Book Review of Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley

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Finding and building a future in Japan outside the mega city.

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

Kyo’s life ends at nineteen, when he fails his university entrance exams and his deported from Tokyo by his Doctor Mother to live with his formidable and somewhat austere grandmother in a small coastal town near Hiroshima, which contains absolutely none of the things he sees as essential to normal life. His mission is to study at a cramming school for a year and get his predetermined medical career back on track.

On arrival, he is shocked to find that people speak to him in passing on the street! Gradually, he comes to realise that they actually care about each other and even about him, the new stranger in their midst. And the community is more impressed by his artistic talents than his medical ambitions.

Interwoven with this is the story of a young American woman, living and working in Tokyo as a translator, who tries to rebuild her own life around translating a book she has found on a train, telling Kyo’s story. She must track down the author and get his permission to publish, whilst fighting her own crisis of confidence in her own talents.

By struggling with the impossible choice between pursuing his medical ambitions or his artistic talents, Kyo finds that the real choice is between Tokyo, where he must choose one career or the other, or the community which will support him whichever he chooses, or even if he makes no choice at all.

This novel, bordering on fable, quietly addresses a very important but seldom discussed issue in the modern world, which is that the whole basis for the “mega city” planning concept behind Tokyo and Shanghai, and turning the whole of England in to an extension of London, is to create a situation where every employer can easily find someone with the skills they need who has no option other than to render those skills for no reward beyond the barest necessities of life. Supposedly, there is a critical population mass of 100 million, at which point all but the 0.001% magically become compliant wage slaves, forever. The author shows us, without beating us over the head with the idea, that more traditional caring values offer an alternative to dystopia.

Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley is published by Random House UK on the 22^nd of June 2023

Book Review of The Orwell Tour by Oliver Lewis

 

Image copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 1999, all rights reserved

 

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Travels through the life and work of George Orwell

This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

 

This is a good and useful book which I will give a four-star recommendation: it’s actually a lot more interesting than it would have been as a five-star flawless treatise with no flaws to set me thinking. Some of the episodes in Orwell’s life and travels I knew something about. About others, especially the extended visit to Morocco, I knew only that it had happened.

When the story comes to Orwell’s time in Wallington, North Hertfordshire, the author repeats the error most others have made and assumes that the tiny village of Wallington and the (then quite small) neighbouring market town of Baldock was the whole story of George Orwell in what used to be known pre-1974 as “The Hitchin Region”. His friendship with E.M. Forster, who would contribute much to Orwell’s wartime radio broadcasts, was strengthened by their ability to easily meet each other halfway in Hitchin, which was where many Hertfordshire buses ran on livestock market days.

But that’s not a major complaint, because the author has indeed toured the whole of George Orwell’s world and visited places a lot more remote than Wallington or the village of Orwell, just across the Cambridgeshire border from Wallington. These locations (as they are and as they might have been) are well-described in a manner not unworthy of Orwell and the author gives us quite a lot of insight into how well, or otherwise, Orwell is remembered.

Spain is the nicest example, because Orwell appears to be remembered widely and warmly and this is interesting. Yes, Orwell fought in the civil war, but so did other, more macho and flamboyant, literary figures. The key here is to remember a point once well made by the former British Railways Minister and Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, that most families in Spain had members who fought on both sides of the civil war and many of those families had members who fell fighting for both sides, too. Orwell never really articulated, let alone supported, the Nationalist side of the argument, but his writings were sufficiently observational and objective for it to be evident to any thinking person that there might have been compelling reasons why people fought against, as well as for, the Republicans.

In Spain, to see the civil war too much from EITHER side’s point of view is to risk alienating any or perhaps every Spanish family, because they all had members on both sides.

In the city of Huesca, there is a campaign to erect a statue of George Orwell drinking a cup of coffee, because, when he was taking part in the siege of Huesca, he expressed a wish to find out what the coffee there tasted like in peacetime. If I were a resident of Huesca, I’d find that a much more palatable goal than most of those formed during the siege.

Mention is made of the ferocious attacks on George Orwell by many on the left: by comparison with Laurie Lee, Orwell has (so far) been well-defended against “cancelling” but Lee was vilified all his life and his diaries stolen by those who claimed his memoirs of Spain to be “false.” Students and fans of George Orwell need to remain alert, because if the hard left could do what they did to the rustic, gentle and innocuous Laurie Lee, it’s not hard to imagine them one day doing worse to a more dangerous foe, such as Orwell.

