The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter

The H-Bomb Girl, for younger readers, is a time travel story calculated to appeal to the Doctor Who set.

Laura, 14, has moved to Liverpool with her mum, who is separating from Laura’s dad, who is in the RAF. It’s 1962. Liverpool is an interesting place, just coming out of the post-war austerity years, with a young and exciting music scene centred around a band called The Beatles.

Laura’s dad is paranoid about something, and there’s some strange bloke lodging with Laura and her mum, and one of Laura’s teachers is strange, too, looking at her funny and making gnomish comments. Across the Atlantic, the Cuban missile crisis is in full flow, and for a time it seems as if the world will end.

This story is a delight, full of great detail on British life in the early 60s, but also stuffed with anachronisms and strangeness, time-travel tricks and parallel worlds. As an adult you notice a few logical inconsistencies, but to give a younger reader a taste for modern science fiction it would be hard to do better.

I bought this for my daughter, following my appeal on the other blog for recommendations. I’d already spotted this on another web site, but hadn’t realised it was so recently published (Sept 2007). With a female protagonist of about the right age and a time-travel adventure, this hit the target (ten year old girl) perfectly: she raced through it and would like more of the same, she says.

Phase Space by Stephen Baxter

This collection by British Science Fiction writer Stephen Baxter contains stories originally published between 1997 and 2002. They’re loosely linked around a couple of recurring ideas and arranged together in the book within a thematic structure with such catch-all section headings as Dreams, Worlds, Paradox, and so on.

The loose relationship, underlined by recurring names/characters and ideas, doesn’t really hang together as strongly as a novel, but leaves you instead with the impression of a writer worrying at ideas, approaching them from different angles, picking away.

Probably the best entries here are the ones that stand best alone, because in the end the idea of “thematically linked” is hardly strong enough for the collection to have any real punch. Ultimately, any collection of SF (by different writers) published around the same time is going to contain repeated ideas. So the ones I enjoyed here include one of the earliest, “The Fubar Suit” (recurring theme/idea here is nanotech); “Lost Continent” (alternate worlds, reality is a simulation); and “The Twelfth Album” (alternate world, in which The Beatles released one last record), which was the reason I bought this book in the first place.

At his best, Baxter can be thought-provoking and eerie, and can write stories you wish could go on longer; the worst here are the ones that were (to me) wilfully muddled and obscure, with only the loosest relationship to the majority of the others here.

Cautiously recommended: if you like stories about alternate universes, nanotechnology, and ponderings on the Fermi Paradox. It really does make you wonder.

Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn

Review by Rashbre

For somewhat arcane reasons I was reminded recently of a story in which a man takes the persona of a female singer. The writer of the book is Gordon Burn and it is about Alma Cogan, a popular British singer from the 1950s.

Burn moves the persona of Alma forward into a later time and then intertwines a story linked with mystery and crime of the 1980s.

Burn is a clever writer and there are some amusing asides in a book which ultimately has a strong and macabre backdrop. On perfume “You want a man to like it, go after the food groups” was Alma’s mother’s advice on a cantelope and orange scent.

I originally read this book some time ago and remember some of the phrases and scenes, but then blasted through it again now for a second time. I found a haunting quality about the descriptions of the early popular music world and some crossover with clubland London books like “The long firm” and some parts of Martin Amis’s work.

Alma also showed her 50s innocence towards ‘Jazz Woodbines’ new kinds of tea (made with benzedrine) and wholesome advice which would nowadays fit well on daytime television or maybe into a new age tent “Never collect inanimate objects, or in the end they will possess you and you will lose your freedom”.

But Burn’s Alma is past her singing best in the 1980s (in real life she died in 1966) and her visits to old haunts and to the places of her catalogued past are creepy, alongside references to (for example) a Marc Bolan glitzy suit and to varied other celebrity remnants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Burn speaks through Alma’s voice and there is much around faded celebrity as well as the tightening of the story which transitions in the second part of the book into a linkage with moors murderer Myra Hindley.

I found the book in the back of a shelf with other books piled in front of it. That I sought it out for a re-read and that I still find it intriguing is, for me a good sign.

A recent blogging encounter reminded me of this story of a female pop icon told very effectively via a man’s writing.

Three Days to Never – Tim Powers (review Part 1)

With his previous novel Declare Tim Powers discovered a rich vein of weirdness in the strange (and apposite) affinity between espionage tradecraft and the supernatural.

Our received wisdom about the casting of spells, the avoidance of the Evil Eye, the scrying of omens (which might involve, for example, the carrying of a talisman, walking in a particular direction, oriented a particular way, the uttering of code phrases), has too much in common with, say, the avoidance of a tail, the awareness of surveillance, the exchange of secret documents, microfilm and other information: dead drops, meetings in the open air.

