A Professional Dilettante

1913: The World before the Great War, Charles Emmerson
This was a good, fairly light, snapshot of the world just before the outbreak of WW1. Emmerson selects a range of cities around the world, starting and ending in London and crossing Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and some of Asia, with a brief glimpse of Melbourne, Algiers and Durban for Oceania and Africa, and gives a summary of their political and social situations in 1913, often with an overview of the history of each place. For getting a good overall image of the relations between various parts of the world, especially between England and her empire, it's an excellent book, and I learned something especially about the Argentina-UK connection that comes up so often in novels of this period and a bit later, and also I enjoyed the German tourist's guide to London in 1913. Of course there are thousands and thousands more things the author could have included, but it's a fun read.


Hawthorn: a Scottish ghost story, Elaine Thomson
Aka the bog trauma story. This was very readable, though rather languidly paced. Our hero Robert Sutherland is working with a team making the first Ordnance Survey map of Scotland, only he falls in a bog and then onwards his life becomes weird. And very full of swooning, at least three quarters of the book is him swooning, having hallucinations, fevers and other problems, while milling about waiting for the plot to happen. I would have liked more map-making, which is more flavouring than part of the story, and it would have been nice to have more female characters who weren't evil or dead, and I feel like it could have committed harder to the ending of discrediting Sutherland for extra horrific interest. But there really was an excellent amount of manly swooning.


The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers (available here at Project Gutenberg)
One of the oldest of the spy novel genre, written in 1903. I found this tremendously fun to read, unexpectedly hilarious and delightful, not so much for the plot as for the two main characters, Carruthers and Davies, and their fabulous odd-couple adventures sailing around the German coastline trying to figure out what the dastardly Germans are up to. Carruthers, fastidious, cynical, very posh and clever, and Davies, straightforward, enthusiastic, loyal, and brilliant at sailing but rubbish at intrigue - the book is written in the first person from Carruthers' perspective and I adore his narrative voice, he is clearly an absolute nightmare in many ways but with a saving dose of self-awareness and a genuine and growing affection for Davies and his very different virtues. There are tons of references to maps and charts and the interested reader can follow along with every nautical detail of the story, but I was not interested in the nautical details except in the superb competence kink in Davies' navigational skills. Luckily Carruthers also doesn't understand most of the nautical details and so the reader can keep up as much as they need to. I did get a bit lost in the details of the plot, but I didn't mind because I was having fun with the Davies/Carruthers show. I also watched the 1979 Michael York film, which was good fun: it elides a lot of the plot, but leans in nicely to the Davies/Carruthers dynamic, though I am not quite able to cope with film!Davies's giant moustache. But film!Carruthers is perfect; the shopping list sequence is hilarious in the film and even more hilarious in the book. This might be fun to request for Yuletide to see if anyone wants to write me some actual Davies/Carruthers, too.


