Book Review of The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jonasson

A supernatural crime thriller with an Icelandic happy ending.

* * * *

Una, a schoolteacher, becomes an economic refugee from the mid eighties house-price boom in Reykjavik and escapes to a small and very remote fishing village where she will have just two pupils to teach. She does not become instantly at home there and experiences both a haunting and increasing hostility and paranoia from the flesh and blood inhabitants. Meanwhile, in a parallel plot a man begins a new career as a contract killer and a young woman is falsely arrested for his first murder. The two plotlines inexorably converge towards a conclusion that English readers might find surprising.

Despite the supernatural aspects, this is in many ways a realistic novel. For example, an ambitious young man who finds himself a bit-player in a large and powerful criminal organisation probably has two options: get out at the first opportunity and try something else, or knuckle down and build a reputation for doing the dirty work with calm efficiency. In the real world, it’s the killers who rise to the top of criminal organisations and it is only sensible to treat any criminal king-pin as if he were a ruthless killer because however skillfully he has hidden the evidence, it’s most improbable that he got where he is by non-violent means.

The Girl Who Died is published in the UK by Michael Joseph on the 29^th of April, 2021

Original novel in Icelandic by Ragnar Jonasson, translated into English by Victoria Crib.

Book Review of Total Fallout by Alex Shaw

This is a very competent sequel to the author’s novel “Total Blackout”. However, this time around the “superweapon” is much more credible and has interesting implications. Indeed, the main reason why I am giving this five stars instead of four is because I think the author is presenting a possibility to which we should give some serious attention. In effect, it is a weapon which allows one nation, or organisation, to get two or more of its enemies (or victims) to use their own weapons to destroy each other, largely at their own expense.

Even as the action level of the plot is about not knowing what the truth is or who you can trust -and this makes it an effective thriller- the question the novel is asking is whether in the very near future we will be able to trust any news, idea or information to be true. The answer seems to be: perhaps, but only by looking at everything we know and examining many obscure or neglected sources, rather than relying on and taking at face value what we are told by convenient, “trusted” or “authenticated” sources, any of which might be subtly corrupted or seamlessly falsified.

This isn’t a highly intellectual book, but it is asking questions which the high intellectuals, so far, ain’t competent to answer!

 

Total Fallout by Alex Shaw is published by HQ Digital on the 19^th of February 2021

Book Review of “Light Perpetual” by Francis Spufford

Either despite or because of the fact that Light Perpetual ignores a lot of given wisdom in the literary world and breaks many of the rules which the intelligentsia set for each other, let alone us plebs, it is one of the best books I have reviewed in the past few years and I am quite selective about what I request from Net Galley for review.

None of the five principal characters is presented as a hate figure (or as someone to be mocked) at any point, even though they all get involved in bad scenes and two of them would, in any intelligentsia-compliant novel, be text-book examples of very stupid people doing bad things: one becomes an unrepentant property developer, the other falls in love with and marries a man she knows to be a violent wide-boy who then becomes a skinhead and a leading figure in the neo-fascist “British Movement.” Such evil isn’t hidden, denied or excused but neither is it judged on political reflexes or nostrums. And, believe me, the author doesn’t shrink from making his evil shocking.

Other characters take a decade or more to recover from setbacks (which is how it actually is in the real world: I know this) and even then they fail to make everything perfect for themselves and their loved ones.

This book also contains the only sermon I have read in the past decade or two by a fictional black evangelical preacher, which is not a parody or a self-vindicating declaration of anti-Christian bias dressed up as reportage. It is a plain good sermon and whilst I would not expect to hear it from a Roman Catholic or Anglican priest of any trendiness level whatsoever, it is genuinely theologically sound. The author is disposed to show black evangelical preachers as they are, and not as it is fashionable to perceive them. And I grew up as a white boy with a beloved Jamaican “Auntie” taking me along to meet quite a few of the breed.

Lastly, this novel breaks the rules by being about salvation by Grace rather than by conformity with either social-political theory or laws. 

