davidgillon | Entries tagged with author: david black

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, K J Parker (aka Tom Holt)

This is the sequel to Parker's "16 Ways to Defend A Walled City", with a largely new set of protagonists as "16 Ways" was narrated on its protagonist's death-bed.

It's seven years later, and the great siege of the City continues (for City, think Constantinople, but in a history where the ~~Romans~~ Robur are black and everyone else is a "milkface", and tired of their oppression*). To get around the awkward fact of Orhan getting himself killed (and being a milkface himself), his staff changed the story to say that the real leader of the resistance was his bodyguard Lysimachus and have been using him as a puppet figurehead ever since (the substitution has succeeded to the point Orhan's name is never mentioned in the book).

Meanwhile struggling actor/playwright Notker (his aged mother describes his talents as lying and running away) is eking out his occasional salary by imitating Lysimachus, who he sort of looks like, at society parties. On his way to the latest, he's a close eyewitness to a trebuchet boulder landing on the place and demolishing everyone inside. Then he gets the word that people are looking for him and tries to disappear by disguising himself in whiteface**, which works, for about a week. When he wakes up after being hit in the face by a spade, he finds himself being held by Orhan's ex-staff. The real Lysimachus was at the party, and now they need Notker to become the real thing.

The problem with this, apart from Lysimachus having various scars that now need adding to Notker, is that Notker's a method actor, and over-and-above being able to channel the brutal ex-gladiator, he shares his upbringing in the leadership of the Themes, the rival extortion/mutual support unions to which every working class person in the city belongs; which means he knows when the plans to manage them won't work, and almost immediately has to start pulling the strings of his puppeteers.

Then the supposedly irrelevant Senate stage a coup, which ends with them deciding that they need to enshrine their new puppet by making him emperor - the old emperor, who's spent the entire siege in a coma, having conveniently died and no-one having gotten around to telling the populace yet. And what's better than a heroic new Emperor? A heroic new Emperor and a beautiful new Empress, so Notker finds himself being married off to Lysimachus's secret lover, which is made worse when it turns out she's his own ex, theatre manager and noted actress Hodda. Oh, and the Senate want Notker to get rid of the themes, because those jumped up proles actually expect people to involve them in decisions.

Hodda is a wonderful character, and I'd call her amoral - this is a woman who tries to sell out the entire city - but for the fact Parker keeps using her as a moral mirror to confront Notker with the actions he has to take. She's quickly joined in Notker's inner clique by Notker's new Personal Secretary, and the captain of the Emperor's Guard (think Varangians), both of whom are non-Robur outsiders. Which means that by half-way through the book Notker has suborned the civil service, the themes, and is surrounded by a fanatically loyal bodyguard, which is unfortunate for the Senate.

But total power means total responsibility, and now it's Notker making the decisions. I'd say that this is about total power corrupting, but it isn't, quite. Being Emperor means Notker has to face the reality that the Robur are slowly losing. There are things he can do to stop the enemy, some of them pretty horrible, but ultimately their saps will undermine the walls, and the enemy will pour through the gap, no matter how savage the battles between their sappers and his counter-sappers. But Notker has a plan.

He also has a plan for revenge on the besiegers, and I'm not convinced that it's going to go down well with most people in our current coronavirus-ravaged world. (It's possible that's intentional).

I think I liked Orhan better as a protagonist, but Notker's cut from the same mould and a strong enough character to step into his boots, and the writing holds to the same principle of putting a conman in a position where he has to take on real responsibility. Recommended.

* I'm not convinced the optics of this are great.

** Ditto

Gone to Sea in a Bucket, David Black

Having started at the wrong end of the six-book Harry Gilmour series I've now gone back to the first two.

Harry Gilmour joined the RNVR at the start of WWII, despite the objections of his pacifist father, and at the opening of the story is a very junior sub-lieutenant on a battlecruiser, and the only officer aboard who isn't proper, pre-war, Navy. Which results in him being set up by those who don't want an oik like him around in such a way that he could potentially face a court martial. He's saved by a staff officer who signs him up for special training - as a submarine officer. The Submarine Service is a better fit for Harry, with experience yachting he's used to the way the bounds between officers and men have to blur to get the job done. Post-training he's posted to HMS Pelorus, commanded by WWI submarine ace Commander Charles 'the Bonny Boy' Bonalleck, VC. He rapidly comes to realise that Bonalleck is a hopeless drunk, and that Pelorus is actually run by her first lieutenant, working around him. And work around him they do, to the point of sinking a German cruiser. But on the way home Bonalleck manages to get them run down by a coastal convoy and is the only survivor of the three men on the bridge at the time*. Things are left unsaid, but I have my suspicions that this was deliberate. Unfortunately Harry, who was in the engine room, and the dozen men there with him also manage to escape using breathing apparatus and the escape hatch. There is a confrontation and harsh words in private, but the men with the status to prove what went on are dead.

