid that it persisted into this century.  The staff at Bletchley Park were secretive even between themselves.  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of their story is that they kept it secret for so long: most veterans did not even tell their families what they had been up to, and only confessed when the cat was officially let out of the bag 30 years later.

So Bletchley was staffed by a motley collection of people, cryptographers, mathematicians, Egyptologists, linguists, astrologers. Sometimes it was down to who you knew in upper circles, who for example a relative played golf with.  The inmates had been recruited from all walks of life. Debutantes and working-class girls mixed with mathematicians, servicemen and university lecturers in an environment where the normal class divisions and deference for rank no longer seemed to apply. They entertained themselves by putting on their own shows and music recitals, playing tennis and swimming in the manor house lake. They smuggled barrels of cider into their rooms, worried about how to make their rations last, and fell in love among the clattering machinery.

I loved the anecdotal bits, like the fact that code-breaking machines that were cobbled together with everyday objects such as sticking plasters and pieces of string – one of these machines was actually called the “Heath Robinson”. And yet of enduring significance apart from the immediate benefit of shortening war I learnt that the forerunner of the computer was created here. 

The setting up of Bletchley Park was rather amateur at the outset, described endearingly by the author.  Those it brought together were united in a common and vital task.  I think it must have been very exciting to be involved in such a crucial and unique part of the war effort.  Cushioned from many of the vicissitudes of living in wartime Britain, working in that rarified atmosphere seems very glamorous to me, being a committed crossworder and puzzler.  I have a Codeword app on my iPad which I love.  It was real cloak and dagger stuff that resulted in the establishment of a very professional organisation derived from the best of human endeavour, ingenuity and commitment. 

Having read this book I now feel I must visit the place to see it for myself.  Does anyone want to join me?

Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is a multi-award-winning American novelist and short story writer.  She won the Pulitzer in 2011 for A Visit from the Goon Squad.  Manhattan Beach is her fifth novel.  

Amazon says: 
Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.

'We're going to see the sea,' Anna whispered.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have been murdered.

Mesmerizing, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan's first historical novel is a masterpiece, a deft, startling, intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men, America and the world. Manhattan Beach is a magnificent novel by one of the greatest writers of our time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/29/manhattan-beach-jennifer-egan-review

What I thought:
Much of the action is set in the New York dockyard during World War II.  The narrative is a female voice.  Well constructed, the novel moves between the characters and timescales.  Some of the most vivid writing centres around Anna's attempts and ultimate success at becoming a sub aqua diver.  I did feel, as did a fellow reader when we discussed it, that the ending was rushed.  As the Guardian reviewer notes, the author decided to withhold crucial scenes until late in the book and I found this unsatisfactory.   It seemed to be late in the day to have those revelations.  It was this that gave the impression of an abrupt ending. 

  

The Boys from Brazil

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin

Amazon says:  In this classic thriller, Ira Levin imagines Dr Josef Mengele's nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich. Alive and hiding in South America, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a sinister project - the creation of the Fourth Reich. Ageing Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman is informed of the plot but before he hears the evidence, his source is killed . . . Spanning continents and inspired by true events, what follows is one of Levin's most masterful tales, both timeless and chillingly plausible. Praise for Ira Levin: 'Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel' Stephen King 

A brief plot summary:

As well as being a successful playwright, screenwriter and composer, Ira Levin has written several bestselling and well-known novels including these classic thrillers: Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, as well as The Boys from Brazil. All these books have been made into equally successful films.  

Published in 1976, The Boys from Brazil opens with the outline of a compelling plot: six men are instructed by a white-suited, evil kingpin to kill 94 men across the world on certain dates, all of whom are civil servants around the age of 65. It seems a strange target demographic, but then we discover that the operation's guiding hand belongs to Dr Josef Mengele, the German SS officer and physician who earned the epithet "Angel of Death" from his gruesome medical experiments in Auschwitz.

Yakov Liebermann, an elderly Jewish Nazi-hunter (Mengele's nemesis who is a conflation of Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Serge Klarsfield, who attempted to capture Mengele in South America) uncovers the plot at an embryonic stage. He proves to be an unthreatening – but very tenacious – protagonist, whose patience and brainpower finally unravels the horrific and insane reason for the murders.

In some ways the book is now fairly dated - it was first published in 1976 - and at the time of publication the inclusion of real or near-real characters must have added a chilling dimension. What scares today is Levin's premise based on biological engineering: in the 1970s, although scientifically possible, Mengele's plan belonged firmly in the realm of fiction; now it's not nearly so far-fetched.