Both the practice of magicks and the trade of the spy involve a lot of smoke and mirrors. And we’ve all seen those TV documentaries about the crazy things the KGB and the CIA got up to: the use of so-called “remote viewers”: people with psychic powers who spied on the other side by clairvoyant means.

I was walking in London recently through the Whitehall area, and I noticed how damn noisy the place is, and how bloody hard it would be to point a microphone at two people having a conversation in the open air, at the bottom of the steps to some ministry or other. Inevitably, the information is going to come through garbled, half-finished phrases, the odd word here and there, and you’re going to have to divine the meaning in much the same way as a witch doctor would by casting the bones.

It’s obvious, when you think about it, which is all part of the pull of Powers’ work. He notices things, small pockets of strangeness in everyday life, and he weaves around them a narrative that is so compelling that you find yourself torn between the need to read for the plot and the wish that it would never end.

Three Days to Never is Powers’ latest foray into espionage and the supernatural. Instead of the Cambridge spies and the European Theatre of the Cold War, we find ourselves drawn into the milieu of the Mossad, and secret branches within secret branches of Israeli intelligence.

It’s been said that Tim Powers is incapable of writing a bad novel, and I have to confess that I buy into that wholeheartedly. I’ve read them all, and from his earliest knocked-off 50,000 worders to his most recent explorations of post-war history and espionage, he hasn’t ever put a foot wrong.

The attention to detail, the assured exploration of those tiny spots of every-day weirdness, is brilliant; moving from this:

She used to think Azusa was an interesting name for a city, but recently she had heard that it meant “A-to-Z USA,” and now she classed it with other ridiculous words, like brouhaha and patty melt.
She also disapproved of a city called Claremont being right next to one named Montclair. She thought there should be a third one, Mairn-Clot.”

To this:

“Okay,” her father went on at last. “Grammar–what, had no respect for time. You know the way she carried on sometimes, as if she was still a teenager, like going to Woodstock; and she’d plant primroses in midsummer, and they’d thrive; food got cold real quick sometimes even though she just took it out of the pan, and other times it stayed hot for hours; well, a long time. It never surprised her. Maybe she was just pulling tricks on us, but time didn’t seem to work right, around her.”

Three Days To Never opens with a widowed father and his daughter exploring in the back garden of the man’s grandmother (“Grammar”), unknowingly observed by one of Mossad’s own remote viewers (a psychic spy). The girl, Daphne (who’s a little psychic herself), pulls a videotape of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure from a VCR in the garden shed and later starts to watch it at home. But instead of Pee Wee Herman, she sees a very odd, and disturbing, old silent movie. The piano soundtrack is also strange, with lots of “missing” or implied notes, and Daphne realises that the implied notes form another, secret melody…

I’ve always felt that a Powers novel carried the same thrilling power of a mid-60s Dylan song. Instead of “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood,” we get (in one book) the ghost of Thomas Edison and the hands of Harry Houdini. In Three Days To Never, we get Israeli spies, Charlie Chaplin, Einstein, and Pee Wee Herman. It’s a richly textured and fascinating journey.

As with everything else written by Powers: Highly Recommended. Part 2 of this review is here.

Call for the Dead; The Night Manager; Absolute Friends – John Le Carré

I realise that it's somewhat of a huge undertaking to attempt a review of three Le Carré novels, but – by chance – I happen to have read these three over the past couple of weeks, and taken together, they offer an overview of his long career.

Call for the Dead was published in 1961, his first novel, and his first to feature George Smiley, later the lead character in the Le Carré novels made famous by film and TV adaptations. Smiley's People was a BBC series, wasn't it? Prime candidate for BBC4 to show again, I should say.

The Night Manager is a more mature Le Carré – late middle-period, post Cold War, published in 1991. Some say it's a Bond parody, but it also reminded me of The Bourne Identity in a lot of ways. And Absolute Friends is his most recent novel, published 2004, so not only post Cold War, but post 9/11 too.

I've hinted at the other place that Le Carré has much to say about our current situation, what leads to it, how we ended up like this, and what's (probably) going on behind the scenes.

Spy novels take you into the hall of mirrors created by espionage, the weird nether-world of flexible moral standards and nothing – ever – being quite what it seems. The texts can be dense, difficult, sometimes slow, never quite getting to the point – which is precisely the point. Even a Big Picture person will find it hard to see the bigger picture, the backdrop, the broad strokes of what is actually going on. Because the thing about espionage – and I've read enough about it over the years to know this – is that nobody ever does see the bigger picture.

The gift of a fictional spy like Smiley is to give the impression of knowing more than you do in order to learn a little bit more than you do, in an endless process of Big Picture building. Smiley is prized for his ability to think. But the Big Picture never does resolve. Even as you're adding grains down here, it's flaking apart and disintegrating over there, like a castle in the sand as the tide comes in.