The Orwell Tour by Oliver Lewis is published by Icon Books on the 26^th of September 2023.

Book Review of A Cornish Seaside Murder by Fiona Leitch

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A thriller of widening possibilities.

This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

There are two departures from current normal police practice in this story:

Two detectives who live together in an intimate sort of way investigate the same case and they solve the case by considering an ever-widening range of possibilities in the light of events subsequent to the original crime and the emerging evidence. The former adds a bit of spice, the latter is thought-provoking as soon as you allow yourself to start thinking about those possibilities rather than wondering when the author is going to actually narrow down the list of suspects.

Told with humour and with some Len Deighton-ish departures into cookery, the story follows the detectives, one having served in London and the other in the big, drug-ravaged cities of the North West, as they investigate what looks to them like an all-too familiar brutal murder, probably involving drugs, for which there is just a smattering of local precedent.

Except that this is rural Cornwall where this sort of thing is uncommon almost to the point of being unheard of and the explanation is something that could only really happen in that location, even though the level and frequency of violence is totally out of character for that community. The conclusion is frightening enough for this to possibly be the last book in this particular series, but it might not be...

A Cornish Seaside Murder by Fiona Leitch is published by Harper Collins on the 8^th of June 2023

Book Review of Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

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Lessons from the Holocaust for the present day.

This book is the author’s first-hand account of what she experienced between 1942 and 1945, mainly in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, bolstered by what she was told by others who were also there and whose accounts she was careful to check as far as possible. Auschwitz was a large forced labour camp including several different industrial enterprises which paid the SS for slave labour intentionally worked to death there. Birkenau was a reception and extermination camp within Auschwitz, where those who might be able to work were separated from those who might not be able to work. The former were set to work, for as long as they lasted in dreadful conditions, the latter were killed more or less immediately unless they had other uses. Few detainees were retained to work in Birkenau itself and even fewer survived. A significant proportion of these had medical training, and partly because of this not only were they forced to assist in medical experiments on humans; they understood what they were seeing. The author was more or less the only one who both understood what she was seeing and lived to tell the tale. Forgive me if there were others, but this really is the best all-round account we have.

This isn’t a review of a book I was asked to read and review or one I just happened to review: it is a review of a book I remembered from years ago and bought and read a fresh copy of, because there are things happening in the world today which cannot be fully discussed for many reasons, the most valid of which is that some crimes and tragedies are so unbelievable that they are innocently and helplessly denied by eye-witnesses and even direct victims at the scene and caught up in the process. The less valid reason is that the authors of great tragedies inevitably and energetically contest the facts until the last guilty verdict is delivered a decade or two after the event.

George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” but how might we learn the lessons of a recent past that is hidden from us? We cannot remember what we are not allowed to know! Well, Santayana’s quote supplies the tools we need: the sort of person or coalition of vested interests that might obfuscate truth and reality on a global scale might very well fail to remember the past and, therefore, the past will contain a template for the very actions they are condemned to repeat, the study of which will allow the rest of us to understand not only what has just been going and what is going on now, but what the next moves might be!

Because this is a non-fiction account of historical events with no surprise twists at the end, I will be breaking my usual rule by using three quotes from the text. The first quote is actually from a letter sent to the author after pre-publication copies were circulated and it is in the front matter of the Kindle version reviewed here; you have to click or tap LEFT from the “beginning” to see it:

“you have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak…”

A. Einstein.

This is not a celebrity endorsement but an authoritative one. It is time for a substantial number of old and new readers to both read and discuss this book, if the evil described in it is not to re-occur either because we do not recall or because we do not understand. All knowledge, even seemingly unshakeable “scientific or historical fact” decays into myth and superstition without the regular refreshment of discussion and debate. And “never again!” becomes a self-denying mantra if no-one is allowed to compare the Holocaust to other situations: past, present or future. Because even though these things are not exactly the same as the Holocaust (no two things are ever exactly the same) some of them may very well be heading in the same general direction at a greater or lesser pace. If we redefine “never again” as being “we’ll let anything pass just so long as we can see a shred of difference between it and the Holocaust” then we really are on the fast track to Hell.

