wot i red on my hols by alan robson (assisto liberoque)

M-O-O-N Spells June

I’m a sucker for time travel stories so I was very pleased when I stumbled upon a series of novels by Jason Ayres. The stories all have the same structure and the books can be read in any order. The connections between them are minimal.

The basic premise that ties the series together is simple and intriguing. There exists a bracelet of unknown origin that is in control of time. At the end of every year the current holder of the bracelet passes it on to the next custodian. The bracelet then takes its new wearer exactly forty years into their past where the custodian will re-live a year of their life. However they retain all the memories of what has (had) happened over the next forty years and during their year in the past the bracelet encourages them to live the year differently this time around, to change things (hopefully for the better) for both themselves in particular and for the world in general. So when they leave the past and return to their own time not only will their own life have turned out differently (and with luck will have improved in quality), but the world itself will also be a better place as well. Then they pass the bracelet on to its next custodian. Lather, rinse repeat...

The opportunities for change during their year in the past are not always obvious. The bracelet tries to help but its advice is often ambiguous and sometimes it point blank refuses to allow its wearer to attempt to change things at all. It seems that some parts of the time stream are immutable. For example, in 1980 - A Year in the Life of Keith Diamond the eponymous Keith Diamond tries in vain to curb the depredations of the notorious sexual predator Jimmy Savile. In 1980 Savile was a well loved (and well protected) show-biz celebrity whose vile habits would not be exposed until well after his death in 2011. In 1980 he was untouchable. There was absolutely nothing that Keith Diamond could do to alter that. But never mind – Keith does manage to stop a group of terrorists from exploding a nuclear bomb in the heart of London. So, swings and roundabouts I suppose.

In 1981 - A Year In The Life Of Nick Taylor Nick is only a small child back in 1981. His major task, from his point of view anyway, is to somehow stop his mother from being killed in an aeroplane crash. But how much influence does a child have over the course of adult people’s lives, let alone his own? How can he persuade his elders and betters to change their minds and stop his mother from getting on the plane? Tantrums won’t do it, they are just a manifestation of childish hysteria. Something much more subtle is required…

In 2022, Wendy Wood is spiralling downwards. She has recently had a stroke and is now confined to a mobility scooter. She was once a (semi-professional) singer and she still retains some small remnant of her powerful voice. In 1982 - A Year In The Life Of Wendy Wood she welcomes the chance to return to 1982. Perhaps this time she can avoid the mistakes that derailed her singing career the first time around. And perhaps she can change her lifestyle so as to avoid the stroke that has robbed her life of its quality.

The major attraction of these novels is the clever manner in which the characters go about solving their individual problems. Along the way Jason Ayres also gives us a lot of thoughtful analysis and commentary on the social and political mores of the UK in the 1980s which is utterly fascinating, particularly for those of us who lived there through those years. I actually left Britain in early 1981 and emigrated to New Zealand so my experience of the world described in the later novels is necessarily limited. But I kept in touch to some small, slow extent (snail mail between friends of course – after all, it was more than forty years ago!) and I recognised a lot of what Jason Ayers was telling me. It was nice to see those years again and to recollect them in tranquillity now that the tumult and the shouting have subsided. It made me see them in a different light and perhaps if you and I had the chance to live again for a year in 198-something-or-other we’d have a better appreciation of the times, just like Keith Diamond, Nick Taylor and Wendy Wood do…

* * * *

When you have read three time travel novels in a row the only thing you can do next is read another time travel novel. So I picked up A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong. It tells a very different story and has a very different structure from Jason Ayres’ novels but it’s equally as clever and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The story starts on May 20th 2019 when a Canadian detective called Mallory Atkinson is visiting Edinburgh to be with her dying grandmother. While out on a jog one evening, Mallory passes an alley and hears the cries of a woman in distress ringing through the darkness. She goes to the woman’s aid, but she herself is then attacked and loses consciousness.Meanwhile, on May 20th 1869 housemaid Catriona Mitchell has been enjoying a half-day off which came to an abrupt end in an alley where she was attacked, strangled and left for dead.

Somehow those two events, exactly one hundred and fifty years apart are inextricably tangled up with each other.

