Book Review of “Against the Loveless World” by Susan Abulhawa.

This is a warm book about bleak situations, ranging from a Palestinian neighbourhood in Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion, through the Iraqi occupation and the return of a now-vengeful Kuwaiti government once the Iraqis were expelled, to a more difficult life in Jordan (a much poorer country than Kuwait) and then a life of knife-edge danger in Palestine itself. The heroine’s only defence against psychopathic treatment is to love those she can. (That’s what separates the sheep from the sociopaths.) The people she loves includes one person who appears to exploit her in a very serious way and another who initially despises her for her (largely misreported) sexual conduct.

Arab and particularly Palestinian culture is shown in loving detail, and this is a necessary antidote to the perceptions that Westerners usually have of Palestine, which is a dusty impact zone for whatever artillery is fired at it. That perception is shaped by journalists feeling they have to “tell the truth” about what seem to be the most important things: such as little boys being shot by Israeli settlers and so on. That needs to be reported, but if it is all you report, then the story you are telling becomes a falsehood, because you are not showing the world what is worthwhile about the culture that is being steadily destroyed. The author isn’t merely trying to show that Palestinian culture is being cruelly destroyed, but that it is well worth saving. That is not really what we get from the “victimology” of social-Marxism, because Marxism in any form seeks to destroy ALL existing culture in order for something “better” to rise from the ashes. (If the fire is hot enough, nothing ever rises from the vitrified ash at all.) Anyone seeking to “help” Palestine on the basis of such victimology is doing the work of the Israeli oppressors for them.

Along the way, the author allows her heroine to realise that if they did not have the Palestinians to oppress, the Israelis would almost certainly kill each other with vigour and enthusiasm. This may be more literally true than even the author realises: during my past attempts to befriend apparently reasonable Israelis, I was surprised and not a little disturbed to discover how just much they loathed Israelis of other persuasions and how much they were hated in return. I would refer readers to the last third or so of “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” by CS Lewis (if they cannot bear to read the whole thing, which is not very long.) This has been Israel’s problem for millennia.

The heroine and other Palestinians are not solely oppressed by the Israelis and Americans, however: they are oppressed by many Kuwaitis (not all, by any means), largely because the Palestinians were exploited by Saddam to supply a tissue of justification for his attempted conquest of Kuwait. The scope of this book does not extend quite to the present day, but the way that the Iranian regime is currently exploiting the Palestinian cause to further its own regional interests is sowing the seeds of further oppression of Palestinians by Arab regimes that the Iranian one seeks to destroy. Where, exactly, is the line drawn between such exploitation and direct oppression? Is there one?

Although this book depicts some inspiring acts of resistance and defiance (not just against the Israelis) it’s pretty clear that these will not create a solution by themselves and are really a form of pleading for some outside force to step in and change the situation. For this to happen, there has to be a change in the attitude and behaviour of several different governments, and for THAT to happen, it has to be possible for people with clean hands to access the top jobs in the countries concerned. As I have tried to make clear in my own work, if you have conventions or even formal systems which prevent persons with clean hands getting to the top (because, you know, you cannot trust anyone with clean hands: they will never do the necessary dirty work) you will be ruled by homicidal sociopaths in perpetuity and they will ALWAYS be able to think of more dirty work that needs doing.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing 23^rd of July 2020.

Book Review of “The Doors of Eden” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is a good novel, but at one point the author succumbs to the temptation to be lazy (perhaps even ignorant) about his political villainy and this is why he misses out on the five star recommendation that he might have got.

It is about parallel worlds, but not necessarily parallel universes because if you travel far enough from Earth after reality has branched, the rest of the universe has not necessarily changed at all. Or, if it has, the changes may be unrelated to any change on Earth.

The novel builds on small ideas to convey bigger ones, which facilitates the suspension of disbelief necessary to its enjoyment. It starts off with a small adventure gone wrong and a mystery, and it also starts off with a pair of young lesbian heroines, which is not a bad thing. (I once wrote a whole series of SF novels about an entire planetary colony of lesbian heroines. Which I wouldn’t get away with doing in the 21^st century as it’s turning out so far.) The parallel worlds theme allows for both adventure and whimsy (there is a world where super-intelligent big cats suborn all other species to their will) and the author has some fun with the attempts of staid MI5 officers to understand the weird. Mystery turns to conspiracy and then existential crisis, for the universe and not just all the parallel Earths. The conspiracy surrounds the character of Daniel Rove, who for most of the novel is convincingly and accurately drawn as a sociopath (and insider-dealing venture-capitalist).