The second quote is:

“The dissemination of ‘false news’ was forbidden by the Germans on pain of death.”

The politics of the Third Reich is linked to the present not by swastikas, parades through avenues of upturned searchlights, MP38/40 machine-pistols or even gas chambers, but by the global trend towards the rigid and increasingly ruthless imposition of a single narrative for everything, imposed by those with no visible chain of accountability. Not only are people having their lives and careers wrecked by even minor departures from the official narrative, that narrative appears much more complicated and far-reaching than that of Dr Goebbels and is therefore easier to transgress against. And it is the single allowable narrative that makes “NAZI Science” a dangerous idol for those who have learned not to deny the Holocaust itself. The striking thing about most of the human experiments described in Chapter XXII is not that they were cruel and murderous, never mind “unethical” but that they were completely and utterly unscientific, designed either to prove a premise that it was illegal to contradict, or simply devised by the camp’s own medical officers for their own amusement.

The remaining experiments were mainly only semi-scientific and most amounted to product development tests by German chemical and pharmaceutical companies of which Bayer was (and still is) the most significant. “Big Pharma” starts with Bayer, not with Beecham’s Pills. A vaccine institute sent numerous vaccines to be tested on Holocaust victims, but it isn’t clear that any useful information was recorded, because the test subjects were mostly sent to the gas chambers before the vaccines had time to work. If in the present day or the future, mass experiments are conducted, without informed consent on either a national or a global scale, with their execution and interpretation subject to a single authorised narrative which may not be challenged on pain of whatever punishment, they will be as unscientific and useless as those conducted in Auschwitz-Birkenau and recorded in “Five Chimneys.” The results of the tests there weren’t always even recorded because the narrative would not change, no matter what those results were. This kind of experiment is only really intended to give diktat a scientific veneer.

The third and final quote concerns a question which troubled not only the author but many of her medical colleagues forced to help conduct tests and experiments within the camp. There was a separate site for sterilisation experiments and these differed from the usual pattern in that the authorities actually seemed to have an interest in the results. Given that all camp inmates (and not just experimental subjects) were supposed to die in the camp anyway, what was the interest in sterilisation? They asked an Aryan German social worker who knew a lot of important people in Berlin (which may in itself explain why he ended up in Birkenau!) what it was all about:

“If they could sterilise all non-German people still alive after their victorious war, there would be no danger of new generations of ‘inferior’ peoples. At the same time, the living populations would be able to serve as labourers for about thirty years. After that time, the surplus German population would need all the living space in those countries, and the ‘inferiors’ would perish without descendants.”

The implication of that is that the primary victim groups of the Holocaust were just that: only the first on a list which ultimately included the vast majority of the human population of Planet Earth.

That’s an objective not recorded in “Mein Kampf” but it was inscribed on the Georgia Guidestones before someone fairly recently blew them up with mining explosives. (Since the Guidestones were erected without the knowledge or consent of local authorities and residents, it's not clear if this demolition broke any laws. Whoever did it may have been legally as well as technically expert.)

 

Footnote, not published on Amazon out of respect for their community guidelines.

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel has been published in several imprints since 1959; they all seem to be basically the same edition and this is a link to one of the imprints on Amazon that is currently available as either a Kindle E-book or a paperback:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XGLG1DR

This is the source which this review is based on, but for copyright reasons readers in some Amazon domains might have to search for a different imprint of the same title and by the same author. In some countries it might be easier to access from second hand bookshops, either online or in a quiet back street.

(There used to be a pub on the Herts/Beds border called “The Five Chimneys” and anything with this title but not by Olga Lengyel may prove to be a beery history of a rural hostelry overlooking the Arlesey Brickworks!)

I actually read this book as a paperback more than a quarter of a century ago, but when I found myself wishing for a book saying things about recent and ongoing happenings which are not yet allowed to be said, I remembered that one had already been written and published two generations ago and all I had to do was buy it on Kindle, check that it still said what I remembered it had said, leave a review on Amazon and encourage others to not only read it for themselves and reach their own conclusions, but leave a review of their own on Amazon or anywhere else that’ll accept it.

Book Review of The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd

 

 

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A wholly original and gripping thriller which shocks and surprises until the end.