Mallory wakes up in Catriona's body in 1869 (and presumably Catriona wakes up in Mallory’s body in 2019, though we learn nothing of that in this novel). Mallory soon learns to adjust to the reality of her new life as a housemaid to Dr Gray,  an undertaker in Victorian Scotland. Not only is Dr Gray an undertaker, he also has a strong interest in the pathology of death and he is often engaged as a medical examiner by the police.  He has recently taken on a new case. A young man has been tortured and strangled in a manner intriguingly similar to the attack on Mallory herself. Could it be that her 2019 attacker has swapped identities with Catriona’s 1869  attacker in the same way that she and Catriona have done? She begins to hopes against hope that perhaps catching the murderer of this young man will open up a path that will take her back to 2019…

Mallory’s knowledge of twenty-first century forensic pathology and her expertise as a detective contrast strongly with the relatively primitive state of the art in 1869 and it isn’t long before Dr Gray has to grudgingly accept that her skills can be useful to him. And now the game’s afoot! So to speak…

The strength of the story comes from the very clever way that Kelley Armstrong has integrated Mallory’s twenty-first century attitudes with the Victorian sensibilities of nineteenth century Scotland. Mallory introduces Dr Gray to a whole new vocabulary ("serial killer" is a phrase he finds particularly useful). Meanwhile Mallory is also learning how to fit in with the, from her point of view, rather constraining lifestyle of the times – she really, really, really misses her phone. How can she live without google?

Kelley Armstrong has done a magnificent job of bringing Victorian Scotland to life – her society feels very much lived in and real and the occasional solecisms (on both sides) vanish in the melting pot of the story. It’s all very cleverly done.

* * * *

I’ve long been a fan of the so-called Tartan Noir genre of detective fiction – grisly humorous stories set in Scotland and infused with a unique blend of hard-boiled detective fiction and Scottish literary tradition. I was browsing a list of writers generally associated with the genre and I came upon two authors whose names were new to me. Naturally I had to investigate…

Lin (short for Linda) Anderson has written a long series of novels about a forensic pathologist called Rhona MacLeod. Driftnet finds Rhona summoned to a squalid block of flats where she is confronted with a truly shocking scene. A young teenage boy has been asphyxiated during anal sex. His body is covered with bite marks and there is evidence that his testicles were gnawed away post-mortem. The case quickly turns into an investigation of paedophilia which involves both the highest and the lowest in the land.

In Torch, Rhona investigates a series of arson deaths in Glasgow and Edinburgh. At least one of the victims was raped before being burned to death when the building was set alight.

I have to confess that I didn’t enjoy these books very much at all and I doubt if I will bother reading any more of Lin Anderson’s novels. The subject matter was unbearably grim and the author never flinches from describing the gruesome details  with an almost voyeuristic glee that is really quite off-putting. Normally a "proper" tartan noir novel would leaven the nastiness with enough sardonic humour to make it bearable. But Lin Anderson appears to have no trace whatsoever of anything even approaching a sense of humour – all she seems to want to do is wallow in grotesqueries. It doesn’t help that Rhona herself is a very irritating and wishy-washy character whose personal and professional lives both drift from crisis to crisis, most of which are directly caused by her own vapid inability to control her impulses.

In search of something to take the taste away, I turned to the second new name on the list. Alan Park’s novel Gunner turned out to be everything a tartan noir novel ought to be, and a lot more besides. I loved it!

The story is set in 1941. Joseph Gunner used to be a policeman in Glasgow, but he left the force and joined the army when war was declared. He was seriously wounded in the fighting at Dunkirk and now he has received a medical discharge from the army. On his return home he is approached by his old boss Malcolm Drummond who drags him, somewhat unwillingly, into the investigation of a very strange crime – a corpse has been found in the rubble of a bombed out building after an air raid. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about that in and of itself – there are always corpses to be found following an air raid – but this corpse is rather odd. Someone has gone to great lengths to disguise its identity. The jaw has been smashed to pieces and the fingers have all been chopped off. With no dental remains and no fingerprints it is impossible to find out who this person might have been though other more indirect evidence suggests that he might have been a German POW. And then another similarly mutilated corpse turns up. Clearly something significant is going on...

Several threads bind this complex story together. The war against Germany is reflected in microcosm as Glasgow’s hard men fight each other for control of the city. The Glasgow police themselves are not without sin here – Drummond, Gunner’s boss, is notoriously corrupt and is himself deeply involved in the struggle. That was one of the many reasons why Gunner had been so glad to leave the force behind him in the first place when the war broke out. Unfortunately for Drummond, it turns out that he has backed the wrong side in the conflict.

Meanwhile, the mutilated German corpses are attracting not only flies but also the attention of a large number of MI5 agents who appear to be engaged in some sort of internal conflict. One faction is in favour of whatever complex action it is that is going on behind the scenes and one faction is firmly against it. Gunner and Drummond are caught uneasily in the middle.

