Opening of "Where Lapwings Fly" by Matthew K. Spencer

This is the beginning of an ecological alternative timelines novel, which should be completed and published some time in 2022.

Prologue, Hammer Hill

It was getting close to Christmas somewhere around 1980 and the timelines hadn't divided yet. Timelines didn't figure in people's lives (unless they were watching Dr Who), so the boy was oblivious as he caught a bus from Mander College towards home, just before sunset. The weather wasn't arctic by any means, but it was definitely a Bedfordshire winter and the bus would go past Cardington Airfield, which the Met Office celebrated, with reason, as the coldest place in lowland Britain. He cleared a patch on the glass by his seat with his glove, so he could see out and not get bus-sick, at least while the light outside lasted.

There were several stops going up London Road and Harrowden Road for Bedford townspeople to get off, but once the bus got past Shortstown the bus would hold real country folk and those going all the way to Hitchin, where bus drivers from Biggleswade Depot didn't like to linger in case the Red Indians got them. The bus was a green Bristol RE with an Eastern Coachworks body and a six-cylinder Gardner engine at the rear: the sort of vehicle that was still the backbone of the United Counties Omnibus Company. That configuration, with pneumatic gear-selection, kept most of the noise and vibration at the back where the smokers were and the boy was sitting in the clean air as near to the front as he could get without hogging one of the seats reserved for pensioners.

"Does anyone intend to get out in Cotton End?" The driver shouted the vital question as he stopped in front of the imposing facade of RAF Cardington's administration building at Shortstown. There was no reply, so the driver knew that he could use every yard of road through Cotton End for a good run-up towards Hammer Hill. Unless some elderly passenger was already asleep, that is: he leaned round the screen behind his seat and had a good look at who he had in the pensioners' seats. That lady came from Dead Man's Cross: it was go!

The Gardner roared, fairly smoothly, as the bus rounded the bend by the hydrogen plant's gasholder, giving the boy a good view of the airship sheds, looming like green metal mountains against the darkling sky to the East. He caught his breath: a huge flock of lapwings, more than he'd ever seen in one place in his life, were flying over the airship sheds towards Hammer Hill and the woods and spinneys of the Greensand Ridge to roost after searching the fields and flood-meadows of the Ouse valley all day for food. When he peered back towards Goldington Power Station and Willington, behind the flock, the sky was not actually dark yet. The lapwings alone had made it go dark!

The driver kept the bus accelerating gently through Cotton End: he didn't want to be going too fast for the bend in the middle of the village and there was a speed limit, but it was generally safe to nudge the speed limit just as you came out of the village so you could take full advantage of the straight and gently-rising unrestricted road past Wilhampstead Turn.The boy turned to look West through another patch of cleared glass across the aisle. There, against the setting sun and the several chimneys of the Stewartby Brickworks, three of which were painting the cold but colourful sunset with smoke, was another huge flock of lapwings that had risen from the fields and brickfields of the Marston Vale to roost further along the Greensand Ridge in the woods towards Ampthill. In some years, practically all the lapwings in Western Europe would spend the winter in Eastern England and this year what must have been a couple of million of them had chosen Bedfordshire, the river Ouse and the Greensand Ridge to see out the hard months. The sight was stunning, but the boy was the only person on the bus who really noticed. The driver was pleased to have the momentum to crest Hammer Hill without having to change all the way down to bottom gear or risk a stall. Everyone else was thinking about home and a hot cup of tea.

Darkness fell as the bus trundled towards Shefford at a more sedate pace via Haynes Turn and Dead Man's Cross and the view from outside was lost to the lights above the passenger seats. The boy's thoughts drifted away from the Bedfordshire landscape, to recent worries and an argument, if argument was the right word for something so completely one-sided.

His physics with chemistry class had been shown a film on the role of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, and he had at first found it difficult to believe and then, as the evidence mounted, alarming. Carbon dioxide trapped heat, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising, through a variety of causes which all tended in the same direction, and so the planet was getting a little bit hotter, year by year. He hadn't seen this reported in The Guardian, so far, nor did he know anyone else not in his class who knew about this, and even they were more bemused than alarmed. This was the sort of thing where corrective action in good time would save an enormous amount of pain, and he was old enough to know that political will tended to follow the path of least pain. But few people knew about global warming and even fewer took it seriously.

