Click here to ediI take back what I said about O’Brian’s depiction of adversity and calamity in The Unknown Shore (though not his tiresome overdramatization of excess). The terror and the magnitude of the seas off Cape Horn and the atrocious hunger, exposure, sickness and despair that the castaway sailors of His Majesty’s Ship The Wager underwent were all too real.
 
Grann’s book is the historical account of the ill-fated expedition that left Portsmouth in 1740 and the personal stories of the very few men who, years later, made it back to England against all the odds. It’s one of those chronicles that is so meticulously and carefully researched that the author has all the events and elements totally clear in his mind and is able to lay them out in a lucid and immediately apprehensible story. “A tale of Shipwreck, Murder and Mutiny” reads the subtitle, and so it is! A true story, rather than a dry history, and far more compelling than O’Brian’s fiction, which overlooks much of the real drama.
 
Unless things have changed since I was a lad (I do hope so), when history is taught at school, the one thing that is never brought home to youngsters is the fact that these events actually happened and these people actually lived. If you had been there, you would have seen Napoleon, Cleopatra or Siddhartha Gautama. That’s what fascinates me about written history these days: and Grann does make the events and people feel real. It undoubtedly helped that he went by boat himself down the Patagonian coast to what is still called Wager Island and saw the environment of that forbidding place, where the sailors were marooned. The permanent absence of food, save for a little wild celery and seaweed. The sleet and lashing rains. The raging seas and the vast distances to human habitation on the remote shores of Chiloe Island or Brazil. Seeing rotten planks washed up from the 280-year-old wreck would certainly have focused his mind on the veracity of the tale.
 
The Wager is well-paced, nicely structured and exciting. If you have the slightest penchant for naval history or seafaring yarns, don’t miss out on this one.

O’Brian’s early voyage on the pages of seafaring drama shows a writer in the learning stages of crafting character, ambience and story. He was clearly his own best pupil, because from the lessons acquired, he went on to write the fabulous 18-novel Aubrey-Maturin series.
 
In Byron and Barrow, we have the prototypes of his twin protagonists, and the fictional recreation of an ill-fated 18th-century expedition will provide a template for the stories to come. In the making of it all, O’Brian falls into all kinds of error and excess. When you start out as a writer, you have to throw it all out there and learn what you can from your mistakes. 
 
It means we accompany the two friends on not just challenging ordeals of shipwreck, hunger and exposure, but on extremes of endurance that outdo each other ad infinitum. Just when you thought the sea could not get more monstrous, the exhaustion more consummate, the deprivation more abject, they get even worse. In the later novels, the extravagance will be managed—or else heroes and readers alike would not make it out alive—and in those books, also, the characters will be properly developed and deepened.
 
While it is only right for an author to be on the side of their lead characters, it starts to grate when Jack and Tobias, even under protracted, unspeakable duress, never display the slightest meanness or selfishness. These examples of nobility of soul, disasters at sea, and gruesome trials on the inhospitable unknown shore, make for something of a dated ripping yarn, not least when the native Patagonians are depicted as brutal savages, with the exception of the converted Chilotans, who consequently “knew how to live like human beings”. This attitude might well have been the one prevalent at the time of the tale in the 1740s, but O’Brian writing in 1959 might have know better and tempered his account accordingly.

The tale remains a very fair attempt, with evidence of skill, pace and wit. Nonetheless, I would recommend anyone interested in reading O’Brian—and I do wholeheartedly recommend him—to skip this book, and the unhappy Wager, and set sail in “Master and Commander”, with Aubrey and Maturin on the Sophie.

I was talking to a lawyer last week about how all the state needs to do these days to disempower a citizen and turn them into a nonentity is to take away their access to internet and banking. The precariousness of status and autonomy in an untrustworthy world was a theme that came to prominence in the 20th century; in the artifice of our present, all smoke and mirrors and alternative truths, it conditions all that a person might propose in their life.
 
Philip K. Dick, as ever, has a whole lot of serious fun with the idea of a powerful individual rendered an unknown. His existentialist sci fi carries the reader forward on a wave of rooting for the flawed Taverner, dropping in occasional absurdist treats during the ride.
 
I got the feeling that Jason Taverner secretly knows that he’s a fraud from the moment he wakes up, and then plays out the destructive script of his worst fear: “I don’t exist.” In this alternative reality, Dick presents us with a warning of a police state of forced labour camps, the slaughter of students, the sterilization of blacks and a cult of the leader. He throws up philosophical and theological arguments and introduces mescaline to make Taverner and us question and wonder — and fear the dangerous power of fundamentalist religion twisted into meaninglessness. An abusive policeman declares: “All flesh is like grass. Like low-grade roachweed most likely. Unto us a child is born, unto us a hit is given.”
 