Matters come to a head and start to clarify when Rudolf Hess flies from Germany to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate a peace treaty with the allies. The final resolution of all these plot threads coalesces around the failure of Hess’s mission and the reasons for that failure. The dead Germans were being groomed to play a significant role in that mission, and when they failed to come up to scratch, they were disposed of. But perhaps some others remain...

As an added bonus, the story also provides a very convincing explanation as to why the most persistent of the many conspiracy theories that have attached themselves to Hess’s mission over the years might very well be true. Perhaps the reasons for the mission’s failure and for Hess’s subsequent imprisonment are actually very different from the accepted historical wisdom. It’s all really rather satisfying. Tartan noir at its very, very best.

Gunner proclaims itself to be the first book of a new series. I am greatly looking forward to reading the rest of them as and when they appear.

* * * *

I’ve been a fan of John Cleese ever since I first heard him in I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again which was broadcast on the old BBC steam radio in the mid 1960s. I followed his career avidly through various radio and TV programmes culminating, of course, in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was an incredible showcase of profoundly intellectual hilarity the like of which has never been seen before or since.

Cleese moved on from there to write and perform in Fawlty Towers,  a programme that many people consider to be the greatest British TV sitcom ever made.

Fawlty Towers concentrates on the misadventures of short-tempered, misanthropic hotelier Basil Fawlty and his acid-tongued wife Sybil. Each episode revolves around Basil's snobbish efforts to raise the tone of his hotel and his increasing frustration at the complications and mistakes (largely his own) that prevent him from doing so. These setbacks frequently drive him into hysterical temper tantrums.

I must confess that I have never been much of a fan of the show – it veered far too close to farce for my taste. I have always found farce to be more than a little embarrassing and unfunny. I felt sorry for poor old Basil Fawlty’s predicaments even though they were largely of his own making. That made it quite impossible for me to laugh with him, for he himself was neither amused nor amusing, and laughing at him felt far too close to cruel mockery for comfort. Nevertheless I have to admit that Cleese carried it off brilliantly and the show did sometimes make me laugh, albeit somewhat reluctantly. That says a lot for the cleverness of the scripts which were all written by Cleese himself in collaboration with his then wife Connie Booth.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the programme, John Cleese has now written Fawlty Towers: Fawlts and All in which he examines every single episode of the show, and tells us how it came to be written, rehearsed, filmed and edited. He tells us what worked, what didn’t work (and why it failed), and what he would do differently if he had to do it again. The result is an absolute gem of a book. Not only does it dispassionately dissect and analyse the show, it is also a hugely insightful treatise on the very structure of comedy itself. Why are some things funny and other things are not? Why do funny things stop being funny when they are looked at differently? Cleese has spent the whole of his life thinking very deeply about this and he shares the results of that thinking in this book.

But don’t make the mistake of assuming that such an intellectual approach will therefore make this a dull book. Quite the opposite – it is often laugh out loud funny because that, of course, is the way that John Cleese ticks.

One surprising omission in the book concerns the opening credits of the show. Cleese doesn’t mention them at all. Perhaps he had no hand in their creation? But they were very popular in and of themselves and were often a talking point among the cognoscenti the day after the episode aired. Each episode always opened with a shot of the Fawlty Towers hotel in the background and a sign in the foreground containing the hotel’s name. The name on the sign was different in every episode, usually being either a partial or complete anagram of the words "Fawlty Towers". My very favourite was in Season Two, Episode Five where the sign read "Flowery Twats", though I must admit that "Farty Towels" and "Flayed Owls" ran it a very close second.

* * * *

People leak, ooze, sweat, dribble and spit. We burst, we bleed and we squirt. Why do we do that? What functions do our various bodily fluids perform? Presumably they are essential to our life and health and yet despite this we have a very ambiguous and difficult relationship with our own excretions. Often we find them unhygienic and even repellent. But it was not always thus...

In Blood, Sweat and Tears, Ruben Verwaal examines the history of our bodily fluids, our changing perceptions about them and the practical uses that have sometimes been made of them (laudable pus, anyone?). In ten utterly fascinating chapters he talks in turn about Sweat, Saliva, Earwax, Blood, Menstrual Blood, Pus, Urine, Semen, Milk, and Tears and he shows us how each of these excretions drips with symbolism, mythology and its own rich cultural, scientific (and sometimes pseudo-scientific) history. Oddly, he makes no mention of bile, snot, phlegm or vomit. Perhaps a sequel is in the works...

Read this book and be gobsmacked (but don’t you dare drool).