(This review is
based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK)
The narrative of
this well-written and competently-translated novel stretches from
August 1956 to November 1986 (there is a reference to prior events in
1955), with most of the story happening in the run-up to the
Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík when a decades-old missing
persons case is revealed to be a murder case which comes to a head
and is resolved on the day of the summit meeting itself.
This structure sets
the scene for the thriller whilst giving the readers a series of
snapshots of Icelandic society changing (and the economy and
population growing) as changes in communications, travel and
entertainment technology bring the outside world closer to Iceland
than it has ever been before, before the world’s most powerful
leaders arrive in Reykjavík to thrash out their differences and
focusing the whole world’s attention there.
Almost all the
action takes place in Reykjavík or its suburbs, or on the “remote”
island of Videy, which bears about the same geographical to Iceland’s
capital as Hayling Island does to Havant. (This may or may not help
British readers from North of the Trent.) The one, interesting,
exception is when the heroine has to travel to her home community in
the North of Iceland for her brother’s funeral. Buildings there
being painted in bold colours (as they are in Port Stanley and some
Hebridean communities) in a brave attempt to stop the settlement
blending any further into the landscape than it already has.
The heroine herself
is brave and brilliant, though she only discovers this in herself
when tragedy forces her to take on her older brother’s mantle and
complete his journalistic investigation into what might happened on
Videy before either of them was born. She has to cope with
generational differences as well as those of politics and social
class. Though when push really comes to shove, she gets prompt
support from those she thought most conservative and disapproving of
her -even as someone she trusted acts with monumental treachery.
Though the story shows us some divisions within Icelandic society,
these fade away as soon as the shocking truth, which no-one can
excuse or accept, is exposed.
If there is a moral
here (and in Nordic thrillers there often isn’t) it is that it’s
not the presumption of innocence that allows the rich and powerful to
get away, literally, with murder, but their own blithe assumption of
immunity. Guilt and innocence are irrelevant to those who are never
required to account for their own actions. And in the summer of 2023,
we have all seen a lot of evidence of that!
Reykjavík by Ragnar
Jónason and Katrín Jakobsdóttir is published in the UK by Michael
Joseph on the 17th of August 2023
(This review is
based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)
This is a
well-written and generally well-thought-out novel with an interesting
surprise ending. It describes a nightmare pregnancy during a winter
which seems to go on for so long that the setting might be Narnia
rather than the Hamptons. That cost it a star, I’m afraid: I know
it’s about the way that perceptions change during pregnancy, but a
pregnancy supplies a certain timeline and the season doesn’t seem,
to the reader, to turn with that timeline. It may be alright in the
author’s original plan, but so much of the book happens in winter
that it seems eternal.
The other troubling
thing is that, until the surprise ending and explanation is reached,
it’s hard for the reader to tell whether the pregnant heroine is
being stalked by strangers or at least gaslighted by her husband, or
if she’s delusional and hallucinating. This isn’t a crime for
which any writer can or should be “cancelled” but it carries
rather more risks in the real world than most of the things writers
are being cancelled for these days. The whole point of stalking and
more especially gaslighting is very often to get the victim declared
mentally-ill and, most especially delusional. Either to discredit
them in court (especially a divorce court) or for someone connected
with the stalker to seize control of the victim’s financial
affairs. There’s not a stalker in the known universe who wouldn’t
be pleased to confuse women’s (or men’s in some cases) experience
of being stalked or gaslighted with delusion, hallucination or some
allied psychosis. And even when the novel’s fairly startling
conclusion is reached, the necessary delineation between abuse and
hallucination is not quite there.
This book has some
interesting things to say, but the two deficiencies significantly
dilute what is good about it.
Delicate Condition
by Danielle Valentine is published by Viper (an imprint of Serpent’s
Tail) in the UK on the 17th of August 2023.
Until, that is, about two months before the sudden about-face by leading AI researchers, politicians and business leaders, culminating in today's meetings between President Biden and not only the British Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, but King Charles as well.
