The Books I Read in May

Fiction

‘Search the Dark’ by Charles Todd

This is the third book in the Inspector Rutledge series.  Though written by an American they are set in Britain immediately after the First World War.  Rutledge is an amiable detective literally haunted by a man he executed as an officer during the war.  Many of the characters in the book have been damaged by the war which provides unpredictability in their actions and contrast with the setting.  The reason why I picked this particular book was because it is set in Dorset which I love.  One of the previous books was set in Cornwall.  It is clear that Todd has a love of these counties and a highlight of the book for me is his description of what marks Dorset out:

 

‘This was Hardy country.  But it was the difference in light that impressed Rutledge more than the author’s dark and murky characters.  There was a golden-brown tint to the light here that seemed to come from the soil and the leaves of the trees.  Not washed pastel like Norfolk, nor rich green like Kent.  Nor gray [sic] damp like Lancaster.  Dorset had been wool trade and stone, cottage industry and small farming towns strung along old roads that the Saxons had laid out long before the Norman conquest.’   

Todd refers to real places such as Charlbury, Lyme Regis and Kingston Lacy (which he wrongly spells ‘Lacey’).  He relocates Singleton Magna from Lancashire to Dorset, but Magna, as in Canford Magna and Fontmell Magna, is a name used in the county.  Stoke Milton does not exist in reality but there is East Stoke and Milton Abbas in Dorset and New Milton close by in neighbouring Hampshire. 

It is unsurprising that Todd uses American English to refer to things though this leads to the oddity of a Dorset person referring to a ‘program’ of films at a cinema.  I know that readers these days are unwilling to accept characters speaking in ways that might be more historically accurate, so I can forgive Todd sometimes modern turns of phrase, people simply will not accept anything else and bitterly complain when you try even just to give a flavour of the way people spoke at the time. 

There are a few historical errors that Dodd should have spotted given that he is writing novels in this period.  For a start it would have been difficult for anyone to be travelling in a Second Class train carriage at this time.  Very few train companies, and none going to Dorset, had them.  Instead there were only First and Third Class carriages.  Todd shows the detective having tea in the garden of a pub in the middle of the afternoon.  This would have been impossible even when I was a child, let alone back in the 1920s.  It was only really in the late 1980s that pubs began to sell tea or coffee.  It would have been more accurate for Todd to show them having tea at the hotel he mentions. No-one has cream in their tea in Britain. There is something called a 'cream tea', but this refers to the meal called 'tea'. In Britain both the drink and the afternoon meal are called tea and Dodd has clearly mixed them up. A 'cream tea' is a tea (the meal) at which you have a drink of tea and scones with jam and cream on them; there may be other foods such as sandwiches and cakes as well. People in Britain have milk in their tea and occasionally lemon.

A key error which I am surprised that he and his editor missed is a farmhouse with two inside bathrooms.  Again even in my youth, this would not happen.  Certainly in the 1920s, many houses lacked bathrooms entirely and the toilet would be outside even in cities let alone in the countryside.  If he had been referring to the house of the local lord of the manor, then that was acceptable, but for a run-down farmhouse, it would have never been the case.  It is likely that there would have been no running water to the house and it would have had to be drawn from a pump by the back door.

The story of a man seeing a woman and children from a train and thinking they are his lost family, hunting for them only for a woman to turn up dead is a good basis for the story.  However, the key difficulty is that the book takes far too long.  I know he wants to sum up the slow-moving nature of the countryside, but the toing and froing of Rutledge really diminishes the horrors he is referring to and the revelations that appear about various local families.  Cut by 50-70 pages (my edition of the book is 344 pages long) this could have been a far more effective novel with the balance between the horrors of war and the bucolic setting shown more sharply and so with more punch. 

Despite my interest in the setting, I felt reading this book was a labour and consequently would not relish reading others set in contexts with which I do not have such a connection. 

Non-Fiction

‘Louis XIV’ by Philippe Erlanger

It is quite stunning just how many biographies there are of the French King Louis XIV; a quick search of Amazon shows twelve let alone the books covering particular policies and significant individuals at his court.  I cannot remember why I bought this book.  It was published in English in 1970 and one in a while it can appear dated, most notably when speaking about Louis’s first queen Maria Theresa of Spain and says that her indolence and her ignorance might be attributed to her having some Arab ancestry, a bigoted comment that properly would not be tolerated these days.  Louis XIV’s long reign was a complex one but Erlanger is best when painting brief portraits of the people that Louis associated with.  He is good at highlighting phases in which alternate paths could have been taken, something I always like.  When he is dealing with the political manoeuvring and the incessant wars Louis engaged in, he is far weaker.  I came away from this book having less clarity about the period of the Frondes than I did before I started reading it. 

Erlanger’s pace accelerates as the action becomes more complex or pressing and you yearn for him to get back to issues from a period of greater stability.  Furthermore whilst he may be correct to use the designations such as ‘Monsieur’ and ‘Mademoiselle’ for members of Louis’s family, once you have got a few pages on you have forgotten who these signify and adhering to their actual names would aid comprehension. 

The book was written in French, I was reading a translation and maybe not being as familiar with French history as he may have expected his readers to be, I was more easily lost.  However, a key purpose of a biography is to allow you to understand better what motivated an individual and what they took part in.  Coming away from Erlanger’s book, I feel I do know more about Louis’s character and how it changed over the years.  However, in terms of the domestic political and international relations aspects of his reign, I would need to turn to a different source to get to grips with them.