I found pleasing gravitas in a certain cultural weight leant to the novel by references that start out with Dowland’s lament in the title, respect shown by characters for Rilke, Brecht and Sibelius, and respect shown by Dick to his teenage character, Kathy, who is reading Proust, and who continues Taverner’s quotation from Finnegan’s Wake with: “When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks.” Together with Felix Buckman’s (the eponymous policeman) poetic reflections, they provide a kind of choral commentary.
 
At the same time, Phil Dick being Phil Dick, we have some priceless humour. The protagonist has set upon him a gelatine-like Callisto cuddle sponge, Kathy’s talking toy, Cheerful Charlie, brings strongly to mind Johnny Cab in “Total Recall”, and Buckman’s sister mentions a porn song called “Go down, Moses.”
 
Two other moments that jumped out at me were—in this 1974 novel—Taverner’s question: “Do you have an encyclopedia machine?”, and when Kathy asks in the Italian restaurant: “Are you responding to my warmth?” Really rather nice.

The Burroughs I admired in The Naked Lunch as a uniquely talented poet of the drugged body and mind, comes across here as an asshole. He’s still smart and brutally honest, able to bring a sinewy travelogue from another angle altogether, but it’s a self-indulgent, disrespectful one. He just lusts after young boys and the ultimate high on ayahuasca (the “yage” of the title). I’m not saying that today’s selfie-taking experience-seekers are any less shallow and self-absorbed, but I don’t want to read their letters, either.
 
His account of Colombia piqued my interest, having been to Cali, Popayan and Pasto. Decades later, the perennial poverty holding back development in living conditions makes these places sound little different, while USA and Europe were racing ahead. The procedure of random police checks on buses between these places —noting name, marital status, profession— in 1953 was unchanged in 1987.
 
Ginsberg’s later contribution amounts to little more than a cry for help after a bad trip on ayahuasca. The slim volume concludes with a “poetic cut-up” by Burroughs. It’s a risky style that he made work in Naked Lunch, but here it is two pages of random snatches, like jottings for a feverish diary that was never put together.

A thriller with wit and dark intent is just my cup of tea. Give it a female lead and I tend to like it even more.
 
This is the first in the Zoë Boehm series, although it would be more accurate to call them the Zoë Boehm and Sarah Tucker novels. An engaging protagonist, smart asides, plenty of intrigue and believable scenes make it a fine read.
 
The only way it falls down for me is that Herron sometimes makes hints about character or allusions to events that want to be returned to, developed or shown to be motivation, but are then left behind. An idea is sometimes introduced that could be made into a theme and then go towards tying the narrative together, but he doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity. The same goes for imagery. Down Cemetery Road was his first book and I wonder if he puts this right in later novels.
 
He’s better at working with characters who are basically decent people, possibly because he has more time for them. The baddies in this book have no saving graces and it kind of makes them into ciphers.
 
What you can’t fault is his neat, acerbic humour. By way of example: “a daytime burglary that went ‘tragically wrong’, according to the paper, as if there were some ideal template of burglary that this had failed to live up to.”

I might gripe a bit, but I’d certainly give another by Mick Herron a go. Maybe one of his Slough House “Slow Horses” books.

I imagined the book would be a journalistic depiction of rough living as witnessed by Orwell. What I hadn’t known or expected was that he had lived in these pitiful, abject conditions himself. If he did so voluntarily, he did so fully committed, at one point being unable to stump up the few pennies for a doss house and resorting to tramping. The late 1920s and early 30s were tough depression years in the cities and there many thousands living in unrelieved poverty. It might not be his finest writing, but who cares? The infernal kitchens in the bowels of the Paris hotel and characters he meets will make an impression on any reader. Orwell’s solidarity with common humanity shines through. Particularly memorable is Bozo, a destitute “screever”, or pavement artist, whose spirit and self-esteem remained intact: “if you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, I’m a free man in here’” —he tapped his forehead— “and you’re all right.”
 
There’s a remarkable bravery in this stance, because Bozo’s chances, once down on his luck, of recovering even a simple economic well-being were virtually nil. Similarly, the beggar has no hope of betterment, his or her plight is usually never their fault, and yet beggars, Orwell points out, are universally despised. Orwell reckoned it was because society considers making money a prime virtue. I suspect it is because we fear that we might descend to such an iniquitous condition ourselves. Our privilege and comfort are not guaranteed and we have no entitlement to them.
 
