David Gillon

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.