Parties in conflict must be turned, somehow, into a coalition to solve the existential crisis. This happens slightly too easily, really, given how divergent the world views are of people from the alternative worlds. I was disappointed that neither the big cats nor the intelligent bird-man dinosaurs were asked to contribute to the solution. Cat-logic can be brilliant, in its own way.

Despite dealing with parallel Earths, the narrative is mostly sequential until the end is nigh, at which point there are several alternative narratives. There is a good reason for this, though, and it’s not just an attempt to meet an overall “mind-blowing weirdness” target set by a deranged publisher. None of the divergent narratives is a solution to the crisis: the fact that there are divergent narratives is itself the solution, which is not what the coalition of experts solving the crisis want to hear.

It is at this point that the Rove character, hitherto an insider-trader and laissez-faire capitalist, turns into a 21^st century Oswald Mosley, complete with an England-fixation. Of course, in the 21^st century you are not allowed to hate anyone, except racists, so Rove has to have a “racist” placard hung round his neck so the author can decently lynch him.

The real Oswald Mosley was the anti-thesis of a laissez-faire capitalist. He was First Secretary in a Labour Cabinet and he was economically hard left, just like Hitler and Mussolini. The state was to own everything and everyone. He was personally wealthy, but he did not earn any of it, and this is the key to understanding Oswald Mosley. As George Orwell observed of his classmates at Eton, it was extremely common for someone with an expensive education and a socking great trust fund, to be a hard-left socialist. It still is. Most people who have worked for their own bread are sympathetic to the idea that it is a matter of natural justice for people to actually benefit from their own efforts. When you deny that this is so, as Mosley consistently did, and as many Momentum activists do today, then you and the slave-trader become one flesh. Pharaoh, Lenin, Mosley and Hitler were all willing to make people slaves to build their Utopia.

If the Mosley persona is just meant to be shorthand for “appalling racist” then it’s still problematical, because sociopaths are available in both racist and anti-racist versions. The former blatantly try to divide communities to manipulate them, the latter are generally less blatant and this means they actually do more damage, to individual victims and the fabric of society, because their subtle lies can divide brothers and sisters, even husband and wife, in a way that racist lies cannot do.

“The Doors of Eden” is published by Macmillan on the 20^th of August 2020.

Book Review of Love in the Blitz, by Eileen Alexander

The contents of this book might be of interest to a wider readership than it is going to get, due to the title and marketing.

This is a compilation of letters from a young woman to her young man, mostly in wartime, and ordinarily that would relegate it to the “social document” or romance shelves. But Miss Alexander tells her beloved, Gershon Ellenbogen, all sorts of anecdotes from a social circle that included cabinet ministers, senior military officers and captains of industry, as well as important academic figures. Having got a first in English at Cambridge University, Miss Alexander has an endless supply of quotes (often very funny indeed), not only for her letters, but for everyday conversation. Although it was the air raid precautions minister, Sir John Anderson, rather than her studies, who supplied her with “shut that book, Mary and pay attention to the air-raid.”

She admires the Labour politician Arthur Greenwood, who “spoke for England” in September 1939 when urged to do so by Conservative backbencher Leo Amery. (Less publicly, it was Greenwood, too, who swung Churchill’s cabinet behind Churchill and fighting on after the disasters of 1940. Greenwood’s position being that Britain did not have any choice other than fighting on, because any deal done with Hitler at that stage would be hugely disadvantageous from the outset and very easily broken at any moment that suited the Nazis. As Vichy France soon found out, on both counts.)

Her first wartime job is to work as third PA (which she translates as “Public Adorer”) to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, another historical figure who perhaps deserves more attention than he gets. There is an irony here, because the book opens with Miss Alexander in hospital recovering from a road traffic accident, in which Gershon was driving -and the law he fell foul of was probably introduced by Leslie when he was Transport Secretary.

She is less fond of Michael Foot, who was still a prominent politician in my own lifetime, with a habit of rubbing an awful lot of people up the wrong way but occasionally putting into words what the nation thought and felt, as at the outbreak of the Falklands War. When, as editor of the Evening Standard, Foot responds to the King of Denmark’s announcement that he and the Royal Family would all proudly wear the Star of David (in response to the German occupiers imposing this on Danish Jews), Miss Alexander is impressed and thinks that Foot’s call for the world to show their appreciation of the Jewish contribution to world culture, came from deep conviction.

