Book 18 - Peter May, Extraordinary People

“Paris St Germain or PSG as they are affectionately known to their fans” Affectionately! That word really bothered me - it is so sloppy. Paris St Germain are known as PSG in the same way that the Scottish Nationalist Party is known as the SNP - it is not an affectionate name it is a more convenient name. Not only that affection is a pretty feeble way of describing the relationship between a fans and their teams - the emotion is more intense than that. I know that one word in a book is statistically insignificant and no basis on which to make a judgement (I could not throw that stone as I, in common with most people, have often written words that are not quite right) but sometimes such things can bring me up short and make me wonder if what I’m reading was written in too much haste. Maybe it was or maybe it something else that happens in some thrillers - a tendency to over-explain background details.

This might be a weakness it can also be a strength . Thrillers can often deal with current issues and use them them as a frame for stories of wrong doing and corruption. In so doing they have a duty to explain what is happening and the forces guiding peoples actions. As such they can be vehicles for state of the nation novels hiding under the guise of formula fiction (in so doing they can tackle bigger themes than more lauded literary novels but that is a debate for another time). But you have to be skilled at digesting your research and knowing how many ’T's to cross and ‘I’s to dot to make the story sing. Sometimes that doesn’t happen and describing what is current at a particular time can leave the book dated. I mean that in a precise sense - not old fashioned, as such, just something that can be precisely dated.

‘Extraordinary People’ was written ten years ago and the plot revolves around a lot of internet searching. Now ten years equals several generations in computer lifetimes. What we now take for granted was not so then. Google for example still had slightly cult status (I do not want to press this too hard and suggest it was hardly known - it was of course widely used in 2005 but it was still a thing of wonder. Remember that kids: Google was once new and exciting. The algorithm that allowed it to rank hits according to relevance - something far superior to anything that went before - was indeed revolutionary. It is thus perfectly plausible for someone to ask in 2005:  “What search engine do you use?” “Google” “Good. The same as me” Nevertheless reading this in 2015 gives you a bit of a jolt as you realise how much of our mental world has changed in a relatively short time. Google is now so much part of the modern world, you don’t even think about it. Today you would not spend much time describing searching on the internet but in this book that happens. As I say things can be dated.

That is not a criticism by the way, I actually like things to be rooted in a particular time and place. At the moment I’m reading ‘Traitors Purse’ by Margery Allingham where there is this short passage “She drove very well, with confidence and with unusual sympathy for the machine. He appreciated that. So many people approach the petrol engine as if it were something vindictive, to be mastered with a firm hand.” That, of course, bears no relation to driving today instead it is a small reminder of how things were 80 years ago. Those details in the fabric of a text are just as revealing as signposts that say 2005 or 1940. However, comparing the two texts, I think that describing cars and driving rather more interesting than trying to explain what  happens in a Google search.

Be that as it may i get the feeling Peter May has done his research and has firmly rooted it, with a sense of place. The central character, Enzo Macleod, is a Scottish forensic scientist who gave up his career for love and relocated to France. Peter May is also a Scotsman living in France and that congruence gives me faith in the way he describes the place. I must also declare a personal interest: for years I have holidayed near Cognac and have a love of the countryside of Southwest France. When reading the book I could picture the places, the town streets, and the heat. Nevertheless there is still the hint of undigested research. The first two sentences of the book are: “The Rues des Deus Ponts cuts across the centre of the Îles St. Louis, from the Pont Marie straddling the Seine on the north side, to the Pont de la Tournelle on the south. The island is no more than two hundred metres across and, side by side with the Île de la Cite, stands at the very heart of old Paris”. It could almost have come from a guide book.However these are details, mere quibbles. 

It is nevertheless it is remarkable that I have written this many words yet mentioned nothing about the plot or the action that animates it. My bad.

The central conceit is a bet made by Enzo Macleod that he could  solve some open historical cases because of advances in forensic science. This is actually quite a neat devise because it sets up a framework for a series but also offers the possibility of playing one period of time against another (though this does not happen to any great extent in this story). 

The first case (this book) is that of a high ranking public official, turned media personality who disappeared. There was no proof proof that he was dead let alone murdered There is no proof that he was dead let alone murdered but as this is a detective story we all know it was foul play. After some rather improbable guesswork bloodstains are found seeped into the some flagstones in a church. DNA, the big forensic advance since the original investigation,  identified the blood as that of the missing person. After some more  guesswork  part of the body is found, in a cask with cryptic clues about where other parts of the body could be found and one of the people responsible. Lots of Googling to interpret the clues and a whiteboard to draw the links and the chase is on and the set-up is repeated a couple more times. That is all I am going to say because I don’t want to give away anymore of that actual plot, except to say it ends with an inevitable showdown with the psychopathic killer.

You will note from the brief description that it is a high-concept novel and also that it is a slightly false prospectus. Apart from DNA to identify the body the investigation owed little to advances in forensics. it was basically Hercule Poirot solving crossword clues.