This is never more clear than in Call for the Dead, Smiley's first outing, in which he is revealed as a frustrated scholar and academic who has been co-opted into intelligence in a time of dire need, and can never quite get away again, even though he would like to. The earliest intelligence operations were all run by inspired amateurs like Smiley. Call for the Dead is short, as novels could sometimes be in times past, and at under 200 pages would probably be classed as a novella these days. It's still dense, though, with much to take in, and Le Carré's style always manages the double trick of espionage – leads you both towards and away from a resolution, like a fuse lit at both ends, narrating both before and after events simultaneously, aware of a bigger picture, but never quite laying it out in an easy way for you to take in at one go.

Smiley acts on an anonymous tip, conducts an affable interview with a minor civil servant about his communist past (at University, natch), decides he's a good chap, and is shocked to discover – the next day – that's he's committed suicide. That's the bones of it, what sets the plot in motion. And Smiley/Le Carré then plays catch up, peeling off layer after layer to get to some form of the truth. It's the cold war, and he finds himself pitted against an East German spy who once worked on the side of the Allies in the second world war, who was once a student of Smiley in Germany before the war, but whom Smiley had not recruited himself, believing him to be slightly unstable, a bit too obvious and vocal, too much of a risk.

Recruited by someone else, this character – Dieter Frey – turns out of be an incredibly good agent, of great value, a miraculous survivor, and now a tricky adversary. Smiley, who only gives the appearance of knowing more than he does, is always one step behind, and only able to follow at all because Dieter is using the craft as taught to him by Smiley, more or less unmodified. You send a postcard to arrange a meeting, but the text doesn't mean anything. What matters is the picture on the front, and how you've previously agreed to interpret that.

Nobody does see the big picture, because spying is a series of small acts of betrayal committed by small men and women. An "agent" in the parlance could be anyone – you or me, an office cleaner, a keeper of the keys, a receptionist. It's not going to be some high-powered, highly-paid individual – well, almost never. We live in a society that excludes people – all the time, all over the place. And as long as people are excluded, made to feel valueless and ignored as much as possible – as long as that happens, there will be a pool of potential recruits. Part of the craft lies in the ability to identify these people. I like to think I would have been a prime candidate, in different circumstances. It's hard to think of it as betraying your country when your country treats you like shit on its shoe. And sometimes you just do it for the cash. Or for a woman/man. As fickle as romantic love is, patriotic love is more so.

The Agent reports to his or her handler, someone with whom they have a relationship, and they pass the information on to the handler, who in turn passes it on, and so on. Sitting back at head office, the analysts – civil servants of whatever grade – assess and interpret the information. And thinkers like Smiley try to see the Big Picture. Of course, it might not be the information itself but the act of obtaining the information that matters more than anything. As in Orwell, the act of betrayal is sometimes all they're after.

Conflicts can arise, and they do. The British are spying on the East Germans, who spy on the British and the Americans, and the Americans are spying on everyone, including the British. And in the aftermath of the Cold War, Le Carré posits a conflict between the forces of so-called Pure Intelligence (those who just want the small acts of betrayal to continue, who want the information but don't want to act on it) and Enforcement (those who want to go in with guns blazing and kill the motherfuckers).

You can see it happening around you. Pure Intelligence hears the chatter about 9/11 or 7/7 in the run up, but doesn't want to act on it. No prosecutions please, we're British. No, you can't use our Intelligece information in a court of law, that would be unthinkable. Then the worst happens, and the Enforcers step in and say, fuck this, we want to nail these bastards. So then the Pure Intelligence people clam up and stop passing on the information. Or they pass on misinformation. Or they sabotage things in any number of other ways. They practice the art of the double bluff.

This is essentially the story of The Night Manager. Who is the worst man in the world? In this novel it's Roper, an international arms dealer, who will sell arms to anyone, on any side. He calls it "selling farms" and he's a billionaire of course, with a private island and a retinue of minor aristocrats and paid help. And he has a "signer", a front, someone whose name heads up the list of company directors, who signs all the contracts, so that Roper himself stays in the background, untouchable.

In The Night Manager, Enforcement decide to do something about him. Pure Intelligence take a back seat, until it transpires that Roper has decided to Buy British, in part, and – more importantly – Buy American. Never mind that he's supplying arms to Colombian Cocaine cartels, there are forces in the British and American governments who will let the deal go through, because the Toys are stamped "Made in the USA."