Life After Europe

This is certainly a topic I know more about than many others as I used to teach on European Integration and even got to grips with the complexities of farming subsidies.  I do not need to tell you that the key political development in the UK of recent months has been the success of UKIP, a right-wing party primarily aiming to have Britain leave the EU.  Receiving around a quarter of the vote and going from 8 to 147 councillors in the local election has unsurprisingly attracted attention.  Though it is important to note that there are 165 Independent councillors and that the Conservatives have 1116, i.e. more than Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP put together.

Of course UKIP’s impact has been greater than simply the number of councillors it has.  It has again exposed the long-running fracture in the Conservative Party over the question of the extent to which even if the UK stays in the EU it actually participates in the political process.  This is because the Conservative Party has two main wings, one which is primarily business focused and welcomes being part of a vast free trade system and the other which is more nationalistic and simply baulks at the perception of giving any degree of sovereignty to any non-military organisation.  This fracture has not really troubled the Conservatives since the closing days of John Major’s administration in the mid-1990s, but is now back in force.

In recent days David Cameron has been compelled to accelerate the movement to a referendum and without anyone really noting this it has quickly mutated from being about redefining the relationship with the EU to the now trumpeted ‘in/out’ referendum.  Cameron has had to play some politics because he is coalition with the most pro-EU of the British political parties, the Liberal Democrats.  Labour has had an ambivalent attitude towards the EU through its history.  This is because back in the 1950s and 1960s it was seen as a project brought forward by conservative, largely Catholic, businessmen.  It was only in the 1980s when with the pressure that working people were facing in Britain and the EU’s introduction of labour and social policies that most, though not all, Labour members began to see a benefit in the EU, as it is now known.

One reason why Cameron is under so much pressure from UKIP is because, whilst it is primarily a single-issue party, it has also managed to adopt a populist stance that taps into a strong sentiment in British society personified by the presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who in fact has been the most successful ‘political’ author of the past decade.  Cameron has been weak on the populist side of Conservative support right from the start as I noted as far back as October 2010: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/camerons-blunder-with-electorate.html  The nostalgia for a kind of edited golden days of the 1970s when people were apparently free to damage themselves through speeding, not wearing seatbelts and smoking, is very strong in Britain.  Cameron, unlike both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, has never even attempted to speak to those Conservatives in Britain who are not wealthy, but in fact, make up the majority of the people who vote for them.  This is why Nigel Farage is succeeding where Jimmy Goldsmith and his rather elitist Referendum Party which was also anti-EU did not thrive.  Farage may flirt with racism but he manages to do it on the ‘down the pub chat’ basis of ‘I’m not racist but …’ which less alarms the bulk of voters than the more explicit rhetoric of Nick Griffin and the BNP.  Cameron, though elitist has a modern outlook which is all about high-tech global business.  However, that is not the world that the bulk of Conservative supporters feel comfortable with even contemplating.  Britain is a country which lives in the past and any attempt to move away from that, especially when people feel insecure in terms of jobs and the economy, is to make yourself unpopular: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/britain-land-that-time-forgot.html  This is why it may benefit Ed Miliband to adopt the trappings of ‘Old’ Labour at least to appeal to a sector of working people who liked the certainties of the past but with a more labour-focused approach.

Anyway, there are loads of commentators with more time to explore these issues so I will move now from the current political turmoil to look longer-term.  It is clear that there will be an in/out referendum.  Even if Labour comes to power in 2015 they will find it difficult to resist the head of pressure for this.  It is something that the bulk of the population have wanted for decades and had to accept assurances that it was not possible.  Now Cameron has opened the door, it cannot be closed again.  All politicians have to face the fact that the vast majority of the British public loathe the EU.  Many of the reasons for this loathing are based on misinformation which has been provided by the media decade after decade.  However, the support for UK membership of the EU is limited to business people who like the free trade aspect and the ability to bring in cheap labour legally from Eastern Europe and middle class people living in South-East England who own property in France or lower middle class people from Essex and Liverpool whose parents retired to Spain.

One key myth about the EU is that it compels Britain to accept regulations that hamper the freedom of Britons to be exploited and to have their environment wrecked.  The EU only got into social and labour legislation in the 1980s but it has meant better conditions for maternity leave and eventually for limiting working hours.  These things are seen as hampering the potential success of British business which feels compelled to work on a cheap labour, long hours approach with workers accepting lower wages as they compete for jobs against cheaper workers from Eastern Europe.  The ironic thing is that in terms of health and safety legislation countries outside the EU have gone down the same route.  In issues such as farming and fishing quotas Britain has always enforced these far more rigorously than the more pro-EU states like France, Germany and Spain.  It is the British government that has made these rules apply.  Yet, the propaganda portrays that the assertion of regulation comes from Brussels.

As Tony Benn has long noted, the EU does not have a democratic structure.  The European Parliament which all UK electors can vote for, is seen as the ‘government’ of the EU, in fact does not create legislation and is little more than a talking shop.  EU business is carried out by the Council of Ministers, the prime ministers and in some cases foreign ministers, of each of the member states.  It is no more than a club of democratic leaders.  Thus democracy is not direct, it is filtered through whoever is in power in each state.  Yet, this is not the perception that has been peddled to the British over all these years.  Of course, to a large extent, this is irrelevant, because the British even now we have a coalition government which is sort of working, we dislike other countries negotiating with us, we just want them to do what we say and leave us alone.