 

Light Perpetual is published by Faber and Faber on the 4^th of February 2021

Book review of We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

This is an interesting account of the fight against what the author calls the “Counterfactual Community”, which includes but is not limited to the Russian FSB and assorted multi-national internet extremists. I came to this book having known pretty much what the author, as the blogger “Brown Moses” had been up to regarding Syria a few years ago, and that “Bellingcat”, the offspring of his blog, had tracked down those responsible for the Salisbury Poisonings when the police and MI5 had not (or at least, not so far as we know). Precisely because Bellingcat uses open source information, it is able to publish its successes when traditional national intelligence agencies have to keep quiet or lose their secret sources

The author describes not only the basic open source investigative methods he invented for the Brown Moses blog, but also how these have evolved, through the Bellingcat years, to meet threats, needs and opportunities alike. It is interesting to see how he keeps ahead of the counter-factual community as their own methods change, not necessarily in the directions of either enlightenment or sophistication, but towards a sort of amplified assumed ignorance which they impiously hope will prove contagious. The author sees this as a tendency to deliberately confuse issues rather than explain them and to pretend that there is no such thing as truth. He also sees this is a trait which some people have, rather than a policy that someone invented. In my own view, if anyone in modern times invented the “post-truth world” it was Vladislav Surkov, who is notable amongst those involved in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power by virtue of the fact that he is still alive and he is, if anything, more influential than he once was (everyone else has been sidelined or has had a heart attack). Imagine, if you will, a version of Alistair Campbell who gets his way by throwing thinking fits rather than shouting blood-curdling threats down the phone at editors and ministers alike. The author makes no mention of Surkov and clearly has never investigated him, but should he choose to do so, he might be able to cast even more light into dark corners than he has done already. But the post-truth world is not just a modern invention: “what is truth?” was a popular way to justify falsehood and injustice in the Roman world and we have Pontius Pilate as an example of where treating truth as an illusion will get you.

The author is not a fan of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The Wikileaks methodology is described as leaking such a huge mass of data at once that it is impossible to verify it all. (Even assuming it is all true, the weapon of the righteous is the sword of truth, not truth’s cluster bomb.) The author does not really explain his reservations about Wikileaks as clearly as he might, certainly not at any length, so here’s my understanding of what he means:

A great mass of largely incomprehensible facts are assembled, in the knowledge that what the mainstream media will do upon their release is to use search engines and other software tools of varying degrees of sophistication to quickly cherry-pick all the “relevant” (in other words: “juicy”) bits. All the malign actor needs is a grudge against someone (Hillary Clinton, in Assange’s case) and they can sow their gigabyte or so of factual but largely incomprehensible data with some really nice-looking cherries, which the journalist’s predictable cherry-picking search terms will be sure to find. But because the data as a whole is so indigestible, the verification process has already been abandoned because the carefully-timed release of the huge mass of data has put competitive journalists under pressure of time as they seek to be first to find the best cherries and publish them. So mostly or even completely true facts, in sufficient concentration, can become a “Weapon of Mass Disinformation.” And Ms Clinton’s reputation has been trashed. Or anybody else’s reputation, on the left, right or even the extreme centre represented by Tony Blair and Immanuel Macron. I do not perceive Ms Clinton to be a martyred innocent, but suggestively shaving some truths to the bone and letting journalists discover them, as if by their own efforts, in the middle of a pile of factual irrelevance is a tool which could convict anyone of anything. The ultimate injustice is to harness truth to evil ends

The author does not mention the ICIJ, but I’d regard them with some of the same reservations he clearly has about Wikileaks, because they also tend to gleefully pack their truth into cluster bombs.

And although, from the very beginning of his investigative career Eliot Higgins has battled the FSB (which takes considerable courage), the need now is for someone to take the fight to China’s 610 office and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The FSB is only committing murder, after all, whilst the 610 Office and the XPCC are doing worse than that. They are not working together to commit genocide, so much as working independently to each eliminate a completely separate victim community. The FSB seeks to pick a fight and then win it, which is how Mr Higgins comes to be fighting them (and, touch wood, winning). The 610 Office and the XPCC are currently having their way without any fight at all. 