And between world leaders meeting in Singapore, supposedly about pandemic regulations, and last week, that article was being seen by hundreds of people located in Singapore every single day.
Now, the most obvious theme of the article is that it suggests that an AI-based economy is the only known way that tyranny can become sustainable (and thus persist for generations or the proverbial thousand years) in the modern world, because it's the only known alternative to letting people have enough freedom and the certainty of ownership of their own ideas to innovate and pursue more efficient solutions, because it's in everybody's interests to do things better.
Somewhat paradoxically, an AI-based economy allows for innovation to be suppressed and efficiencies found which do not actually benefit those who have to implement those efficiencies. So an AI-based world economy would have the benefits of economic sustainability without any of this freedom, democracy and accountability stuff: and the past few years have seen the global elite very much at war with all three of these graces. But that's precisely why the about-face is so strange: it's been very clear for many years that this is what all the decision-makers in the Capitalist and Communist worlds have wanted ever since the "fall of communism" or at least, the failure of the Soviet Bloc. They didn't change their minds because this blog (or any other source of the same basic concept) showed them that continuing on their chosen path would probably have the very results they most wanted!
Thing is, there's the theme of the article, which is obvious, and its implication, which took a bit more thinking time on the part of our lords and masters:
If the Chinese economy benefits proportionately more from the introduction of AI than the American economy precisely because the bulk of its workforce is less-skilled than its American counterpart and expects much less reward, so it can be replaced by AI with little or no economic disruption and very little in the way of compensation and with no imperative to maintain anyone's standard of living, then not only is it possible that those economies where the skill levels are much HIGHER than in the United States (Finland, Japan, Switzerland, South Korea, possibly even Croatia these days) could see a negative economic and social impact from the introduction of AI, those economies with a significantly LOWER technological skills base than that of Communist China (such as Sudan, Uganda or Tanzania?) might derive an even greater proportional economic boost from AI than Communist China.
The panic is really all about the rather belated realisation that the AI revolution will have all the effects the global elite have hoped and planned for, but the resultant power and all other benefits will flow to all the wrong people!
This Wednesday morning at 3AM (there's a song title in there somewhere) I was gently raised to consciousness by a somewhat premature blackbird to the news, from the perceptive, logical and rational Tom Bower, that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex plan to rebrand themselves as "The Spencer family." Here is the GB News video in question, though to get to Mr Bower you first have to witness the rather lovely Miss Kelly Osbourne not mincing any words at all. Which is good fun, but killjoys can scroll past her:
"Spencer" is probably the second most common Anglo-Norman surname after "Norman" and whilst the Duke of Sussex may assume that the inhabitants of Althorpe House in Northamptonshire are the only Spencers who need to be consulted about this (I cannot believe that the Duke and his Duchess might have failed to consult Earl Spencer, at least), they are but one cell in a global Spencer diaspora numbering at least in the tens of thousands and now covering an impressive range of ethnicities. Unless the Duke plans to consult us all, and he doesn't display any awareness that the rest of us Spencers even exist, it would be courteous of him to follow the politically-perceptive example of his great-great grandfather King George the Fifth and adopt a new and somewhat more unique family name.
It would need to be something that captured the popular imagination and which the public might start using of their own accord, rather than being woke-bullied into using it by endless pressure and coercion. And if it neatly epitomises his brand,it might remain in popular usage for his lifetime and for generations to come:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Absalom-Jezebels!
The most dangerous leader in the world is not Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei or Kim Jong Un, but someone whom the Biden White House and the Cleverly Foreign and Commonwealth Office see and promote, not as the author of ongoing genocide against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities, but as a dear and trusted partner who "must not be isolated", which is precisely what both the White House and the FCO routinely seek to do to Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Un.