All EU members have nationalism and bigotry, it is an element of the modern nation-state.  However, the lack of travel by young British people and the general inability to speak foreign languages: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/british-and-foreign-languages.html  exacerbates the situation in which the only view of the EU is the one that comes from the BBC and is heightened by ‘The Sun’ and ‘Daily Mail’ even when people bother to read them.  It is far easier to make a scare about immigrants taking jobs and school places than explain the opportunities of the EU.  The sustained rise in the cost of living in Britain is making British people more and more insular.  It is expensive even to travel within the UK let alone abroad.  As a result, increasingly it is only the children of those who own houses in France that are experiencing neighbouring cultures and they are generally pro-EU already.

In the next decade, perhaps as early as 2017, maybe even before that, there will be a referendum regarding the UK leaving the EU.  There will be an overwhelming vote in support of immediately leaving.  There is no question of this given the extensive hostility to the organisation.  What will life be like once Britain is out of ‘Europe’?

The first thing is that trade would be affected.  I know this from working part-time in an import/export business which brings in goods from the USA and China as well as EU countries.  With EU countries the company pays not import duties and customers in those countries similarly can get their goods at the price they see on the website.  The moment the UK is outside the EU, this will stop.  However, we are fortunate that there is a drive for international free trade so leading to a reduction of tariffs and so the impact on British trade would be less than if we had left the EU in the Thatcher years.  Overall 48% of the UK’s exports in goods and services is with the EU; of all the EU states the UK is least dependent on trade within the union, but currently there is a trade gap with Britain importing £6.1 billion more items from the EU than it exported to these countries.

According to the Confederation of British Industry, the USA with over 300 million people takes 17% of the UK’s exports, but Germany with 80 million takes 9%, France (65 million) takes 6.6%, the Netherlands (16 million) takes 6.9%, Eire (4.4 million) takes 6.1%.  Thus both per capita and as an overall figure, the EU is the largest consumer of UK exports which would now not have free trade with.  You could argue that we could replace this with exports elsewhere.  This is certainly the case, but we need to move quickly.  Between them India and China have 2.3 billion people but only 2.0% of UK exports go to China and 1.2% to India; 1.1% go to Russia and only 0.1% to Brazil, the other two burgeoning ‘BRIC’ countries.  The USA only provides 2.8% of Britain’s imports whereas Eire sends 9.4%.  We have a large trade imbalance with the BRIC states with China providing 9.4% of Britain’s imports, India 8.0%, Russia 4.0% and Brazil 4.1% despite how little we sell to them.

Yes, it is likely the EU would remain Britain’s prime trading partner, even after we had left but access to the EU marketplace would be harder.  In addition, US and Japanese investors are already concerned that their manufacturing in Britain would now be the wrong side of the free market ‘wall’ and it would be better to move to a country remaining within the EU.  This might be of benefit to an independent Scotland.

Leaving the EU would provide a set-back for British trade that is clear.  However, this would fit in well with the populist UKIP attitude and to attract business and produce competitive exports, the UK would rely on cheap labour costs and deregulation.  Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lawson, has argued that EU regulation is hampering the financial companies of the City of London, always a strong element in Britain’s export of services, from making as much profit as they can.  The City of London while it may see itself as an autonomous element of the British economy is in fact currently integrated into it.  The separation is moving far too slowly.  This integration was why reckless activities by its bankers impacted so heavily on high street banks and the general public: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/myth-of-alternative-to-bank-bail-out.html  The cuts in welfare and other spending are a result of insufficient regulation of the UK banking sector and we need, not simply want, more regulation if ordinary people are going to be spared suffering once again from bankers pushing to make even more stupendous profits.  Regulation does not have to come from the EU.  However, this disengagement from the EU does seem to be increasingly linked by other extreme right-wing policies.

The one factor that probably wins greatest support from those seeking to leave the EU is the barring of the immigration of EU citizens, in particularly those from Eastern Europe.  This is where the populist view goes against that of the business community who love cheap labour that can be used to push down wages for British workers too and reduce overall costs.  The impact on the construction, catering and care industries as a result of the loss of these people would be great.  In 2011, there were 2.7 million people in England and Wales (not including Scotland and Northern Ireland) who came from other EU states, this included 579,000 from Poland and only 79,000 from Romania.  The peak for migration from Eastern Europe was in 2007 and the monthly figure is now a quarter of what it was that year.  The economic crash of 2008 naturally made the UK far less appealing.

The balance across the country is uneven; 27% of Polish immigrants live in London as do 56% of Romanians.  In the mid-2000s, 10% of the population of Southampton was Polish but this fell sharply after 2007.  The majority of citizens of other EU countries, 59% are from states which were in the EU before 2004, for example at any one time 300-400,000 French live in London making it the city with the sixth largest French population in the world.  There are around 270,000 Germans, 54,000 Spaniards and over 100,000 Italians.  This can be compared with the 761,000 Britons living in Spain permanently with a further 229,000 living there for part of the year; 150,000 live in France; 120,000 live in Germany and 29,000 live in Poland.  In total around 1 million British people live in other EU states though there are seasonal fluctuations; 660,000 Britons live in the USA.

With Britain leaving the EU, the rights of all these people to live in the UK would suddenly go.  This does not mean that there would be mass deportations because Britain does allow some immigrants even from outside the EU to settle here still.  What would make an impact is what laws restricting provision for immigrants would be introduced either before or after the exit from the EU.  Currently there are plans to limit the access of Bulgarians and Romanians to free health care and policies like this, it seems likely, would be quickly extended to other EU citizens with Poles being the top of the anti-immigration supporters’ list.  In such a climate many EU citizens would choose to leave anyway.  There was a fall in the Polish population in 2008 at the time of the economic crash, particularly noticeable in some towns.  The impact would be very varied across the country with London experiencing the greatest changes.  There are likely to be tensions especially for cases of the children of EU immigrants who have only lived in the UK or for people who have been living here for many years.  The large increase in immigrants from other EU states came in 1992 meaning that some will have been in the country for over two decades.  How would families in which one parent is British and the other an EU citizen be treated?  Expelling one, might mean the other going too.