 

We Are Bellingcat is published by Bloomsbury, on the 4^th of February 2021

Book Review of The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves

 

This is a well-written novel with a great deal of understanding behind it. When you first start to read it, The Ends of the Earth puts you in mind of a Leslie Thomas novel (I have read at least two such) about a middle-aged man running away from home, except that it’s seen from the perspective of the woman left behind. Actually, it isn’t like that at all, but the true character of this novel does not emerge all at once. The truth comes in layers and none of the characters really want to believe it all.

The author ultimately allows love to heal all, but not until the truth is uncovered and faced and ghastly mistakes that might have “justified” lasting animosity or even legal action, are forgiven. And the “happy ending” is nothing like what the reader is expecting or hoping for, for most of the story. The quiet but firm portrayal of forgiveness as a necessity rather than a mere virtue makes this book a very non-trivial love story indeed.

 

The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves is published by Random House UK, Cornerstone Century on the 29^th of April 2021.

 

The following two promotional videos have been supplied by the publisher. Matthew K. Spencer is not being paid for this review.

 

Lessons from the Holocaust about Forced Organ Donation

Firstly, for those who believe that the CCP and the 610 Office are pretty nice folks who would never resort to forced organ donations from prisoners of conscience and oppressed ethnic minorities, here is a short (16 minute) video which summarises the published evidence. (There was also a two-page spread starting at page 32 in the Mail on Sunday for March the First 2020, quite independent of Chris Chapell and his sources. This seems to have been widely ignored, but no-one has credibly refuted it.)

During the video, Mr Chapell claims that not even the NAZIs resorted to organ-harvesting during the holocaust. Of course this is largely true*, but only because, prior to the conception and development of immuno-suppressant drugs in the sixties, human body organs did not have a significant market value in the forties. In fact, everything about holocaust victims (those who died in actual concentration camps) that had a commercial value, was exploited. I have an American friend whose landlord proudly boasted that she had a tablelamp with a shade made from human skin, which her GI husband had brought back from Dachau. (There are times when I need reminding which side the US Army was on.) Body fat was famously turned into soap, gold teeth were extracted, live victims were experimented on, especially during the execution of commercial contracts which the SS had with Bayer -a firm that is still very much in business- and even human hair was taken and sold. (Recently, three tons of hair from Uyghur prisoners was found and confiscated at a US port. Each person contributes a few ounces of hair, so three tons equals an awful lot of prisoners and this was only one shipment.)

But above all, the Holocaust was designed and organised to maximise the harvest of the victims' possessions, property, money and investments. The whole point of fairly-publicly loading each batch of victims onto trains and transporting them across Europe, was to give the Jews and other victim populations the idea that they had all better keep their most precious possessions hidden in their luggage or about their persons and not bury them in the woods where they might never be found if the lawful owner died. Those suspected of having substantial investments were given special attention aimed at making them pay these investments over as a ransom for their own lives and those of their loved ones. In some cases, just enough cases, such people were actually allowed to cross into Switzerland. But many more were simply tricked and bullied out of their investments on their way to the death camps. Once there, their heads were shaved and they were made to leave their luggage in piles and undress before they were gassed. (Traces of cyanide gas would have made it more difficult to search the clothes for hidden jewels, gold coins or share certificates.) Even spectacles and shoes were collected, though many of these items remained in the camps at liberation. Above all, the NAZIs prized the assets which victims already had in banks and safety-deposit vaults outside the Reich. Especially those in Switzerland. Taking control of those assets, by blackmail or torture of the password-holders, saved the guilty men the trouble of moving the assets to where they hoped to flee when the NAZI state collapsed, which the smart NAZIs always knew it would. The Holocaust was intended to and to some extent succeeded in completely liquidating the commercial value of the Jews being exterminated. THAT is the lesson we must learn, if we are to both understand and deal with what is happening in Communist China in the present day.