So the question is did I enjoy it? Yes I did. I read it quite quickly. Did I think it was good? Hmm. Not so sure. That is a totally different question. Some of the action is preposterous and the characters are rather sketchy, i.e. outlined with a broad brush. But that is the interesting thing about detective series there is scope for the central character to evolve as more details are added to the back story. So I will have to reserve judgement until I have read some more.

First published

2006

Link to Last Book

The last book was a psychiatrist unearthing the stories his patients, discovering what was important and what was bothering them. Acting a bit like a detective. So I though I would read some genre detective fiction.

Book 7 - Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

In last week’s book Tim Parks asked the question whether we read to be of our time or to know more of the past or other places. It is rhetorical question as we all read different things for different reasons but it made me think that this week’s book should be something from the past and that I should read to notice some changes in attitudes from a previous era.

Rogue Male was published in 1939 and is the first person account of an accomplished, aristocratic, English huntsman,  who seemingly on a whim, decides to stalk a European leader (Hitler). The question of whether he actually means to assassinate him is left slightly ambiguous at first (though we later learn that he had good reason for wanting to do so) but the point is moot as he is discovered before he could fire and is captured. He is interrogated and tortured quite badly before being thrown over the side of a cliff to make it look as if he died accidentally. But he survived the fall and, using the cunning he had as a huntsman, managed to hide whilst they searched for his body and then escape on a boat down river. Once back in England, though,  he was not safe as agents were still in active pursuit. He was unable to escape unnoticed and was forced to kill one of them, which meant that he was being hunted by both the police and the foreign secret service. But it was an agent who tracked down his hideout in Dorset. He the huntsman became the hunted by someone who was as skilled as himself. He is cornered and trapped in an underground lair and although things seem to be totally hopeless he manages to fashion a weapon with which he can kill his pursuer. After that he escapes and is able to travel abroad and start a new life with a new identity, in South America.

As you can tell from the synopsis, it it a neat tight plot and the thing clips along at a good pace - there is after all a reason why it is seen as a classic thriller - but it is much more cunning than that. There are all sorts of ellipsis where you have to go back to work out exactly what happened and there are all sorts of themes about cover, hiding, concealment, man as animal, instincts and knowing yourself. It is interesting, for example, that our hero only really gets to consciously understand his motive towards the end, after being questioned by his pursuer.

But I am partly reading this for the attitudes of its time and it is rich in examples. In the foreground there is the premise of a huntsman. The whole practice of stalking big game, as a skilful, solitary pursuit that engages all the senses and a deep knowledge of the natural world, is something from a past era. We know engage with the wild in a different, more limited way. We have to find other ways to get in touch with our animal self. For our huntsman hero, he had that knowledge because of what he did, who he was.

“ This was the reasoning of a hunted beast, or rather, it was no reasoning at all. I don’t know if a sedentary townsman’s mind would have worked in the same way. I think it would if he had been badly enough hurt.  You must be hurt badly to reach the stage of extinction where you stop thinking what you ought to do and merely do it.”

But merely doing it was also a model of how one behaved.”like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to enquire very deeply into motives. I dislike and and disbelieve in cold blooded planning, whether it be suggested of me or of anybody else.” This is part of the national character myth of the English gentleman that was potent until the latter part of the Twentieth Century. A myth that had us believe there was an innate superiority that would always enable us to triumph in the end through instinctive knowledge and basic judgement. We were proud to be empirical and not think too much but underlying it there was a form of stoicism. The famous stiff upper lip, that can rarely be seen anywhere in contemporary society. Of his initial interrogation by the security forces our hero says: “I had, of course, been knocked about very considerably. My nails are growing back but my left eye is still pretty useless” What wonderful understatement! Other details of the interrogation are dribbled out later on but there are no descriptions. As a buttoned up English gentleman of the time he takes it on the chin:

“I hold no brief for the pre-war Spartan training of the English upper class - or middle class as it is now the fashion to call it, leaving the upper to the angels - since in the ordinary affairs of a conventional life it is not of the slightest value to anyone: but it is of use on the admittedly rare occasions when one needs a high degree of physical endurance … We torture a boy’s spirit rather than his body, but all torture is, in the end, directed at the spirit. I was conditioned to endure without making an ass of myself. That is all I mean by detachment.”

I must admit that I am attached to this idea of the English gentleman hero. I was bought up on in all the books I read as a child, Biggles stories and the like. Reading Rogue Male was in some ways comforting because it reminded me of the pleasures I had with those stories when younger, when everything seemed bigger, bolder and brighter. But I can only now read it as my older self and now I get the pleasure from other details  in the writing and the way themes are slipped in. Like, for example, the earlier quote about ‘the reasoning of a hunted beast’  there is the phrase about reaching ‘the stage of extinction’ and it is something to bear in mind when you read a story of covering up and trying to disappear.

Date of first publication
1939

Link to last book

I am going to abandon the idea of the randomness for the moment and play a game of consequences, just to see where it leads. I read this book because of a question in the previous book about reading to find out about the past