She also makes friends with Orde and Lorna Wingate, telling Gershon that Captain Wingate is a genius who will either be court-martialled or promoted to general (in a later letter she substitutes “Field Marshal”) and that would equate with what many people expected of him at the time. But she also shows great empathy with Lorna Wingate, who shares her own anguish at not being with the man she loves, only it’s worse for Lorna because her man is famously leading prolonged operations deep behind Japanese lines. To study Miss Alexander’s social circle is to study history in the making, so this collection of letters is not just a love story.

To some in the 21^st century, Miss Alexander’s standards of sexual conduct will seem antiquated if not absurd, but she sees a reality here: that women who try to exercise unusual sexual or social freedom are at risk of ending up in the hands of predatory men best described in modern idiom as “sociopaths”. This happens several times in her own 1940s social circle and I’ve known it to happen to several 21^st century women of my acquaintance. Some of the abusive conduct she describes would be outrageous and indeed criminal, even now, and it might provide some food for thought. (Modern studies suggest that as many as 9% of the male population are sociopaths and that proportion is not inconsistent with the number of Miss Alexander’s female friends who come to grief.)

Love in the Blitz is published by William Collins on the 30^th of April 2020

Book review of “Chassepot to FAMAS” French Military Rifles 1866-2016

“Chassepot to FAMAS” French Military Rifles 1866-2016

(English-language reference and popular history.)

This is the first book from the author, Ian McCollum, who is a mechanical engineer and firearms historian with both a popular blog and an equally popular YouTube Channel. (Proving the old adage that mechanical engineers study weapons and civil engineers study -and build- targets.)

Yann Carcaillon and Jonathan Ferguson are also contributors, James Rupley did the majority of the (uniformly excellent) technical photography, and the Editor was N.R Jenzen Jones. Following its crowd-funded launch, this book is published by Headstamp Publishing (2019) and is now available from them at this link.

This is a collector’s reference book and also a more popular history book on a slightly niche subject, which has already aroused sufficent widespread interest to justify itself. It is well-crafted in every sense of the word, in that it functions well as a reference book in addition to being absorbing to simply read through, and although the gilt page edges are unusual in a book of this nature (the crowd-funding was very successful indeed) in general the money has been spent on practical quality and durability rather than cosmetics, which is exactly what one might expect from a military firearms historian.

A reference book is only as good as the index and this one shows signs of careful thought rather than computer-driven auto-assembly. Some books this size have a forty-page index, this is four pages but, coupled with the way the actual text flows, you can use it to navigate to the section of text, if not an individual page, which should answer your questions. The index does not reference inside the data tables (it would drive everyone potty if it did), but these follow a standard format throughout and once you’ve found the one you want in one chapter, it’ll be in an identical form in a similar place in another. The book has its own logic in some ways, but it sticks to this consistently. Copious endnotes for each chapter are also a possible bane of reference works and here there are very few. Nearly everything the reader needs to know is in the text itself and doesn’t need an explanatory note. The chapter on the FR series precision rifles has exactly one endnote.

Most chapters contain some peripheral material: a one-page history of a particular arsenal, or a short article on a gun falling outside the main scope of the book but perhaps a parallel development to the main subject of the chapter. Some of these are written by the contributors. It is possible to skip these, but I found that they didn’t really break my concentration on the main issue of any particular chapter: rather, they added a bit of context. So I found the best thing to do was to take them in my stride as I read.

There is plenty of tabular data, which is what the specialist gun collectors will be here for, but it is presented at the point in the story of each rifle where someone reading out of a more general interest might also benefit from it. This isn’t going to do the collectors any actual harm.

Other information is available in a handful of appendices, such as directors of the various arsenals through the period covered by the book, or details of the cartridges used.

NB: cartridges are dealt with in a way consistent with a general historical approach and nowhere is there anything resembling loading data! Given the age and extremely varied condition of most of the rifles under discussion, publishing detailed data of this nature would be a pitfall rather than a public service. There is some guidance on decoding the headstamps for 7.5x54mm ammunition, however: this is published by Headstamp Publishing, after all!

Review Copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 23^rd of March 2020. Updated 19th of December 2020.

Review of Collateral’s Eponymous Debut Album

Collateral is a fusion of subtly-different Rock genres, rather than a fusion of Rock with anything that isn’t Rock. This at a time when many in the music industry are busy trying to promote other things. Quite uncowelled, the lads have decided to give the Rock-loving public what they want rather than what the hidden hand of market manipulation thinks they should have and I can see this being very successful.

Most of the tracks are new, but “Midnight Queen” is included, having been previously internationally successful as a single and I think it’s likely to not only remain a favourite with the band’s existing fans, but go on to make new fans as this album succeeds.