Immigrants are always people with ‘get up and go’.  If you have worked in the civil service you will be familiar with working alongside multi-lingual French, Spanish and German workers.  The stereotype of the Polish and Lithuanian builder is based on a degree of fact as are Eastern European waiting and pub staff.  Thus, these sectors which employ a sizeable percentage of especially skilled or cheap foreign labour will suffer most.  There do not seem to be loads of UK people waiting to fill these posts and it seems that ahead of the exit a training campaign would have to be introduced to get young British people ready to fill the lower paid posts or see numerous shops and cafes close; certainly all the Polish grocery shops would disappear and again it is not as if there are Britons waiting to fill those slots.

A further challenge would come if there was a ‘tit-for-tat’ approach from EU states and Britons found they were no longer welcome living in Spain or France and either would be ordered to leave or face increasing restrictions of the kind these states’ populations would be encountering in Britain or that we already see for expatriates in Australia.  Spain would be foolish economically to expel Britons, but they may leave anyway in this new climate.  New locations, notably Turkey, still outside the EU, might become increasingly attractive in the post-EU era.  The difficulty for the UK is that whilst the bulk of immigrants coming into the UK are young and economically active, the bulk of emigrants are retired.  Thus, their return would not only not contribute much to the economy but add a new burden to health and social services.  It is actually of benefit to have so many old Britons looked after by Spain and Cyprus.  It would be interesting to see how the UK’s relationship with the Republic of Ireland would change.  There is a special relationship between the two countries which mean that Irish have more rights than other EU citizens.  This might shift once Britain left the EU and Eire remained in.  There are over 600,000 Irish living in Britain, again focused in specific areas including London; they are the only nationality group which has continued to see a fall in their numbers in the UK in the past decade before and after the economic crash.

Overall on leaving the EU in the following years around 2 million people might be compelled to leave the UK, primarily from London.  In general these would be economically active tax payers who up until the break had been living in the UK legally.  There is likely to be some influx of retired people coming back from EU states but also workers from Germany in particular.  Some would argue that this would solve unemployment in the UK in one go.  However, it ignores the number of businesses run by migrants that would close and the fact that many Britons are not skilled or willing to take the jobs that migrants fill.  Ahead of the exit British teenagers would have to be schooled in accepting posts as cleaners and waiters and be trained in construction and administration in order to fill the gaps left by the missing EU citizens.  Once the EU citizens had been removed, which group would the government turn on next: Commonwealth immigrants?

This represents the changes on a very clinical basis, and that is what people like UKIP want.  However, it would be far messier than that.  Anti-foreign attitudes would be crystalised and people suspected of being from another EU country even if this was not the case, would come under pressure.  Thousands of people in the UK are descendants of immigrants from Poland in the 1940s and from Italy, France and Germany going back decades; who would draw the line between them and more recent arrivals from these countries?  Some people would seek to buy false identities and hide from the authorities.  The policy would also dent the economies of certain districts especially in London, exacerbating the impact of the decline in EU trade on the UK economy as a whole.  Along with the people expelled, would go all the funds that these EU citizens have in the UK.  Of course, as in all these things, wealthy French or Germans or even Poles, could buy exemption, the government is always nationality blind when dealing with the rich.  It would represent the largest organised removal of people in Europe since the end of the Second World War which is unlikely to make Britain look good on the world stage.

Following the UK’s exit from the EU there would certainly be economic and social upheaval.  Britain’s exports and imports would fall and there would be gaps in towns from where EU citizens had been removed.  Attitudes would become insular and xenophobic, something that the UK does not need more of.

What would be the greatest impact for ordinary people?  Well, aside from the economy going downhill further, it would be the difficulty of going on holiday or even a ‘booze cruise’ day trip to France.  If you want to know the difficulties that would occur just ask an Australian or South African who has the right to permanent residency in the UK.  Just to go for a two-week holiday in France requires them to spend eight hours at the French Embassy in South Kensington.  They are interviewed; their children are interviewed separately and you have to battle with the officials to be allowed to have a parent present even with a five year old (this is based on my experiences in assisting a South African planning a trip to France).  They have to produce proof that they have a job in Britain and if they are self-employed, need a letter from their Chamber of Commerce.  Of course there are loads of forms to fill in.  The visa is only valid for six months so if you want to holiday in France again next summer you have to go through the whole process again.  From the Kent coast you can see France, but who is going to bother trying to go to visit it if you have to spend all of this time and expense even for a short visit.  As it is, the French and German embassies are going to be full of business people trying to get visas to visit to carry on at least a little trade with EU states.  No school trips to France or Germany any longer, it would just be too hard to organise.  I guess this severing of the UK (or perhaps by then England, Wales and Northern Ireland – ‘Ewani’ – we need a term for this grouping) from the EU, is the ultimate goal of UKIP.  We can then all speed around not seeing anything much beyond a Britain whose economy would be in further recession and prone to insularity and xenophobia.

