Book review of Bibliotherapy by Molly Masters

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Reading list system for keeping your head (and heart) together.

(this review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

 

After a certain amount of preamble, necessary to explain that the book is to help you to choose books to actually read depending on your condition and position at the time, the reader is presented with a questionnaire so they can self-profile both their own character and their condition of life. This results in a reading list to help the reader at that particular moment.

It’s probably a good idea to go through ALL the questions every time this book is resorted to, because even if a person’s character does not change over time (hopefully it matures) the person’s perception of their own character changes often, especially during an emotional or actual crisis. And sometimes this is going to work better than others.

Reviewing this kind of work is very difficult for a seasoned reviewer, because we might read almost anything without any thought as to whether it is good for our mind, let alone our soul, but the possible lists are mostly fairly sound and in some cases excellent. Almost any reader, at almost any point in their life, is going to benefit from reading “A Long Petal of the Sea” if they haven’t read it already. [That sentence will have to come out before this gets past the Amazon censor-bot!] The exception is a certain amount of selection bias in the list offered to those who might be pondering issues of gender identity. Where the dilemma is more about how to actually do things of a sexual nature, the only perceptible bias is towards encouragement to get on with the job.

There might be readers for whom this could have awkward consequences, but they probably won’t sue.

Bibliotherapy by Molly Masters is published by Harper Collins of the 12^th of September 2024.

Book review of the Witchfinder’s Assistant by Ruth Goldstraw

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Fighting superstition and injustice with faith and professionalism amidst the English Civil War.

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This is an engaging and absorbing historical novel set in a period when political, military and religious differences had separated most factions in England from the counsel of those who might have restored mercy and sanity and the author does a good job of conveying this. Sometimes this makes for an uncomfortable read, but it’s still compelling.

Parliament has the best of the soldiers and it is only they, and the servants and farmers, who supply any degree of professionalism. The Royalist soldiers are more of a rabble and feared by ordinary people. Parliament and the New Model Army will win, in part because they give ordinary people less to fear and resist, but also because they concentrate their efforts on the right objectives.

But members of Parliament and the magistrates acting in their name (but under no effective discipline during this period) have little concept of professionalism whilst the clergy on the side of Parliament are effectively in a bidding war with each other to prove their radicalism and “piety” in order to gain preferment once the war is won. They are all for rooting out evil and hanging it, whilst only a brave minority of Christians and those otherwise at the bottom of the social structure are feeding the poor and comforting the sick. In this splintered society, with “moral” leadership from the incompetent while the men of sense man the ramparts, predators of more than one sort have almost a free run. Except that Master (and former Captain) John Carne was too injured at the battle of Edgehill to man a rampart in the foreseeable future and is obliged to move, with his “strange” and somewhat vulnerable wife, to live in a small Shropshire village and seek employment with the excitable and agenda-driven local magistrate.

What starts out as an exercise in protecting his employer from embarrassment, soon sees Master Carne trying to protect an innocent from his employer’s desire for a witch-hunt , then solve a very real murder, then several murders, all in a community that would be better served by completing its physical defences against an inevitable Royalist attack. Then his employer, apparently frustrated by Carne’s patient dismantling of the first witch-hunt, comes for someone much closer to Carne. He has to summon his strength, his logic and his faith that his God does not do or countenance such evil, to win the fight.

(The next paragraph may need to be excised in order for this review to pass the Amazon “swim test!”)

At first sight the nonsensical nature of the unchallengeable assertions of fact by authority figures in the witch trials makes their evil seem comfortably far away from us in the 21^st Century, but whilst the legal system now has safeguards against such obvious nonsense, the nonsense that can be presented by prosecution counsel, admitted by the judge and go unchallenged by defence counsel just as long as it’s wrapped up in chants of pseudo-scientific jargon and backed by screens of state-funded power-point charts, is essentially the same. And the effect of baseless accusations backed by “evidence” made unchallengeable by false-science rather than false religious dogma also has EXACTLY the same effect of causing the innocent target of the accusations to doubt their own grip on reality and thus doubt their own innocence. In the 21^st Century as in the 17^th Century, real criminals known just how to exploit this sort of dogma and the madness it brings. This is an historical novel for our own times.

The Witchfinder’s Assistant by Ruth Goldstraw is published in the UK by Harper Collins on the 13^th of September 2024

Book Review of Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift

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Infiltrating the Gestapo and fighting famine.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This historical adventure is set in that part of Northern Holland which remained in German hands after the failure of Operation Market Garden to secure a crossing across the Rhine. The circumstances lead intelligence chiefs in London to base their assessment of future Dutch needs on what is happening in the liberated parts of Holland (there’s all sorts of political battles between different Dutch factions who are supplying lots of information about their own position, which seems to be none of London’s business by this stage) whilst the success of the Gestapo and other NAZI security forces in crushing resistance cells is denying London even the most basic information on the state of things in occupied territory. And things in the occupied territory are almost unimaginably bad and getting steadily worse as the NAZIs punish the Dutch population still under their control for the liberation of the rest of the country.