Harry ends up transferred to HMS Trebuchet, the 'Bucket' of the title, where the atmosphere is much healthier. But after a couple of missions they and another sub are sent North on a secret mission. As part of the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Agression Pact**, the Russians had to provide the Germans with a naval base on their territory. The fall of Norway means that this isn't important as a U-boat base, which it was originally intended to be, but the Admiralty has had word that things are happening there and wants to know what they are, even if it means violating Russian territorial waters. But no one must know they were ever there.

When the Bucket penetrates the harbour, they realise that things are much worse than the Admiralty had imagined. The activity at the port is an invasion force, probably aimed at Iceland, and it's almost ready to sail. So they need to take it out, in Russian waters, and the layout of the port means they'll have to sail right into it.

* This is based on a real incident in which a submarine returning from patrol ran into a convoy at night.

** Apparently this was part of the actual terms, but the Germans made little, if any, use of the port.

The Skipper's Dog's Called Stalin

(I'm not convinced this was a good idea as a title).

Harry Gilmour, Book Two. With the Trebuchet's crew scattered throughout the fleet in order to keep the secret of her raid into Russian waters, Harry finds himself assigned as liaison officer to the submarine Radegonde. Radegonde is a minelayer, which is a different style of submarine warfare, she's also Free French, which is a different kind of submarine altogether. It isn't just the vin rouge tank, or the chef, or the debates around her wardroom table, it's her charismatic skipper, Guy Syvret, who won a place at the Ecole Polytechnique, but ended up in the navy instead. Syvret may or may not be a communist, and his dog is definitely called Stalin, but he's a good skipper and someone Harry recognises he can learn from.

But after a mission off Norway, the French order Radegonde to the Carribbean. A meeting with a intelligence type called Fleming (and I think we're definitely intended to assume it's Ian Fleming) leaves Harry with orders to report home with whatever it is they're up to (and meanwhile, back in Britain, Bonalleck is stirring things, whispering in powerful ears that Harry only survived the loss of Pelorus by deserting his post). The main aim of Radegonde's mission turns out to be to replace the Vichy regime on Martinique, which is easy enough to arrange, until the French Submarine Battlecruiser Durandal* turns up. And where Syvret is sort of a communist, Durandal's captain is sort of a Nazi, and appears intent on not just setting the Vichy regime on Martinique back in place, but doing off with the French gold reserves on the island and defecting back to Vichy. Fortunately a US destroyer turns up and sends Durandal running, revealing that the occupation of Martinique is actually the Free French, British and Americans working in concert.

But when Radegonde's crew find evidence that Durandal has massacred the crew of the American freighter it thought was shipping the gold out, Syvret turns all Ahab and orders her into the teeth of a hurricane in an attempt to catch Durandal. The problem is Harry isn't certain the crew will be willing to fire on another French submarine, and Syvret is too obsessed to notice, leaving Harry to work out how to solve the problem.

I actively disliked the ending of this one, it's so blatantly a deus ex machina that it's actually described in the text as an act of god.

If you're into sea stories, and especially submarine stories, then these are both worth reading. There's a handful of places I questioned the author's stylistic choices - wandering into present tense "Picture Harry, at watch on the bridge", for instance - but they're brief and the majority of both narratives is standard third person past.

* Durandal is obviously based on the French submarine cruiser Surcouf, the only one of the post WWI fascination with big gun submarines to make it into WWII, but scaled up, so that where Surcouf had an 8" gun, Durandal has a 12". There are all kinds of conspiracy theories about the loss of the Surcouf in the Caribbean, which Black is obviously tapping into for his story.

Current Mood: okay
Current Location: All at sea

(This has gotten much harder since I dunked my previous Kindle Fire in the bath and can no longer work back through the carousel to remind myself what I've been reading)

Tales from the Folly, Ben Aaronovitch

A collection of short fiction from the Rivers of London universe. Weirdly this seems to be published by his US agents (JABberwocky), rather than a traditional publisher, and may well be ebook only. Aaronovitch says right at the start that he only started writing these under protest/demands from major bookstore chains for promotional shorts, and hadn't written at short length before. Mostly it's not an issue, but one or two cut off at odd points that I'm not sure are entirely successful.