Debilitated by Downtime

This posting has been put on this blog at work.  That is because for the past six days there has been no internet connection in the house I am living in.  Since the start of April I have been living as a lodger in the house of a Lithuanian family; they have a Lithuanian lodger too.  The rent was good especially in this part of London and the room seemed to come with a range of facilities: a bed, a table and chair (it is amazing how few people include these in a rented room), a very large wardrobe, curtains covering two-thirds of the window, two cupboard slots and space in both a fridge and a freezer.  I have use of the toilet, a rather unreliable washing machine and the first sunken bath I have ever been in, decked out in the most popular bathroom colour (according to the BBC website) of the 1970s: avocado.  When looking for rooms I specified I needed parking and wireless internet connection.  I still have the former, but the latter has now disappeared.

My laptop is my prime source of information and entertainment.  I was enjoying excellent internet service for three weeks, watching television (with a licence) and playing those online games that I had been unable to indulge in while living with my parents because they only had internet to one computer and that was a very old one with stronger defences against downloads than the Pentagon.  Then one Thursday morning I woke up and it had gone.  I explained this to the landlord and his wife explained it to him again in Lithuanian.  He rooted around but nothing changed and now I am left bereft.  Yes, there are other things I can do.  I still have games that run off disk and do not need me to log on to Steam or Blizzard.  Living with my parents I built up a good range of DVDs from charity shops which can last me a while.  To some extent I can still write fiction.  However, I find unable to apply myself to any of these things.

I discussed this problem with the woman who used to live in my house.  She had no internet connection for three weeks when a worker cut through the telephone line near her house.  Getting this resolved proved a nightmare as her provider has no control over the physical provision and even BT’s abilities to repair it were hampered by what work the council would permit.  This loss of internet affected her even more than me as she was unable to pay her rent or apply for housing benefit or a motorcycle licence and certainly found it impossible to apply for most jobs she is qualified for or to find property to rent in order to restart her business.  However, like me, she also found that there were mental effects, she found herself unable to concentrate even on activities that did not require the internet; she would go to bed earlier so that the evenings would not seem so long and dreary.  I am suffering these precise symptoms and cannot write even though, in fact, I have fewer distractions than normal.  Partly I have become so used to checking facts online that now I do not trust myself to write without making grave errors that I might not spot.  This sense has been fostered by online reviewers who see a book as completely contemptuous if it gets even very minor facts wrong, or indeed, diverges from the ‘accepted’ viewpoint on a topic.

It is incredible how mentally an internet connection has not only become necessary in order to carry out various activities, but we feel somehow debilitated when it is not there.  I am going to see if I can buy some add-on to enable me to link to cloud provision as otherwise I see my life suffering because I have lost my connection to this mental umbilical cord.  The only benefit seems to be that I am now in a better position to understand the feelings that teenagers feel when they have lost their smartphone or have not checked it in the past ten minutes.

Books I Read In April

Fiction

‘Red Chrysanthemum’ by Laura Joh Rowland

I have been reading Rowland’s detective stories featuring Sano Ichiro and set in late 17^th century Japan for many years.  The stories are great for conjuring up the era and she has a range of interesting characters both allies and opponents of Sano in his role as official detective for the Shogun.  At times some seem overly cruel almost as if they have been written too large.  Some however, are amoral and political concerns entwine with many of the crimes featured.  This being the eighth book in the series, Sano has risen from being a detective to being chamberlain of Japan so even more prone to becoming entangled in political rivalries under the rule of an easily manipulated Shogun.  This story revolves around the castration and murder of Lord Mori apparently by Sano’s pregnant wife, Reiko.  This level of jeopardy for the couple counteracts the danger which often occurs when a fictional detective is successful and begins to rise through the ranks in that s/he becomes distant from the crimes and faces little risk in investigating them.

Rowland has used the approach of the movie ‘Rashomon’ (1950) with narrations of what occurred from different ‘witnesses’.  I worried that this was simply an affectation to give some greater energy to the Rowland’s writing which at times has seemed a little plodding despite the extremity of the crimes she features and the apparent risks her characters face.  However, she presents a range of unreliable narrators and this keeps us off balance.  If the publisher had not put the first chapter of the next novel in the back of this edition then you could believe that Sano might be executed himself, Japanese justice of the time tending to be all-encompassing.  I think the approach works well and I felt there was greater life in this novel than some of its predecessors in the series.  The development of other long-standing characters such as Hirata, who has risen to take over Sano’s previous role as chief investigator adds other dimensions though his martial arts tutor comes over as a stereotype.

Rowland never baulks from showing the harshness or injustice of the times she is portraying and as in previous stories we see characters at the pinnacle of society and in its depths.  The crimes are not skimped on and this leaves me wondering why I feel something is missing.  The politicisation of Sano and his wife to the end of the novel may give a clue and that is he still comes over as being too righteous and maybe we seek some of that amorality we see in other characters appearing in the central ones as well.  Maybe I am asking too much.  I will certainly continue to read Rowland’s Sano series and hope that with the political intrigues playing an ever larger part the next novel will have that final unidentifiable element that for me is missing and it will prove to be an outstanding rather than simply engaging historical crime novel. 

‘To Bring the Light’ by David Drake

This book was clearly inspired by ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ by L. Sprague De Camp which I reviewed recently.  It sees Flavia Herosilla a forthright patrician woman from the 4^th Century CE being thrown back 1000 years to the foundation of Rome.  She has to disentangle legend from actual history in order to assist Romulus and Remus in freeing the village that will become Rome from the overlordship of a neighbouring town, whilst facing chauvinism, sexual harassment and superstitious beliefs which to someone from her time seem irrational.  This is an enjoyable book but far too short and I wonder why Drake did not develop the idea at least as far as De Camp did in his novel.