Agent Ludo, who has been through so many sets of false papers that she’s almost forgotten who she really is, has to flee from a failed operation and is immediately tasked with befriending a senior German officer in the hope of gaining the information needed to rescue a senior resistance figure from custody and probable execution, not so much to continue the fight as to use his respected position with former resistance groups in the liberated territories to get across, to those who might actually do something about it, the crucial fact that the entire civil population of the occupied area is on the brink of starvation in a freezing winter without any fuel.

Everything for Agent Ludo goes from bad to worse, as it does for her fiancé who has embarked on a fairly hare-brained rescue mission despite having no clear idea about where Ludo is or what she is doing. This mirrors the general state of things in Northern Holland and anywhere else the collapsing NAZI regime still holds power. In the end, Ludo and her associates gamble and sacrifice everything, including their own lives in some cases, on the faintest chance of getting food to the starving population.

Ludo loses almost every battle she fights, but her victory is that she keeps coming back for another try until the SS and Gestapo begin to scarper or fold into mental breakdown and the RAF starts to airdrop food, unopposed, but also too late for many. This novel is morally uplifting but emotionally unsparing. A male author would have shied away from this, but it needed to be written.

 

Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift is published in the UK on the 12^th of September 2024 by HQ.

Book Review of Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa.

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A magical year and the triumph of innocence over loss.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

This novel is set mainly in the Olympic year of 1972 and this is important because whilst America and the Soviet Union saw the Olympics as a platform from which to present their competing visions for the future of the world, Japan saw the Olympics themselves as a model of the world as they might like it to be and approached the games with wholehearted and innocent enthusiasm.

The story is narrated by a young girl, Tomoko, who has lost her beloved father and has gone to stay at her uncle’s house whilst her mother retrains to be able to support them both by herself. It’s an amazing house with a big garden, complete with pet pygmy hippo, “Pochiko” and there’s a whole household of fascinating characters for Tomoko to get to know. But she’s not “living with her uncle” as she expected, because he’s hardly ever home. Indeed, he only seems to reappear when Tomoko’s asthmatic cousin, Mina, has a health crisis requiring hospitalisation. (This happens several times.)

Mina seems very weak and frail, but also proves to have developed both her intelligence and her imagination to an unusual degree and Tomoko quickly comes to admire Mina and then to love her (she has to make a effort to correct someone who assumes they are sisters). Mina collects matchboxes with little original cartoons on them, and writes a little story inspired by the cartoon on each matchbox. This is an interesting discipline, because there’s a limit on the number of characters she can inscribe on a small matchbox!

The members of the household (including Grandma Rosa, who is German) all pursue their own daily routines, not avoiding each other at all, but not necessarily being interested by the same thing until the two girls develop an interest in volleyball when they realise that some of the Japanese men’s Olympic team are by no means bad-looking! They learn the rules and imagine themselves being able to play (the reality differs a little) and the whole household, like the country, becomes interested in the Olympics and especially the volleyball!

Then the Israeli team are taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists and athletes are killed. This is shocking and a huge disappointment to Japanese sports fans in general, and to Grandma Rosa and her family in general, because her sister’s family died in Auschwitz. (This does not imply she was Jewish herself: about six million Jews and Roma died in the Holocaust; the concentration camp system also claimed the lives of another five million or so people selected on non-racial grounds, or who simply got in the way of the SS.)

It is a tragedy and one which wounds Rosa and her family, but the games resume and continue, and the Japanese volleyball team wins the gold and returns as heroes. Not just because they won, but because they adhered to the spirit of the games throughout.

Tomoko’s uncle continues to be an intermittent presence and the girls continue to have adventures, including a meteor-spotting expedition to a reservoir in the mountains: they take Pochiko with them so she can have a nice nocturnal swim in the lake!

Christmas looms and Grandma Rosa takes charge, but there is a forest fire and a tragedy on Christmas day. The moment for Tomoko to go back to live with her mother is also drawing near and, perhaps inspired by the barely perceptible fluttering of an angel, she tracks her uncle’s other address down and, quietly but unmistakably, lets him know that Mina needs and deserves what Tomoko herself cannot have: her father’s presence.

 

Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa is published in the UK by Random House on the 15^th of August 2024.

Book Review of The Cornish Beach Hut Café by Jane Linfoot

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An unusually consequential cosy Cornish romance.