Ira Levin's narrative is a compelling page-turner and makes chilling and disquieting reading in the light of genetic advances and also in the context of political upheavals and machinations in the current day.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_%28novel%29

Alone in Berlin

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. The Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel.
Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear.

Every Man Dies Alone or Alone in Berlin (German: Jeder stirbt für sich allein) is a 1947 novel by German author Hans Fallada. It is based on the true story of a working class husband and wife who, acting alone, became part of the German Resistance. They were eventually discovered, denounced, arrested, tried and executed. Fallada's book was one of the first anti-Nazi novels to be published by a German after World War II.

Synopsis:  At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...

The novel has been made into a film starring Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson and reviewed in The Guardian as follows:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/15/alone-in-berlin-review-film-festival-nazi-germany-emma-thompson

Wartime Scenarios - Real and Imagined

Introduction

The Second World War is such a pivotal event in human history that affected generations have inevitably speculated about what might have happened had the momentum swung slightly another way. Variations on Hitler's defeat by the allies have become a recurrent strain in the genre of counter-factual or alternative-history fiction.

The premise of a German and Japanese triumph has inspired writers from Philip K Dick to Robert Harris, whose Fatherland (1992) consciously offers a German-American parallel to the Nazi-invaded Britain of Len Deighton's SS-GB (1978); in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), President Roosevelt loses the 1940 US election to the isolationist, pro-fascist Charles Lindbergh. Now comes CJ Sansom's provocative thriller Dominion, depicting a Britain that surrendered to Germany on 9 May 1940 – the day before Churchill, in the real world, became PM – and now serves as a satellite state of a triumphant Third Reich.

Dominion by C N Sansom
1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany after Dunkirk. As the long German war against Russia rages on in the east, the British people find themselves under dark authoritarian rule: the press, radio and television are controlled; the streets patrolled by violent auxiliary police and British Jews face ever greater constraints. There are terrible rumours too about what is happening in the basement of the German Embassy at Senate House. Defiance, though, is growing. In Britain, Winston Churchill's Resistance organization is increasingly a thorn in the government's side. And in a Birmingham mental hospital an incarcerated scientist, Frank Muncaster, may hold a secret that could change the balance of the world struggle for ever.

Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, secretly acting as a spy for the Resistance, is given the mission to rescue his old friend Frank and get him out of the country. Before long he, together with a disparate group of Resistance activists, will find themselves fugitives in the midst of London's Great Smog; as David's wife Sarah finds herself drawn into a world more terrifying than she ever could have imagined. And hard on their heels is Gestapo Sturmbannfuhrer Gunther Hoth, brilliant, implacable hunter of men . . .

At once a vivid, haunting reimagining of 1950s Britain, a gripping, humane spy thriller and a poignant love story, with Dominion C. J. Sansom once again asserts himself as the master of the historical novel.

Independent Review

24

C J Sansom is fascinated by the abuse of power, so it's not surprising that, hot on the heels of his splendid Shardlake series, comes a novel set in a post-war Britain dominated by Nazi ideology. Following the defeat at Dunkirk, the fascists have been in government for more than a decade, Churchill leads the Resistance, Jews are being deported and David Fitzgerald is a civil servant who has agreed to spy for – or against – his country.

There have been a number of other novels imagining this kind of alternate history – Robert Harris's Fatherland, Owen Sheers' Resistance, Len Deighton's SS-GB and, for children, Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon. All are outstanding in different ways but Sansom's Dominion is the most thoroughly imagined in all its ramifications.

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Like Harris, Sansom has woven a thriller with the tale of a man's growth into moral courage, but he has done it with the compassion and richness that many literary writers should emulate. Every detail of this nightmare Britain rings true, from the way that morris dancing is televised as a cultural expression of nationalism to the absence of the name "Lyons" in Corner Houses. Cowardice and collaboration are everywhere. "We used to think the British people would never become Fascists … but … anybody can, given the right set of circumstances," David's wife, Sarah, says. The French will love this.

When Frank Muncaster, one of David's university friends, is sent to a lunatic asylum after learning a top scientific secret, all three are in mortal danger. David has kept his half-Jewish identity secret, and the Gestapo has put Gunther, a brilliant hunter of Jews, on his trail. Even though Hitler is declining with Parkinson's disease, the British government, led by Lord Beaverbrook, Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, will not stand up for British people.

As in Sansom's Winter in Madrid, the clash between compassion and political conviction is dramatised. David's looks and talent make him as freakish in his way as frail, disabled Frank, and the friendship between someone who can survive institutions and someone who cannot is one of the most affecting aspects of the novel. Sarah is a less satisfactory character: despite her well-drawn grief and jealousy, you never feel that she experiences the humiliating anxiety of intelligent women who are wholly dependent on their husbands.