Non-Fiction

‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdan

This is a rather ragged autobiography by a chef who has previously published fiction.  It goes erratically from culinary experiences of his childhood through a series of failing restaurants primarily in New York.  He gives the background on the chaos, drug abuse and simple abuse that go on in kitchens and also tells a bleak story of numerous restaurant failures.  At times he diverges into looking at things such as the hierarchy in a restaurant kitchen and the slang used.  Despite a brief trip to Japan it is very New York focused and a lot of what he says especially about ethnic groups would not really apply in much of the USA let alone elsewhere in the world.  However, he seems to assume that his readership will be familiar with that context which makes it off putting given that from this basis he is trying to show you a culture aside from mainstream America anyway.  His stupidity and his arrogance may seem to some readers as edgy and exciting but ultimately you come to loathe him and think he should be far more grateful that he is still alive than he shows in this book.  The arrogance becomes difficult to swallow pretty quickly and there is little point in reading an autobiography of someone whose view of the world you cannot respect.

 

Diabetic Driver Discrimination

As I have noted on this blog before, I suffer from Type 1 Diabetes.  I developed this in 1988 but have only been considered disabled since 2005 when the law was altered to encompass more ‘hidden disabilities’.  This did not prevent my previous employer from breaking the law, despite the awards it had received for supporting disabled staff, and allowing my manager to bully me on the basis of my health condition, one which I will never be cured of.  Generally I had thought that British society was becoming more understanding of diabetes, especially with the continuing rise in people with Type 2 Diabetes.  However, the government seems to be going in the opposite direction.  In part I imagine that stems from them wanting to cut back what is seen as support for anyone who is disabled.  They have inherited a distilled version of the Victorio-Thatcherite ‘deserving poor’ perception and blended in elements of Nazism (or perhaps simply Winston Churchill’s eugenic attitudes) that see the lives of the disabled as being less than those of ‘normal’ people.  Not only do we need to do without assistance we need to be reminded that we are not as good as these others, though as we age, even Conservative MPs develop one impairment or another which moves them into this category.  I guess wealth buys you an exemption.

 

Since 1988 having Diabetes has meant that I have had to renew my driving licence every three years.  My parents who are now both 75 have to do the same.  There is clearly an assumption that the authorities have to check in with you at regular intervals to make sure you have not become a hazard sometime in the past 35 months.  I find this ironic given how much dangerous driving and horrific accidents I see on a daily basis driving into London or even back and forth across South-West England, presumably committed by the ‘normal’ drivers.  However, a minister, one I have not been able to track down, apparently outlined in parliament by Philip Hammond, Secretary of State for Transport in 2011 how hazardous diabetic drivers are.  I have not seen the figures, but he felt the need to clamp down on these dangerous handlers of vehicles, even more sinister because their disability is hidden and not seen for all to see.  Perhaps I should wear some kind of triangle on my clothing so people know I am a diabetic, white seems to be the common colour for diabetic products or perhaps a nice clinical blue would be better.

 

As a result of this clamp down, not only do I have to complete the form I always had to and send it back to the DVLA outlining how even though it is difficult to register with a GP especially when you have moved around as much as I have in recent months, four towns in nine months, I have attended not only my GP to see about my diabetes but a consultant too.  Added to this, every time I drive I must check my blood sugar level 30 minutes before I get in the car and then every 2 hours while driving.  As you can see this begins to impinge on my life.  There is no ability to jump in the car to get some milk if we find we have none; I must wake a certain time before driving to make sure all the checks are done; I cannot rush someone to hospital in my car unless I have delayed thirty minutes, though that is something easily done waiting to get an ambulance.  Yet all around me are drivers dropping off at the wheel; drivers whose own blood sugar is so low (because, yes, that does happen to non-diabetics too especially during the evening rush hour) they cannot concentrate and drivers who are so offended by imagined slights that they dissolve into an instant fury which is more dangerous to other drivers than a hypoglycemic attack for which diabetics feel the onset and can be tackling safely before it develops.  In fact contrary to what ill-informed ministers seem to believe, when I drive my blood sugar actually rises leading very slowly to hyperglycemia rather than hypo, but I guess that ministers stop bothering once they have got passed the ‘p’.

 

As a result of this new approach if I am shunted in a traffic queue and the police are involved, I can be taken into custody even if it was not my fault that the accident happened.  The driver who hit me, even if he fell asleep at the wheel or went into a rage, is allowed to go home.  I have to bring my blood checker and prove all my blood levels for the journey and undergo other blood tests.  Thus, a diabetic, unlike ‘normal’ drivers is assumed to be at least partially guilty, even before there is any proof against him/her.  The consultant I used to visit in West London last year was convinced that soon all his patients would lose their driving licence.  Despite me stating that I had been driving with diabetes for 25 years without an incident, he told me it was inevitable that I would be banned and recounted a man who had had two lower blood sugar readings when sleeping at home, not whilst driving and this leading to him losing his licence.  This attitude discourages diabetics from checking their blood sugar levels for the fear of having a ‘bad’ reading somewhere on their checking device, something apparently the police can demand to see without a warrant despite it containing personal data.  With the numbers of people in the UK with diabetes rising, a whole sector runs the risk of having our lives wrecked by other people’s simply uncaring driving.

 

The new policy is based simply on ill-informed prejudice.  Where are all the statistics about the thousands of injuries and deaths caused by diabetic drivers?  Why is it that someone who keeps a close check on what their body is doing is discriminated against when someone ‘normal’ still hung over from the night before or still partially stoned has no such checks against them?  They do not have to check their blood and be able to show the police on demand what level their alcohol or drug level is at even when they are not responsible for the crash.  I do recognise that anyone involved in a traffic accident, even bystanders who have come to assist can now have their blood alcohol levels checked: another clever policy from the government which discourages people from helping out at incidents for fear of being sucked in themselves.