Orwell: “Beggars do not work, it is true, but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis etc. It is a trade like any other, quite useless, of course—but then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And a as a social type, a beggar compares quite well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout—in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite.”

For broad and deep knowledge of our humankind, a grounding in biological and evolutionary science has always seemed to me to be indispensable, and I have learned much from reading Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones, Jared Diamond, Matt Ridley et al. 
 
After hearing Robert Sapolsky talk about his long-term study of baboons and expound his findings in neurobiology in entertainingly accessible videos, I was keen to read his books, also. And, yes, there is plenty to learn in “Behave”, but be warned: this is more textbook than popular science paperback. You need a proper foundation in neuroscience to navigate it comfortably.
 
I once read Dawkins’ “The Extended Phenotype” and realized that I’d reached my limit for hard science. In “Behave”, I ended up fishing out the points and arguments that appealed to my interest and skipping the rest.
 
In particular, the functioning of the limbic system in that inescapable emotional madhouse called adolescence, and the development of the prefrontal cortex until age 25, by which time the brain works in greater balance. I also wanted to read the science behind the counterintuitive finding that conscious resolutions are already determined in a subconscious part of the brain and only subsequently reach consciousness, at which point we believe we are in charge and “make the decision”.
 
Anyway, by listening and learning with Sapolsky and also Sam Harris in their fascinating talks, I have come to entertain the amusingly humbling possibility that we have no free will. So that if I, with my atrophied cortex, decline to struggle through the tough science anymore, that was always the way is was going to be.

For the first time ever, I am finding it difficult to read fiction. But never before in my lifetime has there been such peril in the world.
 
I was drawn to Max Hastings’ account of the relief of Malta in 1942 because my father was on battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth, which followed the same route in Operation Tiger the previous year, although his convoy bypassed Malta to deliver vital armaments to Montgomery at Alexandria. My dad made light of it, but reading Hastings’ account brought home to me just how dangerous it was. Ships came under attack from Junkers bombers, Stuka dive bombers, submarines, torpedo motorboats and E-boats.
 
But if Operation Pedestal makes for hard reading —and it does— it’s because it is so pedestrian. Stuffed with lists, the chronicle is no doubt accurate, but this is no rousing narrative. Hastings simply doesn’t write with the depth and scope of prose of WWII historians such as Taylor, Bullock, Shirer, Arnold-Foster or Beevor.
 
I think I could stomach the harrowing stories of the sinkings of merchant and Royal Navy ships and the loss of life, but the style is too dry and factual, with only a smattering of human interest and anecdotes and no cheering triumph, even if the crippled tanker Ohio made it to port and Malta was enabled to survive. I didn’t get much greater insight into the events than I could have picked up by researching official reports and reading Wikipedia.

What is it with me and these books?
 
I am strongly attracted to the genre, yet struggle to find a Nordic author who really does it for me.
 
I was once asked as a boy my favourite colour. “Dark black,” I said. And this is what noir in the land of the endless winter night promises to be. The dark represents, of course, the Underworld of our unconscious, the unknown. Its thrill and its risk and its magical potentiality. Will it be disappointment or reward? Will the light go on and show you to be in an empty, manmade cellar, or a natural cave whose rock can be mined for something more valuable than gold? Is it a trap, or the only way out? A scenario where fortune favours the brave. Courage, said Aristotle, is chief among virtues, for it is the guarantor of all others. Something in the bleak and austere emptiness attracts the human soul. Its very featureless draws out the searching question. Does the winter offer a place of death or a hidden refuge, despair or the sheltered seeds of spring? 
 
So, then, in the overland netherworld, in countries which represent for us the quintessence of social normality, cool, calm and collected, conscientious citizens and intelligence ruling passion, the scene is set for the totally unexpected. I am ready to be darkened with delight.
 
Sweden
I started with The Laughing Policeman, the first in Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series and found it flat and uninspiring. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke had the same plodding out of sentences. Was it a clumsy translation? Or was the style just off? The prose is just so lifeless. There’s no rhythm. A series of sentence statements. No Hemingway or Elmore Leonard, this. The visual scenes are unclear (eg Beck under the bridge in Budapest) and the investigative solution humdrum.
 
Henning Mankell – Faceless Killers
I had high hopes for Kurt Wallender, but was neither charmed by atmosphere nor gripped by tightness of drama. Again, I don’t know if something was lost in translation, but there was no pace or tension.
 