Naturally, the weather is awful, and obliges with a choking, oily fog as our heroes battle against hideous odds to get to safety. But both as a historical novel and a thriller, Dominion is absorbing, mordant and written with a passionate persuasiveness. Furthermore, it is confident enough of itself to be published without a swastika on the cover. Bravo

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Despite their differences, sisters Viann and Isabelle have always been close. Younger, bolder Isabelle lives in Paris while Viann is content with life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter. But when the Second World War strikes, Antoine is sent off to fight and Viann finds herself isolated so Isabelle is sent by their father to help her.

As the war progresses, the sisters' relationship and strength is tested. With life changing in unbelievably horrific ways, Viann and Isabelle will find themselves facing frightening situations and responding in ways they never thought possible as bravery and resistance take different forms in each of their actions.

Be prepared to weep when you read this book. What these women went through, what they suffered, what they saw. The brutality of it all and the unfairness of their situation – grabs you by the throat and never lets you go.

What the novel excels at is the stark portrayal of the decisions these women faced on a daily basis. Imagine having a Nazi soldier take over your home? Your children starving because of the rations, the inability to do and go where you want? The fear and the not knowing.. The Nazis do everything to break the spirit of the French people and the death camps are in full operation.

The relationship between the two sisters changes throughout the novel and the story of each one – how they came to be where they are and how they deal with their ‘ lot’ in life was fascinating and so well written. Decisions in wartime are unlike any other and these two very different personalities really gave a full and heartbreaking picture.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies.

We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches for the mother he lost - and whom Olive comforts by her mere presence, while her own son feels overwhelmed by her complex sensitivities.

A penetrating, vibrant exploration of the human soul, the story of Olive Kitteridge will make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain, and shed a tear or two.

The novel is structured to form a series of short stories: case histories through which is woven the character of Olive Kitteridge who may play a significant part, or almost none at all.  All the members of my Dorset group rated this highly.





A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr : Bernie Gunther Mystery 5

Philip Kerr writes an excellent thriller.  He also writes for children.  You can find out more about him following this link: http://philipkerr.org/about/   or

https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/philip-kerr/198811/?mkwid=sSZLll4oZ|dc&pcrid={creative}&pkw=books&pmt=b&plc={placement}&utm_term=books&utm_campaign=Search+%7C+Dynamic+Search+Ad+Test&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=bing

In A Quiet Flame, posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie's final case as a homicide detective with the Berlin police. A case he had failed to solve.

Circumstances lead the chief of police in Buenos Aires to suppose that the murderer may be one of several thousand ex Nazis who have fetched up in Argentina since 1945. And, therefore, who better than Bernie Gunther to help him track that murderer down?

Redolent with atmosphere, this novel ends up asking some highly provocative questions about the true extent of Argentina's Nazi collaboration and anti-semitism under the Peróns.   It is this engagement with political and historical issues that authenticates Kerr's novels and sets Kerr's thriller in a higher rank than the traditional crime/detective/thriller genre which makes for extremely popular reading.               

Secretum discubitus

The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey

Catherine Bailey read history at Oxford University and is a successful, award-winning television producer and director, making a range of critically acclaimed documentary films inspired by her interest in twentieth century history. She lives in West London.  She has written a compelling account of a dysfunctional family in the upper echelons of nobility.  The account reads like mystery and her research for the book, which flows like a novel, must have required superior detective skills.

...........At 6 am on 21st April 1940 John the 9th Duke of Rutland, and one of Britain's wealthiest men, ended his days, virtually alone, lying on a makeshift bed in a dank cramped suite of rooms in the servants' quarters of his own home, Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire.  For weeks, as his health deteriorated, his family, his servants - even the King's doctor - pleaded with him to come out, but he refused.

After his death, his son and heir, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, ordered that the rooms be locked up and they remained untouched for sixty years.  But what lay behind this extraordinary set of circumstances?

For the first time, in The Secret Rooms, Catherine Bailey unravels a complex and compelling tale of love, honour and betrayal, played out in the grand salons of Britain's stately homes at the turn of the twentieth century, and on the battlefields of the Western Front. At its core is a secret so dark that it consumed the life of the man who fought to his death to keep it hidden. This extraordinary mystery from the author of Black Diamonds, is perfect for lovers of Downton Abbey, Brideshead Revisited and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

.............. as I read the final pages I could only marvel at what I had read and what it tells the reader about the lengths to which members of a family will go to protect 'the firm', to connive, to deceive, to bring the privileges which birth has conferred on an individual to bear for personal advancement and preference.  Violet, the female protagonist in the story, is a scheming woman of the worst kind.  What she represents is the lengths to which mothers will go to protect their own. 