The first set of stories have Peter as the protagonist, as in the novels. Home Crowd Advantage has him facing off against a French wizard who wants to confess to a crime committed during the London Olympics - the 1948 London Olympics. Some interesting background here on how the French did things differently to the Folly, but not really that differently. The Domestic draws Peter, and Toby the magic-sensitive dog, into what is reported to the local plods as a domestic dispute, but there's only a sharp-tongued old lady living at the address. The Cockpit has Peter, Lesley and Toby investigating a poltergeist at the Covent Garden Waterstones - the bookshop Aaronovitch used to work in. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Granny sees Peter and Beverly stop off at a motorway service station on the way home from Foxglove Summer, which is all the excuse Peter needs to stumble onto a possible granny-napping. King of the Rats, was apparently written for the media junket/announcement that the Post Office Underground Railway was to become a historical attraction, unfortunately it doesn't really deal with the railway, it just uses the Mount Pleasant engineering depot for a setting, with Peter and Jaget, his British Transport Police oppo, called in by Fleet and her sister Tyburn to deal with a man dressed as a rat who's disturbing the reception. This is a story that decidedly stops in media res, rather than the usual technique of starting there, and I'm not certain it's successful, I was definitely left wanting to know what came after. A Rare Book of Cunning Device was originally commissioned by Audible, with proceeds to a library charity, so it's set in the British Library, with Peter, Professor Postmartin, and 'Hatbox' Winstanley, a librarian who knows Peter's mum, investigating another potential poltergeist - there's clearly a lot of them about.

The second set of stories have protagonists who aren't Peter. A Dedicated Follower of Fashion takes place in the swinging sixties and has the titular protagonist, and importer of illicitly entertaining chemicals, caught up in a series of unfortunate events culminating in the rebirth of the goddess of the River Wandle. Favourite Uncle, sees school-age wizard Abigail asked by one of her school-friends to investigate her uncle, who they only ever see at Christmas, and who she's beginning to suspect is not just not related to them, but possibly much, much older than he's letting on. There's a lot of back-story for Abigail buried in here, or not so much backstory as contemporary background, that explains why her family are so relieved to see her working as the youth wing of the Folly. Vanessa Sommer's Other Christmas List, takes Kriminal Kommissarin Vanessa Sommer home for the holidays after learning of the reality of magic during The October Man, and being Vanessa, and methodical, she sets about investigating all the aspects of her home town that might relate to the supernatural (this persuaded me to buy The October Man as soon as I'd finished the collection). Three Rivers, Two Husbands and a Baby almost announces its entire cast list in the title, only missing are a chorus of three talking foxes. The husbands are Dominic and Victor, the local cop and his farmer partner from Foxglove Summer, and Peter and Beverly's riverine high jinks during that story are about to come to a climax.

Part three is made up of brief vignettes rather than stories, but Aaronovitch chooses to call them Moments. Nightingale - London September 1966, has Nightingale's burnt-out contemporary, Hugh from Foxglove Summer, up from the country and during a dinner together he chides Nightingale to show at least some sign of moving with the times. Reynolds - Florence, Az 2014 has Kimberly Reynolds, the FBI agent from Whispers Under Ground, interviewing serial killers, and finding it trying. Tobias Winter - Meckenheim, 2012. The Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters learns that the Nightingale has taken an apprentice, which is going to be life-changing for Tobias. (Incidentally, there's an unexplained joke here that you'll miss if you don't know Cobra 11 is roughly Germany's long-running fictional equivalent to Police Interceptors).

The October Man, Ben Aaronovitch

A Rivers of London novella, but set in Germany, and with only the reputations of the regular characters intruding. I'm not sure novella does this justice, it's really a short novel, with a page count that feels longer than it actually is. Kriminal Kommissar (Detective Inspector) Tobias Winter, of the Abteilung fur Komplexe und Diffuse Angelegenheiten of the Bundeskriminalamt (the Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters at the German FBI equivalent), is visiting his parents when he gets the word that a suspicious death near Trier is sufficiently weird to have triggered KDA involvement, which means Tobias, because the KDA is basically him, the Director, and the support staff.

Tobias arrives in Trier to find that someone is clearly trying to be funny, because his assigned liaison from the State Kriminalpolizei is Kriminal Kommissarin Vanessa Sommer. Vanessa turns out to be the departmental expert in agricultural crime, which is handy when the KDA's tame pathologist announces the cause of death was Botrytis Cinerea, aka Noble Rot, a fungal infection which is more normally used to increase the percentage of sugar in grapes. Which means it probably wasn't a coincidence that the body was found next to the vineyard of Jacqueline Stracker, newly returned after years in the Californian wine industry and hoping to get the family vintage back into production after several decades of absence. Tobias, who describes his job as surfing the standard investigation and spear-fishing the bits that interest the KDA, rapidly establishes that Frau Stracker's grandfather believed their vineyards had benefited from the interest of the goddess of the local river, which leads to Tobias and Vanessa meeting with Kelly, the angry goddess of the River Kyll, and Morgane, the terrifying pre-kindergarten goddess of the Mosel. But quite how the local rivers intersect with the murder of an unremarkable forty-something, notable only for his membership of a drinking club of other forty-something losers, isn't initially clear.