 

I do wonder what step the government will take next.  Will asthmatics have to blow into a bag, video themselves on their phone and email it to the police in each constabulary as they drive through?  Will people who suffer migraines have to whack their head against a government-issue brick to show they are not suffering a migraine before they drive?  Will people with eczema have to carry a diagram of the areas of skin they have lubricated before getting in the car in case some skin flakes fall over the steering wheel so distressing a ‘normal’ person as they speed past?  The policy does nothing to aid road safety, it is simply a policy which taps into the paranoia that is such a vote winner in the UK.  The consequences for the ordinary, yes normal people who happen to have diabetes, caught up by this system can be a wrecked life forced to travel on prohibitively expensive public transport and unable to hold certain jobs making them more likely to be unemployed and dependent on the government.  However, is it any surprise that we see irrational regulations coming from the clueless government of today?

Enough Already: Too Much Praise For Thatcher

Following on from my reminder four years ago: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/bitter-legacy-of-margaret-thatcher.html 
I guess I am not the only person who has been angered perhaps even sickened by the incessant coverage of the death of Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013).  I am sure it will drag on until the actual funeral on 18th April.  At least some of the media acknowledge that she was a 'divisive' politician.  However, few seem to point out that whilst 28% of the population think she was the best prime minister Britain had, many of the majority utterly despised her and all that she stood for.  Her greatest success is probably to have survived until a government was elected that actually made hers look moderate in some respects.  Thatcher denied the existence of society whereas Cameron clearly believes in it and is driving very hard to restore the pattern it had in the mid-19th century if not earlier.

I am sickened that there is to be a military-style funeral for Thatcher.  It is called a ceremonial funeral rather than a state funeral; this is the style that was introduced for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother.  The Queen is attending, so the difference to a state funeral is minimal.  The military involvement seems particularly inappropriate as Thatcher's policies led to the death and mutilation of British soldiers in an unnecessary war which was carried out primarily for her personal electoral benefit.  There are people who are dead who would have been alive if Thatcher had not been elected.  They did not receive a ceremonial funeral.

There are millions of people whose lives have been wrecked because of Thatcher.  Generally they are not the people who are asked to comment, though I am glad that there has been some coverage from former coal-mining villages and from MPs willing to speak out against her.  Whole communities were wrecked by her policies.  Thatcher aimed to destroy the coal mining industry right from the beginning of her regime and stock-piled two years' worth of coal for the purpose.  Her policy not only drove up unemployment and the associated costs in police overtime payments and social benefit for those made jobless, but also put Britain's fuel security at risk.  We face a large challenge in providing enough energy in Britain and are having to pay for expensive gas, simply because of the fuel policy of the Thatcher years.

Thatcher praised greed and rewarded those who exploited others.  The selling off of utilities to companies that make vast profits and provide an ever declining service at rising costs were another direct Thatcher policy which we are still suffering from even today.  The risky adventurism of the financiers of the City of London freed and encouraged by Thatcher led to the dire economic circumstances of today which continue to lead to unemployment and the destruction of the lives of millions.

Thatcher promoted the privatisation of public services at local authority level and created the marketplace in the National Health Service which directly led to the death of patients in locations such as Mid Staffordshire and right across the health service due to 'super-bugs' allowed to persist through insufficient hygiene by private cleaning companies.  The compulsion to have the cheapest service ironically fuelled the demand for cheap migrant labour which the Conservatives now feel is a problem themselves.  Without Thatcher they would not be facing that challenge.

Thatcher's policies through the compulsory selling of social housing has led to the homelessness we see today, not simply people living on the streets but families jammed into unhealthy bed & breakfast hotels across the country.  This is a costly way to house people.  They are not tenants; they suffer ill-health because the conditions are poor and they cannot eat well.  Living in a council house was never luxury but it did not push adults and especially children into the difficult situations they are with the current policy on housing.

I could just keep going on and on about how much Thatcher damaged Britain and the lives of millions of people living here.  Cameron follows a different form of Conservatism to Thatcher as he does not even both to try to reach out to ordinary Conservative voters and has seen a rapid reduction in the police and armed forces that were strongly supported by previous Conservative governments.  Yet, despite all Cameron's praise for Thatcher, his government is having to deal with many social and economic problems created by her government.  The things they whine about are a legacy of her smashing up of British society as it had been developing.  She left a legacy which still impinges on us thirty years later in so many bad ways.  Yes, some people have prospered, but they were the privileged anyway and would have done well whoever was in office.  Their prosperity, however, clearly provided no benefit to Britain as it is a more dangerous, poorer and more unhealthy place than it was in 1979.

Given this record and all that Thatcher rained down on this country, I guess no-one will be surprised that I find it impossible to listen to any comments about how 'impressive' she was.  She had rigid ideas that have meant misery for millions of people even after she left office and no doubt for years, probably decades after her death.  If I believed in Hell I know she would be there answering for all of her crimes.  Unfortunately in this secular world, it is just those who have suffered as a result of her policies who have to keep reminding society actually what has been inflicted on them and whose fault it was that of Margaret Thatcher.