Far fetched? You think somehow not. The Iraqi Supergun springs to mind, doesn't it? A scandal after the fact, but – also – how did Saddam get those French missiles? Oh, and according to Roper, the first Gulf war was fought – not because of oil or Kuwaiti gold – but for the experience, for practice. Think about it: you have an ageing military class, with leaders hardened in Viet Nam about to retire. Who replaces them? Who trains the next generation in the ways of fighting wars? You need a new generation of battle-hardened veterans to pass on the knowledge to the the one after that.

In other words, a war every few years is inevitable. It all makes a lot more sense when you realise that they just need the practice.

The Night Manager is Jonathan Pine, a former soldier who takes refuge from the world in the late night service economy, but events lead him to Roper – and a hatred of Roper – and he volunteers to act as an agent and take him down. So his life is unravelled to a script, his reputation sullied, and he goes on the lam, bumping into Roper in an orchestrated way and penetrating his inner circle.

Of course, it all goes horribly wrong, with betrayal heaped upon betrayal, and as a bloodless coup takes place back in in Blighty, his fake cover story is used as a pretext to abandon him to torture and death. Only one man, his handler, is willing to go to lengths to secure his safety.

Which brings us on to Absolute Friends, in which Le Carré cleverly echoes some of the aspects of Call for the Dead, with a lightweight version of Smiley (Ted Mundy) befriending a lightweight version of Dieter (Sasha). Where earlier generations of spies were radicalised at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s, this generation arises out of the events of the 60s, when student radicals in Berlin lived in squats, skipped their lectures, and marched on the streets before some of them started to justify to themselves the use of violence and terrorism. The subtle point here is about the different kinds of learning. Whereas Smiley was a real scholar with real, in-depth knowledge, able in fact to teach at a high level whilst maintaining his cover, the radicals of the 60s for the most part merely skimmed the back cover blurb of radical books and pamphlets, and looked for leaders to follow.

There comes a parting of the ways. Some of them drift into corporate life, some drift into roles as minor civil servants, some bum around the world, and others end up in Palestinian training camps, or in Beirut, or just dead. It was interesting to me, as a Critical Theorist, to see all those familiar names bandied about by Le Carré, all those names that are used by radicals to justify violence. I remember sitting in Critical Theory seminars thinking, these people (meaning my fellow students) are complete cunts, here only to reinforce their own belief in murder and mayhem, wilfully twisting the words of others to make their kind of sense. Whereas I always struggled through these texts, wondering why they used so many made-up words and avoided making any actual point, my fellow students always had that one thing they thought they knew, that bit they'd skimmed from the back cover blurb.

This level of ignorance, this kind of naivety is exploited in Absolute Friends, first to recruit Mundy and Sasha as agents in the Cold War, and later to take advantage of their idealism in order to set them up as patsies in an onion skin anti-terrorist operation that is all smoke and mirrors and ends up with a terrorist cell exposed to the media which was actually nothing of the kind. The Big Picture here is that Enforcement is still at war with Pure Intelligence and our civilisation – such as it is – is in the not very capable hands of lightweights and fanatics.

If you were to pick one of these three to read, I'd say Absolute Friends is almost certainly up there with Le Carré's best – highly recommended. If you aren't charged with some of Le Carré's obvious seething anger after reading this, then you're doing something wrong, reading it upside-down perhaps. The unravelling of Ted Mundy is surely one of the best character explorations I've ever read, and if you want to understand just a little bit of the political world we live in, packing a few Le Carrés in your suitcase before you head off on your cheap flight and have your passport checked 97,000 times is a good start.

The Beatles: 365 Days – Simon Wells, Robert Whitaker

One of my xmas presents was The Beatles: 365 Days, a doorstep-thick collection of images from the Getty archive, notable for mostly being lesser-known shots, outtakes from sessions that yielded the images we've all seen a million times.

Each image is captioned as to the time and place it was taken, and it's a good way of re-presenting the old story, and astounding me all over again with how fucking hard they were worked in their brief stay on this earth.

The most striking thing, for me, is to see The Beatles standing next to other people, whether they be members of the press (visible through a smoky haze), or their young fans, or the shoulder-rubbing liggers of the 60s scene. Because in many of these shots, what astonishes most is that The Beatles appear god-like, bronzed, healthy, beautiful, even while all around them looked ordinary, spotty, freckled, and crap. Even the other slebs, the so-called beautiful people, look ordinary by today's standards, but the fabs look buffed, shiny, and wondrous. Even Ringo. To unleash their looks on an unsuspecting world was strange enough, but to back it up with obviously superior output was queer indeed.

Anyway, it's a nice book if you like that kind of thing. The format is crap, though, because it's too heavy and the pages are not easy to view, and too many of the pictures are portrait rather than landscape mode, so you're forever twisting this heavy object around to have a look. So, a smack in the mouth for the book designer. Top shot: Ringo in his hospital sick bed either just before or just after a tonsillectomy: smoking a fag. Priceless.