The Paris Architect

The Paris Architect is a 2013 novel by Charles Belfoure and the author's debut in fiction writing. It follows the story of a French architect Lucien Bernard who is paid to create temporary hiding places for Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Specialising in historic preservation, before writing The Paris Architect, Charles Belfoure had written several non-fiction books on architecture, including works on the history of American banks and rowhouse architecture in Baltimore. He decided to pop into fiction spontaneously, thinking it might be an exciting experience and a way of having a break from everyday work. A direct inspiration came to Belfoure after discovering the fact that during the reign of Elizabeth I in England special spaces were designed in houses as temporary hiding places for repressed Catholic priests.

Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews.

So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews being hunted by the Nazis, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life for a cause he doesn’t really believe in. He desperately needs the money to make a living though he knows that if caught, he will be killed.

Ultimately he can’t resist the challenge and begins designing expertly concealed hiding spaces --- behind a painting, within a column or inside a drainpipe --- detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.  But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what's at stake. 

The Paris Architect asks us to consider what we owe each other, and just how far we'll go to make things right. 

Ordo Equitum Solis

In four early books J G Ballard succeeded in making a kind of steely poetry out of the nastiest incidentals of late twentieth century life. So reads the Guardian review for 'Empire of the Sun'.   This novel however merits consideration as a work which distinct from that early, essentially science fiction, genre.

"Based on events which Ballard himself witnessed and suffered while interned as a boy in Shanghai during the Second World War, this is an extraordinary addition to our modern literature of war.

  Indeed, it could be said that if there is still room for a masterpiece about the Second World War, then this is it - and like other masterpieces it gains its initial effect in standing at a slightly oblique and unexpected angle to its subject matter.   By concentrating on the expatriate colony of Shanghai, and by showing us the events following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, Ballard achieves the creation of an amazing microcosm. Above all, the book is a triumph of truthfulness of tone. The boy, Jim, separated from his parents, camping out first in his own empty house and then in the deserted house of his parents' friends, eventually interned for four years in the camp at Lunghua, becomes an admirable clear-eyed guide to a most peculiar inferno.  This, Ballard convinces us, is how it was. No heroes, no heroics, just war as the normal condition, and the only battle that to survive."

The tone of the narrative of Empire of the Sun sounds authoritative and, lacking the need for imagination in the events which take place between the pages of the book, it is completely convincing. I 'read' this novel as an Audible experience.  The narrator, Steven Pacey, made an excellent job of characterisation, finding voices and accents for the cast and in particular for Jim, the young and naive ingenu who is caught up in the adult folly of war. 

Another novel by Ballard, High Rise, was another Audible read.  A new high-rise block seems to give its well-established tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: swimming pools, its own school, a supermarket and high-speed lifts.  But at the same time, the building seems to be designed to isolate the occupants from the outside world, allowing for the possibility to create their own closed environment.  Life in the
high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty annoyances among neighbours escalate into an orgy of violence. Soon skirmishes are being fought throughout the building, as floors try to claim lifts and hold them for their own. Groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools. And party-goers attack "enemy floors" to raid and vandalize them.  It does not take long for the occupants of the entire building to abandon all social restraints, and give in to their most primal urges. The tenants completely shut out the outside world, content with their life in the high-rise; people abandon their jobs and families and stay indoors permanently, losing all sense of time. Even as hunger starts to set in, many still seem to be enjoying themselves, as the building allows them a chance to break free from the social restrictions of modern society and embrace their own dark urges and desires. As the commodities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities.

In time the tenants abandon all social and moral etiquette. As their environment gives way to a hunter/gatherer culture, they gather together in small clans, claim food sources from where they can (which includes eating the many dogs in the building, and eventually even the other tenants). Every stranger is met with extreme violence.

Ballard here offers a vision of how modern life in an urban landscape and the advances of technology could warp the human psyche in hitherto unexplored ways.  It is an allegory based on the tower block phenomenon, an architectural money-saving expedient in maximising potential accommodation over a given area.  But with this new approach to providing living space came various social problems which discredited this innovation.  Ballard's satire illustrates these issues in an extreme way.