Midnight in Vienna and Appointment in Paris, Jane Thynne
WW2 spy novel series. These were inexplicably readable and I am trying to work out why. The plots were weak and the characters pretty two-dimensional, most of the characters were either real people or straight from Central Casting (would you like a mildly alcoholic private investigator with a failed romantic life and a problem with authority? of course you would. would you like to guess what kind of WW1 experience he had? you won't need two guesses. would you like to guess whether or not he is ruggedly handsome and inexplicably attractive to women who as we know love a low-life boozer?). The narrative was fluid and easy to ride along with, but a lot of the interest for me was in the fact that the author has lifted great chunks of her story from a variety of the history books I've read over the past few years, especially the complete works of Helen Fry, who probably should have a co-author credit for the second novel. And, as I said, most of the characters are real people: Thynne never bothers to invent a character when she can just use Noel Coward or Dorothy Sayers or Maxwell Knight or some other poor sod. The plot is weak: again, Thynne just uses real events and hitches her plot to them, but there's very little suspense or sense of danger or excitement, the characters have little interest in or awareness of the stakes and mostly spend their time wondering why they're even getting mixed up in this business. 'Um, I had a hunch' is a key plot motivator in both books, used so often the author unconvincingly lampshades it a few times. The heroine's assorted romantic options are a large chunk of the plot: her Viennese former fiance, her fellow student at Oxford turned refugee, her best friend's brother who happens to be Churchill's aide, and of course our inexplicably attractive to women piece of rough, the hero. No doubt she will shack up with the hero after extensively exploring all the other options over the course of multiple books. In fact, the two lead character and their dynamic are also not original, being 2D versions of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, transplanted to 1940 and with connections to the security services. The period setting is pretty well done, superficial but filled in at least a few degrees better than the popular press version of WW2. The second book's plot was particularly weak: for most of the book our heroes were running around on the basis that there was a German spy ring infiltrating Trent Park - which is a great concept - but then at the end it's oh no there is no German spy ring at all, we picked up the German spies the day they arrived for being Very Bad Spies and probably Canaris is sending Very Bad Spies on purpose because he wants Hitler to lose. Which is historically accurate, but when the plot of your spy thriller novel is 'catch the German spies before they reveal our very important secret' then saying 'oh no actually there aren't any spies' at the end is a pretty major cop-out. If you were writing a much darker and more serious novel about how spy work is pointless and people run around frantically and suffer for no reason and no gain at all, then this would have been a perfect ending: Le Carre could have pulled it off, but this was not even remotely that kind of book, this is your basic frothy romantic suspense wartime adventure, and in this kind of book you have to play the plot straight, or if there are twists they have to be the sort of twists that make it more exciting, not less exciting. So: the author's done her homework and the period setting is decent, the romance is nice and the narrative carries you along without requiring any actual thought, but the plot is not very well constructed.


No 2 Whitehall Court, Alan Judd
Another attempt to find some good WW1 spy adventures: this one features a female agent, Emily Grey, a linguist who is seconded to work for the fledgling MI6 under its famous head C, Mansfield Cummings. The author of this book knows his stuff, he's written a biography of C and there's evidence of plenty of research--but that is the problem with this book. Or one of the problems, anyway. Again, half the characters are real people, and I'm increasingly thinking that this is a mistake in this sort of fiction, because our heroine and POV character can't really have relationships with them. She's observing them without having an impact on them, and when your main character can't have any kind of relationship other than historical observer with many of your other key characters, the novel suffers. And that is the problem with this book: it's flat, plodding, the prose is leaden, the characters atomised, and considering that it's sold as a WW1 spy thriller, it's almost totally lacking in any kind of thrills. About the closest we get to suspense is when Emily starts to suspect that someone is following her - and someone is, it's MI5 to keep an eye on her in a completely harmless way and it all ends in farce. In general the farce was the best bit of this book: Emily is given a hapless failed Marine named Nigel to be her general fixer and bodyguard, and Nigel is absolutely shit at his job in almost every way and also is very believably chauvinistic and patronising towards Emily despite his obvious incompetence. This was where the story came to life - the sequence where Emily and Nigel are on a warship heading for Rotterdam and Nigel is a complete nuisance with far too much luggage was all hilarious - but there were never really any consequences from Nigel's incompetence, Emily is only very mildly annoyed by it and in the end Nigel gets to be a hero and save the day revealing an entire hitherto unmentioned bit of supreme competence. Otherwise, the real villain is telegraphed so hard you can see it from space, which meant that by the time the characters finally caught up with the reader, the overwhelming feeling was 'took you long enough' rather than 'oh wow, I didn't see that coming but it makes so much sense' - the latter being what any half-decent writer of a thriller is aiming for. The spy plot and depiction of how spying worked was all rock solid - as I said, the author's done his research, he knows how all this worked in reality, but what he doesn't know is how to take these historical realities and turn them into a tense, interesting, characterful plot. I was deeply surprised to learn that Judd's written many previous spy thrillers many of which have excellent reviews, I would have taken this to be a first attempt at fiction by a history geek. Anyway, the further this book got from repeating bits of history, the better it was as a novel, which is why the horrible Nigel was the best bit. But I'll definitely go take a look at his non-fiction now.