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This is going to be a very positive review, not least because when I reviewed the author’s previous novel I suggested that it shared a few features with his first novel (which had some points of contact with one by John Fowles) and the next one needed a clean slate.

The People Watcher got that clean slate all right! It benefits from this.

Most of the story is seen through the eyes of a brain-damaged person and some of the tension comes from this character’s inability to really know her own next move or even face her past. The bulk of the tension, though, comes from an accelerating sequence of ever more fraught and frightening events in the present and revelations about the past. Some of the relationships and actions depicted in this novel are spectacularly unwise and unhealthy, but are realistic in that murder is a perverse response to any situation, especially when that situation is normal life. What Sam Lloyd gets so right is the bell-curve of perversity that follows such an inappropriate and disproportionate response, where everything goes from bad to worse for quite some time until a catastrophe allows normality to begin to force her way back in.

There are moral challenges, too, for the reader as well as the main protagonist (who strives to right serious wrongs with small acts of kindness and is shocked when darker methods seem to work.)

The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd is published by Random House UK on the 12^th of June 2023

Book Review of Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro

 

 Second forensic thriller in the Ally Dymond series.

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(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

In the aftermath of the traumas suffered by Ally Dymond and her daughter, Megan, in “Breakneck Point” “Slaughterhouse Farm” is a fast-moving and compelling story of how long-buried traumas and abusive relationships can lead to crimes decades or even generations after that initial trauma.

What unravels is not one thread of a single mystery, but a web of interlocking crimes committed by different people from three generations and several families and for a wide spread of reasons, which means that the pressure on CSI Ally Dymond and her family, and the tension for the reader, never let up till the very end. This wouldn’t be an Ally Dymond story if it did! And if you don’t know everything that’s going on, how can you ever know who to trust?

This is a very good read, but so much goes on that you more or less have to read it from cover to cover in order to keep everything in your head.

 

Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro is published by HQ on the 25^th of May 2023.

Book Review of Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

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This review is based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

This is a fictionalised history of several people’s stories, intertwined with each other, the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It is well-written and deeply-researched. The themes include sexual exploitation, racism and bullying, from a realistic rather than a “woke” perspective. Fear of the impending communist regime turns out to be worse than the reality, though no-one specifically targetted by the regime is likely to think so! All of Vietnam’s regimes, so far, have been authoritarian and one thing which an authoritarian or totalitarian regime does not normally do is crack down effectively on bullying, which makes bullying the key problem for most of the protagonists in this story. (Authoritarian regimes tend to be coalitions of the culpable which find themselves obliged to let their accomplices get away with stuff -and, of course, they then have to go on letting the bastards get away with stuff no matter how bad things get. Marshal Tito was the sole (and belated) proponent of socialist economic liberalism to survive the Soviet era largely because he was the only communist leader to run a tight-enough ship to be ABLE to change course.)

The author shows us what’s wrong with sexual exploitation by showing us all the other things the exploited ones knew how to do and how much happiness and prosperity was possible when they were able to do those things instead. And always, education and new skills, acquired throughout life and not just in childhood, are a better escape mechanism from poverty and exploitation than the panacea of a US Visa. The moral arguments against prostitution are essentially the same as Adam Smith’s economic arguments against slavery: the waste of resources is always a moral issue when the resources being wasted are human ones.

American servicemen are shown as treating Vietnamese women extremely badly and there’s plenty of historical evidence of that. It’s partly because they were so much younger on average than the men who’d fought the Second World War, but also because the only goal they were ever given was to complete their “tour” and go home. The absence of any published definition of success emphasised the lack of any extant strategy for achieving success and led to a lack of much, if any, sense of responsibility on the part of American soldiers to those they left behind in Vietnam when they achieved their goal of going home. Nothing they did was seen as making anything any worse; the author’s skill is to show us that, actually, it did make things worse.

Reading this book left me with a feeling of admiration for the Vietnamese who seem to have recovered from the Vietnam war rather better than their neighbours in Cambodia and Laos. And gratitude for the post war British leaders who saw Vietnam as a hot potato which, like Aden and Yemen, simply needed to be dropped. Which makes the sell-outs of their successors, Blair and Cameron, to the mindless White House incumbents of their day all the more galling.

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is published in the UK by One World Publications on the 6^th of April 2023.