Books I Read In March

Non-Fiction

‘When Swan Lake Comes to Sarajevo’ by Ruth Waterman

My parents were evacuated from Croatia where they had been holidaying when the war in Yugoslavia broke out in 1992.  In that decade, living in London, I met quite a few young people who had fled from the conflict.  In the 2000s I would write a short story set in Bosnia.  These aspects led to me discussing with an author I had met, a proper one who has produced paper books, not just e-books like the stuff that I write and people simply condemn.  She lent me this book which is a memoir by a orchestral violinist and conductor who helped assemble and train various classical ensembles in Bosnia in the period 2004-6.  In my teenage years, I used to read travel memoirs of people in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century and this took me back to those books.  Whilst I have heard about, sometimes at first hand, what happened in the former Yugoslavia, I suppose I have always felt it as far removed from me as someone writing about travelling in the region when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  To some degree this book did not change my perspective though I do feel I have a slightly more up-to-date impression.  Waterman’s story shows simply how long it takes for a country to put itself back together and that no-one should be expecting a restoration of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya in the next few years.

The book is like two books combined into one.  The passages of the challenges Waterman faced in rehearsing the ensembles and having them perform have quite a light tone and at the end are pretty life affirming, though perhaps less so than Waterman initially thought.  They are cut with testimonials from many of the people she met outlining what they and the people they knew experienced during the war.  What alarmed me was that I could process these testimonials without difficulty.  Some small snippets, such as blame put by a Bosnian on the war being caused by the Americans rang true when you have heard about the agents provocateur in the region at the time.  Similarly finding out the post-war Bosnian currency was the Deutschmark also answered another question I had had about the political situation behind the war.  Perhaps it is because I remember news from the locations at the time; maybe as a historian, dealing in the deaths of millions I am now immune even to hearing the experiences of individuals.  I felt surprisingly numb reading this material.  This made it hard for me to accept why I was unsettled by the books.

The aspect that I felt unease with was when Waterman outlined how orchestras work.  Each member does not simply play the music on the sheets in front of them; they are in a constant dialogue through gestures and expressions and can deliver very different output from the music they read as a result of this.  Perhaps everyone already knew this and I am just a fool not to have realised.  I have always felt inadequate in the face of people who can play music, speak a foreign language or do a martial art, three activities that I have utterly failed at.  This book simply made it worse.  I now realise that musicians, certainly working at the level of playing public performances are a species apart from me with alien capabilities.  I came away from this book wishing I had not read the elements about how an orchestra works and had stuck simply to the material about the war.  I came away from reading this book unpleasantly unsettled and embarrassed at my own failings.

 

‘Brest-Litovsk.  The Forgotten Peace.  March 1918’ by John W. Wheeler-Bennett

I have noted in recent months how history books fall down once they try too hard to draw parallels from the past to the time when the book is being written.  This book was written in April 1938, though my copy was published in 1963.  Thus the author tried to draw parallels between the reshaping of Eastern Europe by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the developments in the region at the time he was writing.  He failed to see the persistence of appeasement, the absorption of Austria into Germany and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia let alone the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the subsequent division and re-division of Poland.  Thus the points he makes seem strained and now erroneous.  It would have been better if he had dropped the Introduction and got on with the history. 

The story of the negotiations between the Socialist Federal Republic of Russia and the German Empire and its allies Austria Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire are rarely told.  This book certainly gives a good impression not only of the negotiations but of the motives of those involved in them and the directions they were receiving from their leaders back home.  What is interesting is how weak the Bolsheviks were even after they had closed down the Constituent Assembly and within the party how weak Lenin was.  Wheeler-Bennett seems rather in awe of Lenin and very dismissive of the liberal government which had followed the February Russian Revolution.  It becomes clear in this book, more than in other general histories of the October Russian Revolution, how Lenin may have been excluded from developments or even once the peace talks had begun, have had his policy ignored and dismissed.  His almost unique early recognition that Russia could not fight the Germans any longer and that to oppose them would simply provoke harsher terms and that there was not going to be an outbreak of revolution across Europe, meant that he was proven to be right and gained immense credibility.  Wheeler-Bennett reproduces one of Lenin’s speeches and you can see that he gained nothing through his rhetoric unless it was to bludgeon his audience with his constant repetition of bare bones ideas.  You wonder how much worse those he faced down were at public speaking. 

Opposing the first German offer led to the loss of all the Baltic States and the Ukraine, though Germany was too weak to enjoy these gains for long.  In fact if the Soviets had accepted the first offer it would have been better for Germany as so many troops would not have been tied up occupying vast areas that had formerly been Russian.  The book is also good in showing how dependent Germany and especially Austria-Hungary were on the grain and other resources that they could insist on delivery from Russia and the Ukraine.  Again, an earlier peace may have led to their economic situation being aided sooner, though given the difficulties the occupying forces faced in securing the grain they had been promised the benefits may have been minimal. 

Another interesting element often overlooked in general histories is how the extreme demands of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk altered the attitudes of the Americans away from the conciliatory Fourteen Points to the far more aggressive peace treaty sought by the British, French and Italians.  This was despite the Western Allies unease with the new Soviet regime.  The Treaty made claims of the barbarity of the Germans appear to have been true all along.  In part this was an accurate assessment as Wheeler-Bennett shows how the expansionist fantasies of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, effective dictators of Germany from 1916 onwards, were allow to run free with the treaty and the Soviets’ vacillating attitude while they still had to learn that Lenin had been right all along.  If the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had not been so harsh, then it seems likely that elements of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany the following year, would have been milder, though the Allies were committed to the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine and Poland, no matter what, so in German eyes the treaty, even if more moderate than the one our world saw, would have been deemed to be harsh.

 

Overall, in large part this is an astute book which still provides aspects that I find too often missing from general histories of the period and benefited from the author being able to interview participants in the story that he outlines.  It would have been better still shorn of the very rapidly anachronistic introduction and the unnecessary and rather tedious appendices of documents.