What makes Xi stand out from all the other despots is not the size and strength of his economy, nor his nuclear and biological arsenal and his conventional armed forces, nor even the unprecedented levels of surveillance and control he exercises over his subjects. Xi distinguishes himself by his willingness to lay plans of extermination, not against dissidents or some scapegoat ethnic group (he's doing that already without troubling the White House and the FCO in any way) but against his own Han ethnic majority, and on a scale to dwarf all previous acts of genocide.
The embedded YouTube video, below, describes a three point plan by which Xi Jingping plans to create manual jobs on construction sites for eighty million University and College graduates (a counsel of ruin and despair in and of itself), by sending a matching eighty million existing internal migrant construction workers (over fifty years old) "back" to countryside areas of extremely marginal fertility to grow grain. He also creates a uniformed militia with unprecedented powers even for Communist China, and their mission is to rigidly control every single act of agriculture or environmental management in the areas to which the eighty million "retirees" are being forced to go and this affects the existing resident population of those areas as well as the retirees. The third point of the plan appears to be the deliberate prohibition or sabotage of any act of agriculture by any of the participants that might allow them to feed themselves and their immediate neighbours, let alone earn revenue to pay for all the non-food necessities of life.
And, note very well, cash is also being extorted and drained from both the existing residents and the retirees at every turn. Resources in the affected areas that might enable life to continue, such as vegetable gardens, livestock and even orchards, forests and windbreaks of trees (some planted on the orders of Xi's predecessors to alleviate the damage done by Mao's policies of deliberate famine-creation) are being systematically destroyed. Freezers are being confiscated to stop "peasants" being able to preserve fresh food. The eighty million retirees are being transported to a land where every cupboard is bare before they even arrive. This differs from the notorious genocide of the Namib people in South West Africa by Imperial Germany at the turn of the twentieth century in only three respects:
The (possibly only initial) number of victims is two orders of magnitude greater.
The victims are mostly the same race and ethnicity as the militia forcing them into a desert to die and the leader ordering this to happen.
The desert itself is being artificially created for the purpose as part of the policy!
The motive and "justification" for this has been frankly stated that the "retirees" haven't funded their own retirement (they have only ever been paid enough in any given week to keep them alive for a week and they therefore expected to keep working till they dropped) and most only have savings to last for about a year and their own funeral. And it seems unlikely that the eighty million aspiring young university and college graduates taking their place will ever be paid enough to fund their retirement either.
It has been stated (not by anyone connected with Xi) that all this is to provide jobs for young middle class ex-students to stop them rebelling. That may be a short-term benefit in Xi's eyes, but the reality is that a whole tier of the Chinese workforce has been given the same status as Vladimir Putin's "disposable infantry" in that they will be given jobs, and given no choice but to do them, until they become infirm or it becomes expedient to give those jobs to someone else. At which point they will be euthanized by transportation to a place where human life has intentionally been made impossible.
Not only does Xi condemn China's working class to a miserable death in an arid dustbowl of his creation: he is putting China's middle-class youth in the place of the old working class, both in the workforce and in the death queue.
Western viewers of the video below will, on their first viewing, be most appalled at the environmental damage, but the real atrocity is that the environmental disaster is an intentional instrument of mass human execution.
Somewhat presciently, in my novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row" (written and first published in 2018) the issue which finally triggers a civil war between opposing wings of the CCP boils down to "The Faction's" denial of the right of workers to make safe and sensible investments towards their own retirement. (Workers are fleeced, instead, by investment instruments all linked to the property market bubble.)
It may seem to many that the very worst thing they can imagine, is a campaign of genocide against a religious or ethnic minority. And it probably is the worst concept that any of us can truly grasp, because it's the worst thing that happened (more than once) during the twentieth century.
We can, however, reason (but not really grasp) that once the campaign of genocide starts against an ethnic majority the only limiting factor on that genocide is everyone being dead.
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 22nd
of June 2023
Image copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 1999, all rights reserved
* * * *
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 26th of
September 2023.