There was a local environmental campaign group and he occasionally went to meetings, but he hadn't heard a word about the warming, even there, and eventually he had concluded that he had better introduce them to the subject, because it was evident that no-one else was going to. A couple of evenings ago he had gone along, and when he had been, slightly patronisingly, invited to contribute to the meeting, he had started to say his piece and outline what he knew, winning a few interested and thoughtful nods and murmurs as he went. One lady in her thirties leaned forward a bit, absorbed by what he was saying. But Mr Shortmead, a middle-aged teacher who liked to dominate meetings, even though he prided himself on "helping his young co-learners to form their own ideas" was displaying, not simply restless impatience, but rising anger. Words, like "nonsense" and "poppycock" were spat out rather than muttered and followed by "utter codswallop" "patent lies" and "capitalist lackey!" At that last jibe, the interested lady, and everybody else, turned to face Mr Shortmead, wondering what all this was in aid of. The boy paused for a moment, to let them come back to him when Mr Shortmead had been made to realise that he was being very rude and unkind. The pause was fatal.

Words came from Mr Shortmead's mouth like bullets from a fixed-line machine-gun. The boy tried to get a word in edgeways, but he could not and neither could anybody else. Well, Mr Shortmead was a keen musician and he obviously had been trained in breath control, but it was almost as if he had been specifically trained to use a stream of condemnatory language as a speech-suppression weapon. There were no gaps into which even a sharp edge could be inserted -and all the words were bitter and damning, too! Who had taught him to do this: the KGB? Perhaps the Gestapo? Or was it King Herod's official spokesman?

"Global warming" was an evil plot by the Western nuclear power industry to frighten everyone into dropping their campaigns against nuclear power and allow nuclear power stations to be built by the hundred across Britain and beyond. Either the boy was a feeble-minded idiot, to repeat the lies, or he had already sold out and was a lackey, a collaborator! The torrent of words did not stop until the boy had made a helpless gesture at everybody else at the meeting, got his coat and left. He felt weak at not standing up for what he knew to be true, but Mr Shortmead made it quite impossible for anyone to even suggest they disagreed with him. Once the boy had left, never to return, there was a shocked silence in the meeting room as people wondered how they were going to cope: if a sincere belief (they had no idea if the boy was right or not) could be greeted with such frightening fury, was it safe to say anything at all in Mr Shortmead's presence? It would be several years before the group's members would dare to conclude that the boy had been basically right. Years in which a start might have been made, but wasn't, because Mr Shortmead was not alone.

Sitting on the bus as it waited for the traffic lights by the bank in Shefford, the boy shuddered at the memory of that furious verbal assault. In the past he had been punched in the face by people who hated him less: denying him -and every bystander- control of their own voice seemed more violent, more brutal, than mere physical violence, too.

If that's what the supposed bunny-huggers in the environmental movement were willing to do to someone on their side who was merely presenting what he believed to be a new and important idea, what might their capitalist oligarch opponents be capable of? If that was how the debate was going to be conducted, did it actually matter who won? The bus took a troubled boy onwards to his destination. That night, the Planet Earth timeline spawned new parallel timelines towards two additional alternative futures: Gaia and Technyar.

 

This extract, and the novel "Where Lapwings Fly" it is from, are copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 2021, all rights reserved.

 

 

Book Review of “Great Circle” by Maggie Shipstead

* * * * *

Epic flying adventure novel with a twist at the end.

This novel is well-conceived as well as well-researched. It is also only the second novel written by an American and at least partially set in England in WW2 that I have read without being annoyed by all the misconceptions, half-truths and untruths -and the other stayed well away from technical matters. As Alan Myers once put it: “the reader is in safe hands.”

Covering a sweep of years from the Great War, through the Prohibition years and WW2 to nearly the present day, Great Circle has many well-drawn characters and perhaps not by accident, the only really superficial ones are found in the scenes involving Hollywood and its people. The leading characters are complex in a way that is consistent with their being driven to do really extraordinary things and I think this is the real strength of the story. “Normal” people wouldn’t have done these deeds, would not have achieved these things. But we see those extraordinary characters being forged in difficult circumstances in difficult times and they achieve by challenging, rather than accepting, the world as it is. They don’t merely overcome adversity: they are nourished by it. This is not exactly heart-warming, because they don’t make very many comfortable personal choices, but they do great things.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is published by Random House UK on the 4^th of May 2021.

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.