When I decided to deal with the issue of organ harvesting (amongst others) in my novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row", I decided to do it logically and not emotionally, because the sort of mind we are dealing with here does not really experience emotions at all. Not only are the victims totally exploited for everything they have got as well as everything that they are, but before they are even taken into custody they are selected as worth exploiting. The victims all follow some kind of spiritual practice: in this case either Falun Gong or Christianity, but elsewhere in the book it is made clear that ALL of China's Muslim minorities are also targets, not just Uyghurs. This is simply because spiritual practice and some kind of moral code means that the unwilling donor is unlikely to have been a drug user or sexually promiscuous, so they will be much less likely to carry HIV or other deadly viruses. The majority of victims in my novel are portrayed as Falun Gong practitioners and indeed the video, above, suggests that Asian people wanting to buy black market human organs from the CCP tend to regard Falun Gong practitioners as particularly healthy and the source of the very best-quality organs. This belief may indeed be the primary reason why Falun Gong is persecuted in China!

Apart from being fit and healthy, the harvesting victims in my novel are selected because they are prosperous: either very prosperous or moderately prosperous; they are all believed to have something worth stealing. My anti-hero, Mr Ren, is surprised when a 610 Office supervisor accuses him of having assets worth two hundred million US dollars. Firstly, he's always been satisfied to be on an upward trend and has never totted up the sum total of his wealth, and secondly, doing so in US dollars strikes him as unpatriotic. But, given the imperatives of the totalitarian forces condemning him to death, the fact that Mr Ren has substantial assets that are already outside Chinese jurisdiction makes him a much more attractive victim than those whose wealth is all locally-held.

This is not me exercising an author's imagination so much as logic, based on my having read a great deal of material about the Holocaust over more than forty years. This isn't just the way it happens in my book: it is the way it happens.

The video above merely aspires to present evidence that forced-organ harvesting is happening in Communist China, partly for the benefit of wealthy recipients from outside China. (Uyghur donors are attractive to those from the Middle East who require organs that have been nurtured on a halal diet. Trying to force Uyghurs to eat pork, as the CCP routinely does, helpfully identifies those who will not break halal rules to save their lives. (It's an irrational requirement: nothing stolen is halal.))

But an understanding that every victim who has assets will have been stripped of them before their body organs are harvested, and any assets so confiscated that are already overseas or in an attractive currency will tend to end up in the personal portfolios of the officials organising the harvesting, is key to gathering evidence that will bring to justice those responsible for what is, for all practical purposes, another Holocaust.

*Selected body organs were harvested by SS doctors from Holocaust victims who had been carefully exposed to experimental medicines, poisons or general industrial chemicals, on behalf of Bayer. So that they could see how much good/damage the chemical did.

Book Review of Ask No Questions by Claire Allan

 

This is an excellent journalistic thriller, set in Derry with enough local colour to assure any middle-class liberal readers that they are not in Islington any more.

Ask No Questions really is a novel about assumptions, both those of the leading characters and those of the gentle reader. Although many of the characters either know or suspect that there has been a frame-up and a cover-up, most of them have wasted a quarter century of their lives on one wrong assumption or another about just what that was. The police and the law are mostly in the background of the story, but their wrong assumption, as is sometimes the case in real life, is that somebody who is less capable of dealing with everyday life than the average man, is somehow going to be more capable of murder.

Murder is a talent which most of us lack, and in times of war the majority of conscript soldiers cannot bring themselves to actually aim to kill unless they are in immediate personal danger themselves; many of them cannot do it even then. This is why murder as a talent is sought after by organised crime, terrorist gangs and paramilitaries the world over. Even when the victim is a little girl, the search for a murderer needs to be a search for the rare talent which allows someone to kill another human being, not for the disability which sets a person apart, but which generally mitigates any harm they might do.

There is a cover-up as well as a murder and in this story the motive of the person who is instrumental to that cover-up is so surprising and unsettling that the reader probably won’t guess what it is until the very end. Murders can happen with very little motive, or at least the motive is often meaningful only to the murderer, but cover-ups always need a motive and that can be more shocking than the crime being concealed.

 

Ask No Questions by Claire Allan is published by Avon Books UK on the 21^st of January 2021.