The new tracks deserve more than one hearing before you make up your mind about them: give that mind of yours a chance to cue into what’s actually going on and you’ll like them too! A good album from a band that are determined to make their own luck.

It is available from the official website, many online retailers and hopefully the surviving High Street ones as well.

Book Review of "The Paris Library" by Janet Skeslien Charles

This is an historical novel, about Paris just before and during WW2 and Eastern Montana in the Cold War of the eighties. It’s a shock for a reader of my generation to realise that, in 2020, not just children, but parents of children, probably do need to know what the early to mid eighties were like. There are both similarities and differences in the two threads, of course: Paris was occupied by the NAZIs, but the thousand nuclear missiles buried in the American plains never flew and Soviet Communism turned out to contain the seeds of its own destruction. The Montana characters are geographically isolated, those in Paris are isolated by their circumstances and their (fully justified) fear of letting anyone know just what those circumstances are.

Lily, a Montanan teenager is fascinated to learn about the Paris that her new friend, Odile (older than Lily’s parents) knew, even though it was Paris in her darkest hour. It all sounds so chic, if not “cool” that she wonders why Odile ever left and that’s not a tale that Odile wants to tell. The central message of this book is that everyone has something they’d prefer others not to know and it’s essential to respect this.

The author does a good job of portraying escalating oppression and declining nutrition in occupied Paris, without pretending that Parisians knew about everything that was going on elsewhere in Occupied France, let alone the rest of Europe. The NAZIs kept everyone in the dark, unless there was a news story which would take spin, in which case it was put on posters everywhere in Paris.

She also does a good job of showing how important “Crow Letters”, anonymous letters denouncing people to the French police or even directly to the NAZIs, were in that oppression. {It is beyond the scope of this book, of course, but in Germany the NAZIs made a rod for their own backs by offering a reward of 1,000 Reichsmarks to anyone who denounced neighbours or even relatives to the Gestapo. By early 1944, the Gestapo was fully aware (there were memos about it) that most of the people they were arresting were good Germans denounced out of spite, but to stop doing it, or to stop paying out the bounty, would have been to admit that the NAZIs were fallible and had perpetrated a great injustice, so it continued. The 610 Office in Communist China may have the same regrets, one day.} She also shows us that immediately upon being liberated, some Parisians behaved as vindictively towards anyone thought to have been friendly to the occupiers, as the writers of the Crow Letters had been to their neighbours. Almost certainly, none of the Crow Letter writers were amongst those publicly punished after the liberation, because nobody knew who they were: they went for the women who’d had babies instead.

This is a very well-researched book and I have only two gripes:

French characters refer to the Germans as “Krauts” even before America enters the war, and I wonder how accurate this is? Also, the lethally-poor treatment of captured French soldiers forced to do manual labour in Germany, is put down to the Germans not caring whether they lived or died. In fact the Germans did care about this issue: Heinrich Himmler’s official policy on forced labour was called “death through exhaustion.” The slaves were meant to die and the only reason why fewer French prisoners died than Russian or Polish ones was that the Germans needed the French economy to go on working as long as the occupation lasted, and that meant letting the working population still in France believe that their loved ones might one day come back safely. Had the Germans won, this would not have happened.

“The Paris Library” is published by John Murray Press on the 2^nd of June 2020.

Book Review of “The Ninth Child” by Sally Magnusson

This novel, set in mid 19^th century Scotland and the Isle of Wight, is an absorbing tale of stalking and child-theft in a landscape where myth and superstition are never far away from becoming reality, even as technological progress improves the lot of mankind. The author does not flinch from showing the reader either the dangers of civil engineering, as far as the Navvies are concerned, or the utterly dreadful, disease-ridden conditions in the city of Glasgow which an unprecedented civil engineering project is designed to address. Men do difficult and dangerous work, because it is needed desperately.

Where the author finds fault with the ethos of the age where many such improvements are made, is that women were not supposed to play much of a part in the enterprise. The preview of this work said that it was a great age for innovation but a bad time to be a woman. In fact, The Ninth Child shows us that the mid 19^th century was the time when even that began to change. There are some scenes involving Queen Victoria and it would be quite impossible to write an accurate portrait of the changing role of women in 19^th century Britain that did not refer to her! But the author shows us other, strong-willed Victorian women as well, both high and low.

This is a thriller, too, and it keeps up the tension until the end. Well told -and the author chooses the tensest part of the drama to show us why there is no word for “manana” in Gaelic, because there is no need for such indecent haste. 

The Ninth Child is published by  John Murray Press (Two Roads) on the 19th of March 2020.

It is available from Amazon, Waterstones and other retailers.