As a postscript to the above reviews there are two further things to say about Empire of the Sun.  Firstly, in order to comply with a requirement of the Read Harder Book Challenge 2016 that I have embarked on, I sat down to watch the film of the book.   Steven Spielberg directed the 1987 American production with Christian Bale playing the role of Ballard as a boy and John Malkovich playing Basie.  Ballard chose Bale (who was 12 at the time he was cast) because he felt he bore some resemblance to himself as a boy. The casting was based on the recommendation of the wife of Steven Spielberg; more than 4,000 child actors were auditioned.

By and large I felt the film was fairly faithful to the book although visually it was heavily sanitised in comparison to the narrative of the novel.  To complete my understanding of the novel I also read Ballard's Miracles of Life which is a short autobiography describing his childhood and early teenage years in Shanghai in the 1930s and the early 1940s, when the city is ravaged by war.  Ballard is plucked from a happy and comfortable childhood to experience the horrors and deprivation of internment camp with his parents. 

After being liberated by the Americans in 1945, James travels to England with his mother and sister, but he finds the atmosphere of post-war Britain difficult to penetrate.  After his schooling he embarks on medical studies but throws this over to enlist in the RAF.  This also turns out to be a wrong move and subsequently Ballard marries, becomes a father only to be widowed unexpectedly.  Faced with bringing up his three children single-handed he embarks on his literary career and makes forays into the art world of the 60s and 70s.  The book ends with Ballard's return to Shanghai in 1991, and with a very short and moving epilogue, dated September 2007, wherein he announces that he is sick with a terminal illness

A Sweet Caress, A Beating Heart: Lives lived to the Full – two engrossing offerings from Audible.

Sweet Caress; the Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

This title has been in my Audible Library for some months.  Somehow I had not got round to downloading it from the Cloud onto my Device, favouring more immediate urges for easy listening, by which I mean thrillers and stories that have a classic structure of a beginning, middle and end.  In point of fact once I settled to Sweet Caress I found that it had a coherent, compelling and chronological structure and was easy to get into. 

This is a story of a life lived to the full.  Through this life, that of Amory Clay, a brave, feisty, characterful woman who becomes a professional photographer, William Boyd tracks some of the defining moments of the 20^th century as told through her camera lens.

  Her professional life, during which she looks for life, love and artistic expression, spans the decadent demi-monde of late 1920s Berlin, New York in the 1930s, the violence of the Blackshirt Riots in London in the same decade and where she receives an injury that will dog her life, and to the Rhineland in the Second World War.  She also, despite her advancing years for a frontline photographer, sees ‘service’ in Vietnam. 

Amory’s father is a flaky paternal figure.  She is born in the decade before the First World War and her disappointed father gives her an ambiguous name and announces the birth of a son.  She has patchy memories of his intervals of leave and there is a bizarre and vivid incident when he drives to pick her up from boarding school, ostensibly to go off on a jaunt, and tries to drive himself and Amory in their car off a bridge to commit suicide.  It is her gay photographer Uncle Greville, who is a more stable and nurturing influence, who gives her a camera, this gift representing the defining moment of her life.

Endings are tricky.  If you have been held by a book all the way through you expect a ‘good’ ending.  It may be happy or sad but if you are me you don’t like ambiguity, you don’t like to feel you have been sold short either.  Boyd’s ending to Sweet Caress is a good one, with a twist of surprise at the very close.    

Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks                                                                               

The Literary Review has written that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; he has been named "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book".  He is best known for his three novels set in early 20^th century France: The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.  These were published in the late 80s and early 90s.  Fast forward to 2015 and in Where My Used to Beat Faulks returns to that wartime era, but has shifted his arena for the action. 

The novel contains more than one of Faulks’ main recurring themes, the World Wars of the 20^th century and he sheds a long and woeful light over the 20^th century as glimpsed through the life of Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has experienced the best and worst of times in that century.

  On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor is forced to confront the events that made up his life.  The agent of this process, Hendricks’ host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man who is living on borrowed time, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.


To try and make sense of events and people who have shaped his life Hendricks must explore events and his experiences during the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that is never resolved, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally – unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front.  Here Faulks has written an intensely vivid, insightful and heartbreaking passage of unbearable tragedy which epitomises the attitude of the higher echelons of military power in the arena of the First World War towards its ‘foot soldiers’, the millions of souls who were drummed up as little more than cannon fodder, whilst the generals parked themselves in their makeshift canvas headquarters at the rear of the battlefield and dreamt up new manoeuvres for their plans of campaign.

It is a complex novel, representing, in common with Boyd’s Sweet Caress, a commentary on the 20^th century.  Such a complex novel deserves a more detailed and insightful review and for this I attach the following link:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/01/23/struggles-heart/q8snoR1kLJN7i1gzzxaLTJ/story.html