I liked this a lot, enough that I read it twice in a row, and have read it again since. Hidden in the text are a lot of details about the Folly's German equivalent, and how its job differs from that of Nightingale and Peter. Amongst other things, it's fairly heavily implied the KDA's Director, the Wicked Witch of the East, is ex-Stasi. Tobias isn't Peter Grant, but he shares a certain attitude to getting the job done in the most efficient way possible, which in his case the Director describes as a combination of indolence and attention to detail. Vanessa, meanwhile, isn't Lesley, but shares the potential to be a more traditionally skilled copper than her male counterpart. OTOH I can't see Lesley keeping up the concert harp, or anything else, in the circumstances where Vanessa doesn't actually like playing, but thinks she should because she's good at it. It's entirely possible Vanessa's overdeveloped sense of responsibility will get her into trouble if and when Aaronovitch revisists the KDA. And given how much Tobias sees Peter as an overly capable rival, whereas Peter doesn't know Tobias exists, it would be an absolute waste if he doesn't give us both more from Winter and Sommer, and the KDA meets the Folly.

Never Too Old For a Pierhead Jump, David Black

I've just finished reading Friedman's British Submarines in Two World Wars, and WWII naval operations in the Far East are an area I'm interested in, so when this turned up for a pound in my Amazon recommendations I decided to take a chance. A pierhead jump is apparently nautical slang for a last minute assignment to a ship, and this is what happens to Lieutenant Harry Gilmour when the captain and XO of His Majesty's Submarine Saraband are dismissed for failing to stamp down hard on conduct prejudicial en route to join operations in South East Asia in early 1944. This is apparently the sixth book about Harry, they've been drifting through my mentions for a while and given the price I presumed they were self-published, but this is a lot better than I expected. Though I did wince, and wonder if I'd made a mistake, when the conduct prejudicial turned out to be homosexual activity. I'm still trying to figure out how you'd even manage that on a submarine where the only person with his own cabin, or any cabin, is the captain. There's a definite cringe factor for the collision of then contemporary and modern sensibilities. But anyway Harry is parachuted into command at Suez, mostly on the grounds he's the only spare submarine captain handy.

Harry takes over a broken crew, who are basically pissed-off at the world for the situation they find themselves in. And how he sets about rebuilding them into a functional crew is very well done, especially the recognition that they're not going to be a good crew until they're both regained confidence in themselves as a crew, and screwed up at least once to season that confidence with reality. Other than the chief engineer, the characters are functionally restricted to the control room crew, because they're the only ones around Harry when things happen, but they're well done, with individual depth.

I can't think of another novel, or film, which has tackled the British/Commonwealth submarine war in the Far East, there may well be one, but it's not coming to mind. Rather than the mid-Pacific operations of the American subs, this comes down to operations in the tight waters between the Burmese/Malayan coast and Sumatra, with the British boats based in Ceylon and the Japanese in Singapore trying to run supplies up the coast to their army on the Burmese/Indian frontier. There are some similarities to operations in the North Sea, the water is shallow enough to make it difficult to hide, but here it's a rare target that's worth a torpedo. The narrative naturally breaks down into individual war patrols down into the Straits of Malacca, and brief interludes in Ceylon, where Harry finds himself involved with the enigmatic Doctor Victoria Cotterell.

The action sequences are very well done, and give every appearance of having been written with detailed charts at hand - it was no surprise to find out the author had a senior submariner for a technical adviser. They start out with what's basically junk-bashing, actions against barely escorted impressed local shipping, then as the British submarine crews learn their new environment they press further down into the straits, encountering more capable opponents. The story culminates in a mission to land an agent in Sumatra that goes badly wrong, and then in a mission to transport XE-Craft, mini-subs, to Singapore for an attack on a Japanese battleship. (An appendix gives details of the real XE-craft attack on Singapore and how it differs from the story here).

And what impressed me possibly more than anything is that the author remembers that by this point in the war the RN Submarine Service's war is almost over, and that affects the attitudes of the crew and the other characters. There is a jarring secondary arc taking place in North Africa involving a character unconnected with the main narrative, which is definitely concluded with extreme prejudice, and that seems very out of place, but on picking up the first book in the series (which has a foreword by an ex-First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff!) I see that that's been ongoing almost since Harry first set foot in a submarine. At this point I'd anticipate picking up the whole series, and while the last book reads okay as a standalone, barring the secondary arc, it'll probably make considerably more sense when I read the five novels that come before it.