Iceland
Snowblind by Ragnar Jónasson. Again, the tension fails to mount and hold. It drags and becomes repetitive. The revelation in the end is no great shakes. A darn shame. I have had a fondness for Iceland ever since I fell in love at first sight in Reykjavik post office.
 
Finland
I then tried The Man Who Died by Antti Tuomainen, for no better reason than it was the same title as a story of mine. In Tuomainen’s book, an overweight, terminally ill man springs into action in extraordinary ways and it’s all rather fatuous. Carl Hiaasen high jinks without the satirical solidity.
 
Norway
Jo Nesbo. Come on, Jo, I thought. Give me a cracking good read. Neh, it wasn’t to be. I found Blood on Snow simply unremarkable and I just gave up on Redbreast, one of the early Harry Hole series, after 150 pages and still waiting to be given a clue of what it’s about.
 
Writing for TV, on the other hand, has produced absolutely gripping Nordic drama in The Killing and The Bridge, not mention the wonderful Unbeforeigners.
 
Meanwhile, I continue to look for Scandi or other European noir writing with depth, brilliance and a lead character to rival, say, Philip Kerr’s splendid Bernie Gunther.

On this day three years ago, a tyrant with the cold of death where a heart should beat invaded Ukraine again to subjugate its land and people to his rule of fear. He has failed. He will always fail, because these people value themselves and their integrity in a way he cannot grasp. This is the aggressor’s profound and permanent defeat. An intimation of his inadequacy keeps the bloodless worm of his brain awake at night. Where another people would have crumpled, the Ukrainians have resisted the second army in the world. They love their own and to them their land is family.
 
This war started in 2014 with the illegal Russian annexation of the Crimea and occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of the Donbas region, where fierce fighting took place. That is the setting for this book. For many Ukrainians, especially those in the border regions who had grown up thinking of the Russians as difficult but viable neighbours, who spoke Russian and shared many cultural traits with them and decades of common history, the military assault was not just murderous and destructive, it was totally disorienting.
 
In Zhadan’s book, this confusion is reflected in the absence of clear references to Russian and Ukrainian sides. For a despondent mining town used to being under one form of onerous rule for so long, the occupiers are “the new ones” and the orphanage of the title is lost to a zone of battle that it cannot win. Pasha, the everyman hero of the novel, is a meek non-combatant, a teacher with a crippled hand, whose lone attempt to reach the orphanage-boarding school and bring home his nephew, Sasha, is the relentless subject of the book. 
 
Relentless because that’s what a war zone is. The destruction of house and home, school and store, everything people have worked for, everything broken down to abandonment, burning, fear, hunger, cold, rain and snow, muck and mutual distrust, pain, bodies and wild dogs. Page after page and through it all struggles Pasha past broken buildings, evading tanks and soldiers from both sides, “an empty school, a destroyed newsstand, a bullet-riddled obelisk, scraps of metal, burnt bricks, bloody clothes,” doubtful of himself always, imagining his nephew’s angry resentment for having been sent to the Internat in the first place.
 
“They can’t see the city, but long black streams of smoke are rising from over there. They have been since yesterday; it’s as if the ground has been ruptured and now something truly terrible is coming out from the earth and nobody knows how to stop that something, the worst thing, since nobody knows how it happened, how the earth split and released all its blackness…”
 
I was surprised that Zhadan presents the pitiful disarray and havoc as a kind of inhuman phenomenon that civilians and fighters of whichever flag are caught up in, and it seems a generous, nuanced and brave move to have Pasha and Sasha aided at one point by a civilian who is one of “the others”. Especially since the writer is such a stalwart supporter of his country (last year he joined the Ukrainian army’s 13th Khartiia Brigade). We all know that there is a very clear human agency behind the aggression with a name and a pasty face, but Zhadan prefers to push past the politics and centre on the misery that all people suffer on the ground in the midst of battle and carnage.
 
“The dark sunflowers, dried out by the summer heat, look like a scorched forest” and “the moon hovering over the crushed city is spreading the smell of a body chopped to pieces.”
 
When they reach the city defenders, uncle and nephew “walk down the street among the soldiers. There are more and more of them. Black pits under their eyes. The inflamed eyes, the parched mouths, and the screams—abrasive, loud, discontented—that they let out in an attempt to communicate.”
 
Only at the end do we hear Sasha’s thoughts, and in the shot-up streets of a neighbourhood that still stands, a kind of resolution rises from the meaninglessness of the war.