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

First things first: a cosy Cornish romance differs from a cosy Cornish murder mystery in large part by replacing the murderer with a property developer and those two literary devices being interchangeable a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century speaks volumes about Cornish and English culture and where we are all headed. The property developer is seen mostly at a distance and serves to present the more central characters with an ill-defined but looming threat which gets them all (mostly) working together for the common weal. This is all seen through the eyes of one Florence May, who is trying to build a new life after health issues have brought an end to her most important relationship, her hopes of a family and even her ability to voice “audible” books for a living. In the love and hope of her friends, she overcomes all of these issues through a series of hilarious accidents which teach her to accept that she deserves a new life and that others are perfectly willing to share her worst moments as well as her best.

There’s quite a lot of baking, too, and the recipes are all at the back of the book.

The Cornish Beach Hut Café by Jane Linfoot is published in the UK as of the 12^th of July 2024 by Harper Collins.

Tacitus, John Bunyan and The Hope Accord

 Here is a link to the "Hope Accord": https://thehopeaccord.org/

The past four years or so have seen quite extraordinary levels of censorship and even officially-sanctioned coercion and gaslighting, to protect certain actions* and the officials responsible for putting them into effect, even from informed scrutiny stopping well short of criticism, never mind opposition or attack. Regardless of whether the reader's stance is to agree with or furiously condemn the principles put forward in the accord, readers might want to read it before coming to either position. And if the reader already has a position on this subject the only thing they have to fear from reading the according (it is not a long or wordy document), is having their mind changed. And it is the fear that people might have their minds changed which lies behind all censorship in the modern world and back, far into history.

* Those actions were pandemic-related in this instance, but alarming precedents were set right across the board.

 There is an article about censorship in the Roman Empire on the following link, which might ring a few bells with any reader familiar with the treatment of those reckless enough to question almost any aspect of the pandemic response, let alone the "natural" origin hypothesis of the completely novel pandemic virus itself:

https://brewminate.com/book-burning-and-censorship-in-the-ancient-roman-empire-and-provincial-roman-egypt/

 From which I have copied, as fair use, this quote of Tacitus which might even be out of copyright by now:

After concluding the speech he gives to Cordus, Tacitus says in his own voice:

The [senate] ordered his books to be burned by the aediles; but copies remained, hidden and afterwards published: a fact which moves you the more to deride the folly of those who believe that by an act of despotism in the present there can be extinguished also the memory of a succeeding age. On the contrary, genius chastised grows in authority; nor have alien kings or the imitators of their cruelty effected more than to crown themselves with ignominy and their victims with renown.

 As the article makes clear, Tacitus believed in freedom of speech for himself and other well-read members of the Roman elite, however dissident they may have been. Perhaps a better (and somewhat more modern) example comes from 1673 AD and the pen of John Bunyan, because no-one can accuse the tinker from Harrowden of being a member of any "privileged elite" and, in consequence, he was arguing not only for the right to speak, but also for the right to a courteous hearing! Which is precisely what members of Parliament, including my own MP, so shamefully and stupidly denied to Mr Andrew Bridgen by running away with hands over their ears in front of TV cameras when he broached those issues related to the Hope Accord in the House Of Commons, whether in the chamber or the committee room and Westminster Hall.

Bunyan wrote this to William Kiffin:

What need you, before you have showed one syllable or a reasonable argument in opposition to what I assert, thus trample my person, my gifts and graces, have I any, so disdainfully under your feet? What kind of a YOU am I? And why is MY rank so mean, that the most gracious and godly among you may not duly and soberly consider of what I have said?

Across three and a half centuries, Bunyan addresses our political and medical-scientific establishments on our behalf. Many of those who fled from Mr Bridgen because they feared he might be speaking the truth, have lost their seats now and are indeed crowned with ignominy, but many remain in Parliament. This gives them a chance to doff their crowns of ignominy by giving the Hope Accord a polite hearing, or at least reading it before vilifying, censoring and cancelling its authors and signatories.

Book Review of The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch

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The latest novel in a series of “cosy murder mysteries”

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

 

A twice-retired detective sergeant attends, mainly in order to sell meat pies, a music festival site accompanied by her teenage daughter, her mother, her dog, and her fiancé who is a serving detective chief inspector. The festival is well-described and comes across as a cheerful Cornish parody of the larger, grander, much more earnest and hippy-infested, Glastonbury festival in neighbouring Somerset. It is almost certainly meant to and has much gentle fun with this theme.

There then ensues a murder (of course) a drink-spiking, a kidnap and unlawful imprisonment.

There are some (very) faded rock stars, adults bravely taking an enlightened view of teenage soft drug consumption whilst consuming rather more meat pies than enlightened medical opinion would countenance these days, an obvious suspect whom no-one really wants to be guilty and a motive hidden in the mists of time and on the other side of the Atlantic. These are good ingredients for a good story, and this is.

The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch is published by Harpur Collins on the 28^th of June, 2024.